May 26th found the Manaferra team in the heart of Barcelona attending the event held by European Search Awards. It is with great pleasure that we announce that on that night, Manaferra took home not one but two reputable awards, Best Use of Search for the SEO campaign on higher education and Best Small SEO Agency (Silver). 

While this isn’t the first time Manaferra’s work has been awarded and held in high regard by industry experts, it certainly isn’t any less important. The awards Manaferra brought home, in Prishtina, will serve as a token of recognition and appreciation for the constant hard work delivered by all of Manaferra’s team members. The award has confirmed once again what we have been claiming all along that we bring results; we deliver work that speaks for itself. While we aim to be a humble agency, there are moments like this that make us not so humble. Jokes aside, we feel incredibly lucky (even though luck has little to do with it) to have brought home awards like these.

As for the event itself, the European Search Awards is a yearly event, part of the awards series “The Search Awards”. It welcomes entries from all European countries with the intent of celebrating agencies and companies in the field of SEO, PPC, and Content Marketing. Individuals chosen to be part of the judging panel are highly qualified experts from all over Europe. The Search Awards are pretty competitive, and even getting nominated is a big deal, let alone becoming a winner. 

It has definitely been an otherworldly feeling to be part of the event itself in Barcelona and then also have the chance to get on the stage in front of some of the greatest in the industry and accept the award. All I could think at that moment was how appreciated I felt by the judges who chose us and our work to get awarded among other agencies nominated and how we should keep doing what we do best. Evidently, when you love what you do and give your all, you will get rewarded.

Diana Bajraktari, Content Marketing Manager

Manaferra

Not to forget that the other part of the team was back home watching the event online. As proud as I felt about myself there, I felt as proud of the team I work with. 

I can’t find the words to describe the moment we heard our name being called through the screen. What I can remember is the boost of motivation to keep pushing our goals and objectives further and keep delivering work that will win awards like this one and the one we got last year. Our commitment to delivering growth and investing in our team are paid off through results and awards like this. I’m proud of the team we have built at Manaferra.

Granit Doshlaku, Co-Founder, SEO Director

Manaferra

A big congratulations to the agencies that won European Search Awards! You can have a feel of that beautiful evening by going through this photo gallery. Also, have a look at the list of the winners for this year and those that were shortlisted. 

Thank you to the team, clients, and Search Awards for the euphoric feelings. 

SEO content often gets a bad rep for being keyword-stuffed and written for search engines only. Well, we’re here to show you there’s much more to it than keywords. Read on to find out in detail what SEO-friendly content really is, what us SEO content writers are really after, and how to write good SEO content step by step.

The topic cluster model is a content organizing model created and made popular by Hubspot. The content on their website inspired this model. Seeing that they were continually creating content, their website was starting to get crowded. Google was also beginning to favor topic-based content as opposed to keywords.

Creating a content marketing plan timeline is one of those things you procrastinate on doing, and when you finally do, you see it wasn’t as complicated as you thought it’d be.

You can spend hours browsing the internet or reviewing your existing content just to find an idea of what to write, OR you can have it planned already neatly in your content calendar. What’s left is only to start writing.

It comes a day when you start making changes to your website. These changes can be from a simple change in design to completely change the CMS that powers the site. Or maybe you are moving your site from an old domain to a new one. In this case, you want to make sure that the links you have worked hard to rank in Google don’t just disappear. You want to redirect them to the new ones. How? By using 301 redirect, of course!

There are three types of redirects. We want to make sure to use the right one, 301 redirect, which tells Google that this link has moved permanently. The other two types are 302 (found or moved temporarily) and Meta Refresh. More about redirection you can read at this awesome guide by Moz.

In this article, I’m going to write about two ways to mass 301 redirect links by using .htaccess and WordPress (because it’s too damn popular to ignore it).

Mass 301 redirect using .htaccess

Mass redirection in .htaccess it’s pretty easy, actually. All you need to do is open your .htaccess file in the root of your site and add these lines of code:

Redirect 301 /old-page.html http://www.example.com/new-page.html
Redirect 301 /old-page-2.html http://www.example.com/file/

You can also 301 redirect an entire site with just one line of code:

Redirect 301 / http://www.new-site.com/

Mass 301 redirect using WordPress plugin

WordPress 301 Redirects is this awesome plugin that I use whenever I need to redirect links from my WordPress sites. After installing the plugin, all you have to do is start adding links you want to redirect from your site.

/2012/09/old-post/ http://www.example.com/2012/09/new-post/

Conclusion

Whenever you change something in your link structure, it’s imperative to be careful of what will happen with the old links. You don’t want to see all SEO traffic going to 404 error pages (which eventually will follow with a drop in rankings). It’s also a bad experience for the visitors. So whenever you make these changes, you have to be sure that the old links are pointing to the new ones.