SEO consists in telling the search engines what your site is all about and convincing them that your site’s information will be helpful to their customers. Giving the search engines the most helpful information about your site in a format that they find easy to process give you an advantage over sites that leave search engine rankings to chance. Schema Markup is a systematic way of telling the search engines what the site is about and what content it has. With this information the search engines can index the information on the site more accurately and more completely. There is a standard... [...]

Nate Dame says, “Effective content marketing is a vehicle for modern SEO. Just as wheels without an engine leaves you pedaling, content without an SEO strategy can’t keep up in a digital marketplace. And just like an engine with no wheels, SEO without content is a shiny machine that goes nowhere. Content needs SEO to stand out in the din of mediocre blog posts clogging up the internet these days, and Google has said that one of the top three ranking factors for organic search is “content.” But what does that mean? Not any content, surely. Unfortunately, search engines are not handing... [...]

Andy Crestodina says, “It’s as if they live in different countries: Searchlandia and Socialstan. Search optimizers and social media marketers don’t get together a whole lot, at least not in the same piece of content. But there’s no reason they can’t peacefully coexist in one article, in one URL. Imagine. One topic, one message, united in quality, but with two separate and equally powerful sources of traffic: search and social. Is it possible? Can one post be optimized for both? Yes. And when it happens, the traffic is greater than the sum of its channels. Um. Actually, the traffic... [...]

Sonia Simone says, “Google reminds me that we’ve covered the intersection of Zen and business a few times at Copyblogger … which doesn’t surprise me a bit. At the heart of Zen is the concept (which is not a concept) of nonduality. In the words of Shunryu Suzuki: “To speak of waves apart from water or water apart from waves is a delusion. Water and waves are one.” I’m sure Brian Clark had been rereading his Suzuki Roshi when he advised us on Monday to “forget SEO” — because the wisest practice of SEO is to get out of dualistic thinking about SEO. It’s not separate or distinct... [...]

Stefanie Flaxman says, “By now you know that — technical details aside — SEO is not separate from content marketing; it’s an integrated aspect of content marketing. Optimizing your content for search engines is part of your craft and a skill you can strengthen with practice. But even when you rank well for search terms your audience uses, the real test is what happens when someone clicks through to your website. As Brian wrote on Monday: “There’s nothing worse than a quick bounce.” To avoid a quick bounce, you need to focus on content optimization. Since you don’t want to miss... [...]