Samuel Scott

My Recent Essays

• How to Approach Owned and Earned Media 9 January 2015
  My newest essay is up on Moz! We all know content is king, but if your content marketing plan consists of blindly publishing daily blog posts on your website or submitting countless bylined articles (i.e., guest posts) to random outlets, your king will turn into the court jester. Marketing must have a sound strategy behind it to be […]
• Online Marketing is No Longer a Bag of Tricks 5 January 2015
  Google was founded close to the height of the 1990s tech bubble. (See above.) By the time that the search engine became the top method to find things on the Internet, the United States was in a recession. Despite the Dow  Jones Industrial Average (DJIA)‘s rebound starting in 2003, the economy as a whole did […]
• How SEO Will Not Change in 2015 26 December 2014
  What is the difference between doing “SEO” and doing “marketing”? The answer lies partly in Moz cofounder Rand Fishkin’s recent webinar on Cracking the SEO Code for 2015 (see the full presentation) in which he addresses the following issues (and more): Website speed Quality content that is designed for human beings Domain-level metrics and brand-building Here, I wanted […]
• Is There Fraud in the Online Advertising Industry? 21 December 2014
  Bob Hoffman has called it “fraud” perpetrated by “criminals.” The retired founder, chairman, and CEO of Hoffman/Lewis Advertising — who now writes the Ad Contrarian blog and speaks at advertising conferences — had been referring to ongoing revelations in the digital advertising industry that a lot, if not most, of online advertising is a waste of money. […]
• The Death of Linkbuilding for SEO 18 December 2014
  Over the past two years, SEOMoz became Moz, ThunderSEO became ThunderActive, and seOverflow became Inflow. Although I do not work for these companies, I would argue that they — and likely many more — have been rebranding themselves by removing affiliations to “SEO” and instead associating themselves with good, old-fashioned “marketing.” The reason? The phrase “SEO” has become […]
• How to Pitch Reporters in Various Industries 17 December 2014
  In the end, journalists are just another audience in a company’s overall marketing strategy — and they should be treated as such in publicity and public relations plans. A month ago, I wrote an essay for Moz on the coming integration of SEO and public relations. The post included a lengthy infographic flowchart and a […]
• How to Get More Good Twitter Followers 15 December 2014
  Having a large Twitter following brings many benefits — more fans who will retweet your posts, higher Klout scores, better branding, more media attention are just a few of them. So, many CEOs have been telling their Vice Presidents of Marketing or marketing agencies, “Get us 100,000 Twitter followers tomorrow!” I exaggerate only a little. If […]
• The Future of SEO in 2015 14 December 2014
  Build, promote, and publicize a website that delights its target audience. Everything else will fall into place. This is the secret to good search-engine optimization for 2015 – but, frankly, it should always have been the best practice in the first place. Google is beholden to Internet users. The moment that web surfers no longer think […]
• Join Me at Brighton SEO in April 2015! 11 December 2014
  I’m honored to announce that I will be joining such esteemed marketing influencers as Aleyda Solis, Erica McGillivray of Moz, and Tom Anthony of Distilled on the speakers’ list of the next Brighton SEO in England in April 2015. I will speak on the integration of SEO and PR in a talk entitled “Stop Thinking About […]
• Why Israel is Holding New Elections 5 December 2014
  TEL AVIV — Israel’s thirty-third government was doomed to collapse from the beginning. The governing coalition consisted of ministers from parties that were completely the opposite of each other on ideological grounds. The Economy Minister — Naftali Bennett of the right-wing, religious-Zionist Jewish Home party — was opposed to any future Palestinian state and wanted to annex […]