Taylor Tomita says, “Search engine optimization (SEO) has always been apparent within the internet world, but as Google’s ranking factors have been streamlined with their frequent search algorithm updates, implementing SEO into a website is becoming increasingly necessary in today’s digitalized world. SEO is the process of setting up a website in a way that allows it be visible within a search engine’s results page, based on the standard practices that all search engines use to organize the internet world. This can be boiled down to a number of strategies, but overall, SEO is impressing... [...]

Andrew Raso says, “If you’re in any kind of business, you’ve no doubt received plenty of unsolicited emails from companies trying to sell you search engine optimization (SEO) services or get you more customers by ranking your website higher. Unfortunately, this industry is bombarded with cowboys and churn-and-burn models, with 80 percent of SEO firms performing scam tactics of some kind. If you’re a respectable business owner, I’m sure it’s not a churn, burn and die solution you’re looking for. But if you’re not careful and assertive with your choice of SEO firm, you may... [...]

Shannon Evans says, “SEO has so many moving pieces, it can be hard to keep up – especially when SEO isn’t your main duty. If you’re running a small business, that probably means you’re far more passionate about serving your customers than you are about competing in the never ending race that is SEO. SMBs might not have all the resources large enterprises do to manage SEO, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t things your company can learn from enterprise SEO programs to apply to your own site. Below I’ll outline a few lessons and best practices from successful enterprise... [...]

Aleh Barysevich says, “Get ready for a new year of changes to Google’s algorithms—and your SEO strategy. The following five trends, distilled from a guide published on the Link-Assistant.com blog, will undoubtedly be buzzed about next year. 1. Dark Traffic It’s not news that an immense amount of traffic is flowing to websites from social media and messaging apps. But, thanks to a quirk of Google analytics, you can’t necessarily tell that’s the case. When Google Analytics can’t tell the source of a website visitor, that visit is recorded as direct traffic, even... [...]

Christopher Jan Benitez says, “In the world of post-Penguins and post-Pandas, the phrase “SEO automation” sounds taboo. It is easy to think of this term as “black hat” when tools like SeNukeXcr and XRumer help webmasters build hundreds of backlinks and attract thousands of visitors with a few clicks of a button. You do not have to do the legwork for building links and drive traffic because these tools will do the laborious work for you. In essence, this is the idea of what SEO automation does – taking away the guesswork from intricate SEO tactics to produce results. However,... [...]

Jayson Demers says, “Your company’s reputation plays a large role in local organic search rankings. For example, if your company is listed in every major local business directory and you’re mentioned on local news sources regularly, and if great user reviews of your business dot the web, you’ll likely rank higher than if just the reverse occurs: You’re rarely mentioned and your reviews are poor. Every business gets a bad review now and then, and some businesses naturally have trouble attracting reviews from their customers. But, with local SEO becoming more important and more influential,... [...]

Jay Baer says, “TripCase is now a powerhouse mobile app that seamlessly manages at least 30 million trips each year using the combined power of over 40 airlines and more than 110,000 travel agents. In This Episode How realistically evaluating social returns can lead to a more focused engagement plan and higher returns Why showing your collaborators an example of what you can do can lead to better cross-organizational buy-in How inhaling and exhaling data can lead to a more feature-rich product and more clients Why becoming familiar with the vernacular around your product can mean better... [...]

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?... [...]

Ben Davis says, “I apologise for lumping all SEOs together in the headline, some are good and some are still bad, but as the layman or ‘content person’ knows, there are a lot of opinions out there. If you came via the blog homepage, the header image on this post showed Jupiter, Mercury and Io from Roman myth. Myth is a word that crops up a fair bit in SEO, such is the knowledge of the ‘inner workings’ of the Google ‘algorithm’. Here are three of the oft-debated opinions that are still out there. Myth One? 302 redirects do not pass link equity I wrote a... [...]