How to Analyze Websites Like Michael Martinez
Finding a good marketing forum to help you with the challenges you face isn’t easy. Some forums won’t allow you to post a link to your Website, which makes it virtually impossible to get good advice from the people visiting the forum. Some forums go even further into making life difficult for you by preventing…
How to Do Keyword Research Like Randy Ray
Michael Martinez asked me to contribute some SEO tips to this blog, and I haven’t written about SEO in a long time. I (reluctantly) said okay. But I wasn’t sure where to start. I finally thought maybe I should start with the same activity I start my SEO activities with: Keyword research. Here’s how to…
10 Minute SEO: What Everyone Should Do and Almost No One Does
What’s the first thing you do when you evaluate a Website’s SEO problem? Now go find a Web forum where someone just asked for help with an SEO problem and give yourself 10 minutes to find the problem. You don’t…
How to Recover from Google Algorithm Updates
Google updates its search system 10-15 times a week. Bing updates its search system maybe 10-20 times per month. Unfortunately Bing is less open about how its search engine works, but we can be sure of one thing: Bing does…
Marketing with intent: The combined power of SEO and content
If we can agree that the ultimate purpose of marketing is to attract attention and generate interest, then combining SEO and content marketing is a no-brainer for smart brands and marketers.
Easy Search Engine Optimization Anyone Can Do
It’s hard to write an article like this without talking about the need for SEO industry standards or pointing out the immense competition among SEO consultants, agencies, tool providers, and (e)book authors for your business dollars. So I will begin…
The Difference between Knee-jerk SEO and What You Need from Your SEO
Every day across the world and the Web thousands of search engine optimization professionals give employees, employers, co-workers, clients, and other SEOs their opinions on a variety of topics. The constant flow of opinion is healthy for the industry. If…
The Difference between Knee-jerk SEO and What You Need from Your SEO
Every day across the world and the Web thousands of search engine optimization professionals give employees, employers, co-workers, clients, and other SEOs their opinions on a variety of topics. The constant flow of opinion is healthy for the industry. If…
How to create SEO-friendly content
SEO-friendly content doesn’t have to be difficult or time-consuming, provided that you understand how on-page SEO can work alongside your content. Here’s how to create content that both your audience and search engines will enjoy.
The SEO benefits of using WordPress to publish your content
Creating and launching a fully-fledged website is not enough to get your brand noticed by itself. In order to improve your online visibility, you … read more
The SEO benefits of using WordPress to publish your content
Creating and launching a fully-fledged website is not enough to get your brand noticed by itself. In order to improve your online visibility, you … read more
Brand TLDs vs .com (part two): How can brands benefit from a .brand domain?
In part one a few weeks ago, we discussed what brand TLDs (top level domains) are, which brands have applied for them, and why they might be important. Today, we’ll take an in-depth look at the potential benefits for brands, and explore the challenges brand TLDs could help solve.
How Content on Its Own Brings Traffic, Links, and Leads
I have been publishing Websites since August 1996. Although I have worked at improving visibility for sites through all those years, I have never seen content fail to bring traffic, links, and leads. I have even watched spam blogs drive…
You SEO People are Destroying News Websites with Dumb Advice
Dear Kettle: This is the pot. I am calling you black. Here is why. Earlier this year I wrote on Marketing Pilgrim that you should always update your older outbound links. I do this on my Websites because it maintains…
Who Needs to Be Mobile-ready by April 21, 2015?
Since even some mainstream news media sites are now reporting on Google’s April 21 deadline for making Web content “mobile friendly” we can assume that a lot of people outside the usual marketing circles have at least heard about the…
Core Essentials of On Site Search Engine Optimization
Your onsite search engine optimization goes well beyond meta tags, page titles, and article URLs. In fact, real onsite SEO has very little to do with the (meta) content you put on the page. You need to know the difference…
Random Little SEO Tips Anyone Can Use
The problem with sharing SEO tips is that when more people use them they tend to become abused and spammy. But there are technical things you can share that should not become too problematic. Well, it’s all on you if…
After the Penalty, What Do You Do for Links?
From February 2005 through May 2005 Google went through what I have sometimes called the Google Awful Update. Their search results were characterized by many URL-only listings and they often displayed 2-year-old data in place of contemporary information that their crawlers should have been picking up. Danny Sullivan seemed unaware of the issue at the time when I mentioned it to him but I confirmed it was happening to many Websites. The only way you could improve your Google performance at the time (if your site was affected by the Awful Update) was to publish new content, which could not be replaced by 2-year-old data and was not shown in URL-only format. What I took away from that experience was that “Google remembers everything”. I have been telling people that Google remembers everything for years. At the SMX Advanced 2007 conference in Seattle, during the “You-and-A” session with Matt Cutts, this memory thing came up again with an example where Matt mentioned if you own 200 spammy sites your 201st site may be flagged for review. This was not the first time the issue had come up. At an earlier conference during a Website review session someone asked Matt why […]
What the SEO Cycle Should Look Like Today
We haven’t all changed our feathers. I still plan and execute search engine optimization the way I did ten, twelve years ago. Nonetheless, everyone who was once all about links is now all about content and they bring months of experience to the “new SEO”. It sounds like a brave new world, to me. Indulge me as I share some observations based on my years of experience with this “new SEO”. The SEO Cycle, the OLD Way Back in the day the SEO cycle was pretty simple, consisting of six steps: Keyword Research Content Production Link Placement Measurement Analysis Adjustment That all seems a bit mechanical but I’ve been following this pattern since 1998 (when I first started learning about search engine optimization). Last year I did concede that we can narrow the list to three points: Produce Content Place Links Measure the Results That’s still formulaic and mechanical but it allows for a little more freedom in thinking. Too bad people flew into panic mode and stopped thinking earlier this year. Let’s take a closer look at what actually changed, shall we? Keyword Research: Still Going Strong If You Do It Right In 2007 when I shared advice on […]
Search: Not Provided: What Remains, Keyword Data Options, the Future
In late 2011, Google announced an effort to make search behavior more secure. Logged-in users were switched to using httpS from http. This encrypted their search queries from any prying eyes, and kept from being passed on to websites the users visits after seeing search results. This led to the problem we, Marketers, SEOs, Analysts, […]
Search: Not Provided: What Remains, Keyword Data Options, the Future is a post from: Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik