Post of the Week
Content
Searching For Buried Treasure – How To Find More Of Your Featured Snippets
This is a smart approach from Glenn Gabe on how to use Google Search Console (GSC), SEMrush and a little help from Analytics Edge to discover and track featured snippets. Even if you don't have SEMrush, the initial process for defining prospective featured snippet opportunities in GSC is cool! 🤓
Tech
Redirects Using Cloudflare Workers
Since we're on the theme of Edge SEO and Cloudflare Workers, I thought it best to provide you with an example on how to use it. This post provides a script which you can tinker and add to Cloudflare to implement redirects. 😲
Performance is a Marathon: Successful tactics for web page performance
This is part of a great two-part blog series; you can read the first here. In this post the guys at Telus talk through the progressive tactics they used to optimise web performance. They also provide a ton of insight on where you can learn more about web performance.
Outreach
I Bought Guest Post Links from The Hoth: A Detailed Review
I'm not featuring this article to advocate buying links, but more so to raise awareness that this type of tactic is still working! In this experiment, Glen from detailed.com bought some links from The Hoth, and despite the seemingly unnatural nature of acquiring the links, they had some impact.
Broken Link Building Strategy You (Probably) Never Tried
This is such a smart and sneaky way of identifying backlink opportunities at scale. The author uses a script to extract thousands of Wordpress theme author websites, before ultimately finding a list of those who haven't renewed their domain. He also discusses leveraging the power of sitewide links, something which despite being against Google's guidelines, is working for the likes of Wordpress and Colourlib.
Tools
Extract & inline critical-path (above-the-fold) CSS from HTML
If you don't follow Addy Osmani, then go do it. He's the engineering manager working on Chrome, and is always providing useful information on web performance. One of his tools I came across recently is called Critical. Critical helps to generate and inline your critical-path CSS, to eliminate additional roundtrips in the critical path.
Merry Christmas Eve! 🎄
One of the most common obstacles in any SEO strategy I've worked on is that the client can't implement what I'm recommending. This happens for various reasons; their legacy CMS breaks every time you touch it, they have long development queues and SEO is at the back of the line, or it's just too bloody expensive.
This is very frustrating, we need a workaround, and we've got one; Edge SEO. 👋
I first started reading about Edge SEO in a post in 2017 by Jono Alderson called 'Blurring the Line Between CDN and CMS' which introduced Cloudflare's latest feature, Cloudflare Workers. This allows you to make development changes on your servers such as adding hreflang tags, redirects, and noindex tags, without having to integrate into existing website logic. Since Cloudflare has an API, it's recently surfaced that some guys, including the author of our Post of the Week, have created 'meta CMS's' which make the implementation of this a whole lot easier if you're a non-techy.
Check out our Post of the Week by the very smart Dan Taylor, which introduces Edge SEO some more, and should definitely get you excited for the state of SEO in 2019.
Andrew Charlton