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... [...]

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... [...]

Paul Shapiro says, “I recently asked a room of experienced marketers how they thought social media marketing could assist their SEO efforts. The answers were more or less what I had expected to hear: Social media helps foster relationships, which in turn helps build links and improves rankings. Social media aids in public relations, as a distribution channel and a means of generating easy online buzz. Social sharing provides a form of social proof, giving greater credibility and trustworthiness to your content. Brands can rank for their social networking profiles and receive greater visibility... [...]

Tom Dibble says, “Although the relationship between dynamic personalisation and search engines is anything but a happy marriage, it seems to be evolving in the right direction. Do you remember those Christmas mornings as a kid, when you rushed downstairs, dizzy with excitement and nervous in anticipation of what Santa left waiting for you under the tree? You tore through the snowman covered wrapping paper, your fingernails peeling back the final layers to reveal (gasp!) the perfect gift. So perfect, in fact, that it was exactly the thing that you asked for when you wrote that letter to Santa... [...]

Jennifer Slegg says, “Local SEO has seen the biggest shake-up since Google launched their first local algorithm, Pigeon, just over a year ago. On Thursday, August 6th, people began to notice that the usual 7-packs that frequently showed up in the search results for local businesses were suddenly replaced with 3-packs in the desktop search results. It initially wasn’t too alarming, but as the hours passed it was obvious Google had changed the face of local search in their search results. By the end of that day, 3-packs had completely replaced all the 7-packs across all verticals and... [...]

Cyrus Shepard says, “Recently, Moz announced the results of our biennial Ranking Factors study. Today, we’d like to explore one of the most vital elements of the study: the Ranking Factors survey. Every two years, Moz surveys the brightest minds in SEO and search marketing with a comprehensive set of questions meant to gauge the current workings of Google’s search algorithm. This year’s panel of experts possesses a truly unique set of knowledge and perspectives. We’re thankful on behalf of the entire community for their contribution. In addition to asking the participants... [...]

Cyrus Shepard says, “We’re excited to announce the results of Moz’s biannual Search Engine Ranking Correlation Study and Expert Survey, a.k.a. Ranking Factors. Moz’s Ranking Factors study helps identify which attributes of pages and sites have the strongest association with ranking highly in Google. The study consists of two parts: a survey of professional SEOs and a large correlation study. This year, with the help of Moz’s data scientist Dr. Matt Peters, new data partners, and over 150 search marketing professionals, we were able to study more data points than in... [...]