I've got some awesome posts for you this time. The quality of post that only get published once every 3 months or so...
Recent Tech SEO Stuff We Love
Optimising For Latent Intent - The Radical New Onsite SEO Strategy
via @tjprayner
This is a blockbuster post from Tom Rayner (it is also pretty long, so pour yourself a coffee and strap in), in which he presents some compelling evidence that keyword intent is not created equal, with some interesting example cases. The idea being that Google is inferring the underlying (or 'latent') intent in a search term, and serving results based on this latent intent. He goes on to describe a case study where he developed an on-page strategy that targeted latent intent, and was richly rewarded with rankings. Read it.
15 Site Architecture Tips for Performance SEO: Master Guide
via @CyrusShepard
Optimizing internal link structure can be an extremely impactful technical SEO endeavour, and this guide from Cyrus Shepard is an absolute masterclass. There is a raft of different techniques covered, and Cyrus explains how to identify both pages that satisfy user intent and pages with high authority, and how you can structure your link building efforts around these pages.
An SEO’s guide to XPath
via @richardbaxter
Scraping web data is like a cheat code for digital marketers, and can give you access to data at a scale and speed that would embarrass marketers who have been copy/pasting instead...
This is an excellent guide from Richard Baxter, who gives you a framework for writing XPath in order to scrape any datapoint you like, so you'll be scraping your competitors' product inventories in no time!
Developing SEO audits that maximize growth
via @aleyda
Another powerhouse slidedeck from Aleyda Solis - and this is one of those slidedecks that stands on its own independent from the presentation, as it includes so much rich text data you can still follow along (not true for most slidedecks in my opinion). The deck shows you how to frame your website audits within the context of the site performance vs competitors, and how to prioritize based on this analysis.
Other Stuff You Should Check Out
- Do You Need To Build Links? Here’s A Framework To Find Out
A really neat post that shows you how to evaluate the necessity of building links for your ongoing SEO strategy - for each keyword and URL you are targeting, do you need to build more links in order to compete, or do you have enough already?
- Building Links to Sales Pages
Inspiration on how to add 'citation worthy' content onto your sales pages (i.e. content that helps convince an offsite writer to justifiably link to your most important pages).
- Which CMS platforms perform best on Google? – What I discovered by crawling one million websites
A very interesting study into the major CMS platforms and how they perform on Google, with a bunch of interesting insights and takeaways.
