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niche surfer - Wave Issue 132
Reddit Says "Show Me the Money!"; Speed Don't Rank; Master Internal Linking; Auto-GPT; Google's Helpful Content Checklist; Top HARO Mistakes; and Much More!
Yoyao
April 22, 2023 • Est. Learning Time: 16 minutes
Oopsie …
Did you hear about SpaceX's Starship? It was supposed to be the most powerful rocket ever built, but things didn't exactly go as planned. It ended up exploding just four minutes after liftoff.
SpaceX Starship and Super Heavy Booster
See Starship in the air and the explosion in this video on Twitter. See more liftoff images and videos on Elon Musk’s Twitter.
But hey, believe it or not, it was still considered a success. Why? Because even though it went kaboom, it still managed to gather valuable data.
And that's just like running a startup or an online business - sometimes you gotta move fast and break things
NASA, on the other hand, moves at a snail's pace because they don't want anything to break.
But what about you? When it comes to SEO and websites, what's your approach?
Do you jump on new strategies as soon as you learn them, even if they could potentially blow up in your face?
Or do you take it slow and steady, carefully researching and testing before making a move?
Personally, I like to be somewhere in the middle. I have test sites where I can experiment with new ideas and see what works before implementing them on my main site. Testing is key if you want to stay ahead of the competition.
So don't be afraid to take some risks and try out new strategies. Even if you don't have dedicated test sites, you can still make small changes and see what happens.
And if something goes wrong, don't panic! You can undo the changes to recover.
In the early days of my journey, I moved an “About” page link from the top navigational menu to the footer because I wanted a smaller, tighter navigational menu for importance at the top.
24 hours later, my search impressions were crashing for the next 48 hours. There was no update going on and I didn’t make any other changes, so I assumed it was that change.
I put the “About” link back at the top and 24 hours later, all was good again.
Remember, even if your site gets hit by a Google update, it's not the end of the world. The hit will still sting for some time, but if you put in the work, your site can recover.
SPONSOR
Effective SEO strategies are built on a foundation of:
Keyword research and analysis
Topical coverage and relevance
Content planning
Website structure
Internal linking
Anchor text management
Cannibalization
SEO
Google has removed four ranking systems from the documented ranking systems page:
Page experience system
Mobile-friendly ranking system
Page speed system
Secure sites system
My Take: Does that mean you wasted all that time and money on speeding up your site? Nope. You made your sites faster for your users and for Googlebot to crawl. Remember, crawlers won’t spend a lot of time on your site, so if it’s stuck loading a slow page, they may just move on - just like any real user would.
Google also shares more in a blog article on the role of page experience in creating helpful content.
Google and 160+ Googlers are developing a new search engine that uses AI technology to offer users a more personalized experience.
Google is working on Project Magi, which adds new AI-based features to its existing search engine, allowing users to complete transactions and incorporate search ads.
Matt Diggity says not to freak out about creating personas for E-E-A-T because it’s largely based on links and mentions on authoritative sites.
One of the best ways to do this is with HARO link building, like with Linkifi’s HARO service. I covered the 15 links that I got after buying their 10-link package a couple of issues ago.
Mike King discusses how search engines measure relevance and how word embeddings can improve search functionality. The author explains that search engines use the vector space model and cosine similarity to determine relevance. He also discusses the differences between word vectors, word embeddings, and techniques like TF-IDF.
My Take: As you may have guess, it’s a rather technical article, but there are some real interesting insights here. He also shares an example of iPullRank’s enterprise SEO page and how it compares to those in the Top 10 based on 3 factors: relevance, content optimization, and authority. Even though his content covers everything that those in the Top 5 covers, he’s ranking 11th due to lack of authority.
TOOLS AND RESOURCES
Depositphotos - They’re back on AppSumo with their 100 stock photos for $39. Still one of the best, if not the best, deal out there for stock photos that are not overly used.
NeuronWriter - Plan content optimized for search engines by researching keywords, analyzing SERPs, and extracting high-ranking content. Like Frase and SurferSEO.
Nifty - This is what I use to manage all my projects and tasks, communicate with my team, and start video calls with one click.
CONTENT
Something I’ve been preaching forever now is to learn how to be objective in evaluating your own content. It’s even easier now that Google has a great checklist to see help you evaluate and create helpful content.
Use these questions to help you gauge if the content you're making is helpful and reliable. Beyond asking yourself these questions, consider having others you trust but who are unaffiliated with your site provide an honest assessment.
AI
Auto-GPT is an open-source project on GitHub built to interface with GPT-4 and GPT-3.5 to automatically complete a list of tasks. The differences between ChatGPT and Auto-GPT:
Auto-GPT can generate its own prompts to complete the goal you give it. E.g., if you want to create a website, ChatGPT will give you the steps on how to create a website. Auto-GPT will create the list of steps and execute each of the steps.
Auto-GPT can crawl the internet and websites for information.
You can try it yourself with AgentGPT and its limited demo. AgentGPT was built to interface with Auto-GPT. This can’t crawl the internet yet though. To do that, you’ll need to program Auto-GPT yourself for now.
If you do try it out with your own OpenAI API Key, be sure you watch it because it can sometimes go into a loop and go in circles because it can’t figure out whether the chicken or the egg comes first.
Here’s a Twitter thread of examples of Auto-GPT usage to give you ideas of what’s possible.
Researchers at Google are working on Dreamix, a diffusion-based AI video editor that can modify existing videos using text descriptions or generate new videos from an initial image. Dreamix is not publicly available, but the technology is being developed for end users.
More AI stories:
OpenAI's CEO believes that the era of giant AI models is coming to an end. Instead, the focus will be on creating more specialized and efficient models for specific tasks. This shift is driven by concerns over the energy consumption and environmental impact of large AI models. (un-paywalled)
OpenAI’s CEO also confirms that they’re not already developing GPT-5 and won’t be for some time. They’re continuing work on GPT-4, including “all sorts of safety issues that are important to address.”
Elon Musk says he wants to start ‘TruthGPT’ to rival OpenAI and Google. He filed for a new AI company called X.AI Corp last month. Any guess as to why he wanted OpenAI and all other AI models to stop their progress for 6 months?
Google’s Bard will now help you code and you can export that code directly into Google Colab to use. Let’s see if it’ll be better at coding Google Sheets scripts than ChatGPT.
LINK BUILDING
Cyrus Shepard conducted a study on internal linking strategies by analyzing 23 million internal links across 1,800 different websites. He shares his insights in this Niche Pursuits podcast with lots of gold nuggets.
The variety of anchor text used is massively important for relevance and should be varied across the board. Links with varied anchor text in the main body text have the most significant impact on rankings.
Those in the Topical Maps Unlocked course know all about internal links and anchor text! Here’s all the proof of what’s been taught in the course 😁
Sakshi Udavant, a journalist who often uses HARO and other similar source request platforms for hundreds of stories, shares a list of the common mistakes she’s seen. She also offers up some friendly suggestions on how you can avoid them so you can stop wasting your time/money and actually get the coverage you’re seeking. Top mistakes include:
Faking expertise
One-line answers
Sending AI responses
Sharing inaccurate information
Plagiarism
Forcing your company’s name in the answers
Simon Treulle shares 3 main link building methods to help Pet Keen: HARO, Industry Statistic Posts, and Guest blogging and case studies. He shares examples of his pitches too.
He also shares a few key tips to help ensure that people don’t avoid your site, like having a trustworthy and professional website.
NEWSLETTERS
Newsletter publishers are diversifying beyond email to expand their revenue streams. Newsletter publisher executives share their plans to expand into events, video, podcasts, and online education courses to attract bigger ad deals.
By offering advertisers an array of products that reach different audiences, publishers hope to diversify and grow their businesses.
BUSINESS IDEAS
Branko Kral provides insights on how to scale and fuel a technical blog using SEO tactics. He shares how to build a winning team, effective processes, and the importance of content marketing, PPC, analytics, and marketing.
He covers how technical blogs can build authority and trust, goals and results, topic clusters and pillars, key roles in the team, and the process for scaling technical blogs using checklists, specs, and templates.
MARKETING
Natalia Zhukova shares a guide to creating buyer personas for businesses to improve their marketing, product development, and sales. It includes information on what buyer personas are, why they are important, who should be involved in creating them, and how to put them into practice.
She also provides a free buyer persona template and tips on conducting buyer persona research.
My Take: As you look to expand into other streams of revenue, like affiliate and digital products, it’s more important than ever to figure out your who your target audience is. There’s actually two now - the visitor and the buyer.
For pure content sites, you would only worry about the visitor and that’s why you’d write only long-tail keywords. But now as the long-tails are getting eaten up by AI and SERP features, you need to build a brand. You also need to focus on your buyers if you want to continue increasing your monthly earnings.
Joshua Hardwick takes a look at how SaaS companies are using 6 key Twitter Profile features: Banner, Profile Photo, Bio, Bio link(s), Profile link, and Pinned Tweet.
Even if you’re not a SaaS, it’s still a good look into what you can do with your personal Twitter profile for personal branding. Looks like it’s time to update my Twitter profile!
At least it’s better than a photo of the “Adventure Island” sign I used to have as my banner!
NEWS
Adthrive and CafeMedia have merged to create Raptive. Doesn’t seem like anything is changing other than a unified brand. And not to be beaten, Mediavine announces they’re still Mediavine.
Reddit plans to charge companies for access to its API, which they use to download and process the social network's conversations and develop AI systems. The move is one of the first examples of a social network charging for access to the conversations it hosts to develop AI technology.
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SURF WITH OTHERS
I’ve followed Richard Patey’s newsletters for quite some time now as a great resource for staying up to date with acquiring and investing in digital assets.
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