Greg Sterling says, “Earlier this week Yahoo held its second Mobile Developer Conference in New York. This was the East Coast version of its inaugural developer conference held in San Francisco earlier this year. As part of that event, which I did not attend, Simon Khalaf, Yahoo’s SVP Publishing Products, took the stage to deliver a kind of “state of mobile” talk that was full of data. The highlights are reproduced in a Tumblr post. Yahoo reported that time with apps continues to grow, while mobile browser time continues to decline. In 2014, according to Flurry/Yahoo US smartphone owners... [...]

Bryson Meunier says, “So you’ve checked the box and now have a mobile-friendly site. “Mobilegeddon” convinced you that mobile searchers are worth paying attention to, so you made your site responsive or at least gave mobile searchers content they don’t have to pinch and zoom to view. Mission accomplished. On to the next thing. Right? Maybe not so fast. Here’s an example that might make you think twice. The other day, my wife asked me to pick up something for dinner, and being a carb-based lifeform from the Midwest in close proximity to a Noodles & Company, I went to my phone... [...]

Rand Fishkin says, “Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re going to chat about a problem that many of you have mentioned in comments, in tweets, in questions, and emails to me and to other folks here at Moz when we talk about content marketing and specifically content amplification like, “Okay, I made some great content. But how do I actually get people to share it? In particular, how do I get content into the hands of the influencers who might amplify it?” Look, this is very frustrating, right? If you’re a small brand,... [...]

Rand Fishkin says, “Today, it’s my pleasure to announce some exciting news. First, if you haven’t already seen it via his blog post, I’m thrilled to welcome Russ Jones, a longtime community member and great contributor to the SEO world, to Moz. He’ll be joining our team as a Principal Search Scientist, joining the likes of Dr. Pete, Jay Leary, and myself as a high-level individual contributor on research and development projects. If you’re not familiar with Mr. Jones’ work, let me embarrass my new coworker for a minute. Russ: Was Angular’s CTO after... [...]

Billy Hoffman says, “As we know well by now, the speed of a web page is very important from an SEO and user experience perspective. Faster pages have higher search engine ranks, and users will visit more pages and convert higher on a fast performing website. In short, the smart SEO professional needs to also think about optimizing for performance as well as content. As we discussed in our last article, WebPageTest is a great free tool you can use to optimize your website performance. One of the most useful outputs of the WebPageTest tool is a graphic known as the waterfall diagram. A waterfall... [...]

Kristi Hines says, “If you’re a local business owner, you’ve likely heard that you should submit your business to local business directories like Yelp, Merchant Circle, Yellow Pages, and similar networks in order to help boost your local search visibility on Google. It sounds easy at first: you think you’ll just go to a few websites, enter your contact information, and you’ll be set. Because all you really want to do is get some links to your website from these profiles. But the truth is, there are a lot of local business listings to obtain if you go the DIY route. There are... [...]

Brian Sutter says, “Small businesses have always lived and died by word of mouth. Even before the Internet, a business was in trouble if too many people said bad things about it. Fast-forward to today, when any customer can say almost anything about your business, and all the world can read it. One negative review can cripple a new business. Even an established company has to be careful not to rack up too much negative feedback. Turns out that online reviews are important. However, maybe you’re skeptical: Exactly how influential are customer reviews in the first place? you ask. Is anyone... [...]

Dan-Petrovic says, “Question: How does a search engine interpret user experience? Answer: They collect and process user behaviour data. Types of user behaviour data used by search engines include click-through rate (CTR), navigational paths, time, duration, frequency, and type of access. Click-through rate Click-through rate analysis is one of the most prominent search quality feedback signals in both commercial and academic information retrieval papers. Both Google and Microsoft have made considerable efforts towards development of mechanisms which help them understand when a page receives... [...]

Sam Edwards says, “As you’ve probably heard before, YouTube is the second largest search engine in the entire world. That means  aside from Google (which owns YouTube) no website is used more frequently each month than YouTube. In fact, the most recent statistics suggest Google attracts an estimated 1.1 billion unique monthly visitors. YouTube brings in approximately 1 billion. That’s more than Facebook, Yahoo!, Amazon, Wikipedia, Twitter, Bing, and other popular sites. And this equates to big bucks. According to data curated and published by ExpandedRamblings.com, YouTube produced... [...]

Farooq Bhatti says, “In the local search sphere, one of the most important aspects of an establishment is its unique identifier, commonly known as NAP, which stands for Name, Address and Phone.   A citation is simply an online mention of your business NAP. When search engines see consistent NAP citations across your website, review sites, social media profiles, and directory listings, then this acts as a positive ranking factor. However, if search engines find inconsistencies in the citations, in the interest of caution and their own reputation, they promote businesses with accurate and... [...]