Post of the Week
Essential Image Optimization
This isn't recent, but it is hands down the best guide I have ever read on image optimization. Created by Addy Osmani, an engineering manager at Google, this will be your image performance bible. Enjoy!
News
Chrome may soon lazy load images and frames natively
Google is obsessed with page speed, and for good reason. This looks to be another step in the right direction from the giant, as Chrome Canary, the development version of the Chrome Browser has recently added the ability to enable lazy loading for images and frames natively in the browser. Interesting! 🤓
Content
UX: The New SEO Ranking Factor
Whilst not strictly a ranking factor, user experience (UX) is becoming a more critical component of SEO strategies. Ryan Stewart of From The Future provides you with the steps you need to take to use UX to your advantage, as well as some successful case studies.
Tech
Creating Kick-Ass Marketing Reports Through Progressive Detail
For anyone struggling with displaying client or internal reports, the guys at Portent have put together the ingredients of a kick-ass report. Ian Lurie describes using progressive detail to deliver the big picture first, before moving onto more granular summaries.
How to Use REGEX Formulas in Google Sheets
Life as an SEO is made much easier by Google Sheets. We regularly use formulas such as vlookup, iferror and Google's own query language, but which other formulas can we use to get more out of our data, and faster? Paola, an analyst at Distilled, explains how to use three of the most popular REGEX functions, REGEXEXTRACT, REGEXREPLACE and REGEXMATCH in her most recent post.
Case Study
How we grew organic traffic by 332.91% with user-generated content
You just have to look at companies like Trello and Slideshare to see the impact user-generated content has on organic traffic, and business! Despite these successes, user-generated content is often an underused tactic. Mihai Sterian shares how MindMeister increased organic traffic by +300% with user-generated content, and how you can too!
Tools
48x Free SEO Tools To Super Charge Your Search Rankings [2018]
We all love a freebie. Whether you're just starting out or are a large agency, I'm sure there'll be a tool to be added to your arsenal in this list curated by Matthew Woodward.
In this week's issue, I've unintentionally leaned more towards the technical side of SEO (sorry to non-techies!) Our Post of the Week also wasn't published within the last week, but because I've just found it, it was too good not to include.
It was a week of stumbling upon old information, all new to me! I recently discovered a cool tip for displaying the published date of articles in search results. If you append &as_qdr=y15 to the URL returned after a site:domain.com search on Google, you'll begin to see the published date beside each result. How can you use this? Well, for some search queries, fresh content is incredibly important. You should look to update your oldest content, so that they're more relevant for today. 😊
Andrew Charlton