HTTPS for SEO, Content Marketing Tools, Content Syndication, Speedlink 33:2014

Hi everyone, hope you all had a great and productive week! One of the most noteworthy news this week was definitely Google´s announcement about HTTPS being a ranking factor.

….We’ve seen positive results, so we’re starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal. For now it’s only a very lightweight signal—affecting fewer than 1% of global queries, and carrying less weight than other signals such as high-quality content—while we give webmasters time to switch to HTTPS. But over time, we may decide to strengthen it, because we’d like to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web….

There you go, but before you go all crazy and get “hooked” by people offering you services or anything related, bear in mind that HTTPS is just another signal that is being added to more than 200 others. After all, and while security is very important, HTTPS is far of greater importance for sites that are processing orders or acquiring user data when visiting.

In any event, Google will be releasing the best practices soon enough, but in the meantime here are some basic tips to get started, as they recommend:

• Decide the kind of certificate you need: single, multi-domain, or wildcard certificate
• Use 2048-bit key certificates
• Use relative URLs for resources that reside on the same secure domain
• Use protocol relative URLs for all other domains
• Check out our Site move article for more guidelines on how to change your website’s address
• Don’t block your HTTPS site from crawling using robots.txt
• Allow indexing of your pages by search engines where possible. Avoid the noindex robots meta tag.

Top 100+ Content Marketing Tools

Content creation in itself is already a big tasks, let alone having to market it. Despite the “hard work” Content Marketing when done properly is worth it and can really pay off. Now, it does not mean that we can´t make use of marketing tools to make our lives a tad easier.

With that said , kudos to Kim Roach who collected a bunch of them all together and created one GIANT list of 100 content marketing tools to create epic blog posts, marketing and distribution, blogger outreach, content analytics, and more. One hell of a job putting these marketing tools up.

Syndicating Content – Whiteboard Friday

And since we are talking about content, here´s one viable way of getting your content seen. Moz, in this Whiteboard Friday video, shows you both reasons why you might want to syndicate as well as tips on how to go about it.

And as usual, in no particular order:

Content Creation & Marketing/SEO and Search

• Use These Smart Blogging Tips To Get Better Results With Less Traffic
• 7 Lies About SEO You Probably Believe
• An Open Letter To The New SEO Generation
• Website Health Check: How to Optimize for Search Efficiency

Social/Small Business Bites

• 10 Twitter Tactics to Increase Your Engagement
• If You Have Not Mastered Marketing on LinkedIn, You May Be Losing Business
• How to Share Content That Readers Will Want to Re-Share
• How to Become a Hit on Pinterest, Using Pinterest Analytics

More from around the web …

• Marketing Day: Google Tests Mobile Ad Tracking, Twitter Loses Bing Translator & Yelp Adds It
• Who Do You Listen to When Influential Bloggers Don’t Agree? #FridayFinds

That’s it! Enjoy and have a great weekend!