Miriam Ellis says, “Earlier this month, I was standing on an 8,000’ pinnacle of the Sierra mountain range at the precise moment when winter arrived. A few miles and minutes back down the highway, it had been golden fall with aspens, oaks, and big leaf maples in peak color. Then the sky darkened, showering hail. Right before my eyes, hail turned to snow, wildly whirling, salting the evergreens into obscurity. Winter had come. It’s a rare, exhilarating thing to witness patient Nature change in the blink of an eye, but returning to work from my time in the mountains, I met with another... [...]

Benjamin Estes says, “SEO is not something that is done. SEO is a way of doing things that encompasses many teams and initiatives. This is especially true for large organizations with well-established and potentially siloed teams. Most marketing disciplines have concrete inputs and outputs. Consider the following examples, which may seem trite at first: PPC results in visibility in search results. Email marketing results in visibility in the inbox of folks on your mailing list. Content strategy results in marketing content on your site. But this isn’t really the case for SEO. Can... [...]

Lori Goldberg says, “The term SEO, which was allegedly first used in 1997, has long been used to describe a webmaster’s ability to edit a website’s design and code to favorably influence its rank on search engines.  SEO strategies have included back-linking, title tags, page architecture, site maps and introduced us to a style of writing content that emphasizes keywords. These strategies have largely belonged to webmasters and programmers. Despite significant changes in search algorithms and user-friendly web design tools (ie; WordPress, Drupal, Squarespace), many core elements of what... [...]

MOZ team says, “It’s no secret that Google keeps a lot of secrets. From keyword data to link data to traffic data (and surely more), there’s a lot that we could benefit from — if they’d only share it! Since that’s not likely to happen anytime soon, Rand takes us through various ways to access that all-important data in this week’s Whiteboard Friday“. Recovering the Data Google Has Hidden Away – Whiteboard Friday MOZ Blog  [...]

Kelsey Libert says, “Some content is designed to “go viral,” while other times a piece of content intended to stay among friends takes the Internet by storm. But whether planned or unplanned, rapidly-shared content has several commonalities. One of the key factors is that the content creates a strong emotional response in viewers. Through our research on viral emotions, we’ve found that certain emotions are better than others at driving people to view and share content. In other words, creating the right emotional response is extremely important to getting your content widely shared.... [...]

Anna Korolekh says, “When I joined the PSD2HTML team in November 2014, the site had been suffering from a manual penalty related to spammy backlinks for over a year. They’d tried everything to promote a recovery, but nothing worked. They were ready to admit defeat. The penalty resulted in the loss of over 80% of their organic traffic. The story of how this happened is very interesting. PSD2HTML was one of the first companies to market PSD to HTML conversions in 2005. At the peak of their success, they transitioned to an SEO company. In 2013, our relationship with a well-known agency... [...]

Joy Hawkins says, “Local SEO can be confusing for those businesses that don’t have a physical store for customers to walk into. Unlike businesses with a brick-and-mortar storefront, service-area businesses (or SABs) go out to meet with their customers, as opposed to their customers coming to see them. This often results in them servicing multiple cities, which can be problematic—the #1 ranking factor in local SEO is the physical address of the business. In addition, business owners are also usually concerned about privacy, as many of them use their home address and can’t utilize some... [...]

Jennifer Slegg says, “If you’re a webmaster, you probably received one of those infamous “Googlebot cannot access CSS and JS files on example.com” warning letters that Google sent out to seemingly every SEO and webmaster. This was a brand new alert from Google, although we have been hearing from the search engine about the need to ensure all resources are unblocked—including both JavaScript and CSS. There was definite confusion around these letters, supported by some of the reporting in Google Search Console. Here’s what you need to know about Google’s desire to see these... [...]

Chris Ebbs says, “As of Q2 2015, there is still no convincing evidence that social shares affect Google rankings. You might want to read that again. Be it tweets, re-tweets, Facebook shares, or Google+ posts, there is just no solid evidence that they affect improvements in ranking positions. In recent years there’s been a big shift in the SEO industry. Search agencies and others are pushing the merits of content marketing as an activity that can help drive SEO success. Among the inevitable increase in content, something being widely misunderstood and purposely misrepresented by some... [...]

Lindsay Kolowich says, “Search ranking is a critical component of any inbound marketing strategy. When it comes to designing and writing content for your website, it’s important to have search engine optimization top-of-mind. After all, the top three results on a search query get 61% of all search clicks — and 75% of search engine users never scroll past the first page of search results. If you find yourself struggling to gain exposure in search engines, it could be because your website isn’t optimized for search. Want to increase your website traffic via organic search?... [...]