Miriam Ellis says, “Google’s Snack Packs (a.k.a Local Stacks) haven’t gotten the best reception in the local business community. Many people feel these results serve Google itself more so than the local businesses they feature. For this reason, it may be more important than ever to make sure your local search marketing is both accurate and thorough. In this post, we’ll dive into why. Let’s take one of these results apart and discover how best to respond to their limitations. I was never a fan of Google’s Carousel. The vivid, image-oriented, horizontal display... [...]

Roy Hinkis says, “The sitelinks search box (schema.org/SearchAction) is one of the most popular markups out there. According to SimilarTech, there are now more than 650,000 sites that have implemented this markup, making it one of the most popular of all schema markup types. That said, we don’t really know the reason why Google sometimes shows the search box for branded queries for sites that have implemented the markup, and sometimes doesn’t. While we don’t know what Google’s criteria are behind the search box algorithm, we have the data to definitely see that there’s... [...]

MOZ team  says, “Keyword Research is a very different field than it was just five years ago, and if we don’t keep up with the times we might end up doing more harm than good. From the research itself to the selection and targeting process, in today’s Whiteboard Friday Rand explains what has changed and what we all need to do to conduct effective keyword research today“. Why We Can’t Do Keyword Research Like It’s 2010 MOZ Blog  [...]

Trevor Klein says, “This week, we’ve got the fourth (and second-to-last) installment of our short (< 2-minute) video tutorials that help you all get the most out of Moz’s tools. They’re each designed to solve a use case that we regularly hear about from Moz community members. Here’s a quick recap of the previous round-ups in case you missed them: Week 1: Reclaim links using Open Site Explorer, build links using Fresh Web Explorer, and find the best time to tweet using Followerwonk. Week 2: Analyze SERPs using new MozBar features, boost your rankings through on-page... [...]

James Gurd says, “In this blog I explain 10 recommendations for your local SEO program, based on research and my own experience of planning and implementing local SEO strategies for B2B and B2C retailers. Search engines have been working hard on fine-tuning their algorithms to provide high quality search results based on location. Google is the best covered in the industry, with its Pigeon update launching in July 2014 and rolling out to UK, Canada and Australia in December. Use the links if you want to learn more about the update. It’s one thing to know that local search is important... [...]

Eric Enge says, “One of the classic problems in SEO is that while complex navigation schemes may be useful to users, they create problems for search engines. Many publishers rely on tags such as rel=canonical, or the parameters settings in Webmaster Tools to try and solve these types of issues. However, each of the potential solutions has limitations. In today’s post, I am going to outline how you can use JavaScript solutions to more completely eliminate the problem altogether. Note that I am not going to provide code examples in this post, but I am going to outline how it works on... [...]

Just deValk says, “Both WordPress SEO Premium and the free version of WordPress SEO have been updated to version 2.2. This new release brings quite a few changes and some nice new additions. We’ll explain the changes in this post. Security fixes This release contains a fix for a potential XSS issue in the admin, specifically the snippet preview. It was caused by issues in our JS, which is why also did another overhaul of our admin JS. The XSS issue required you to be logged in, so the risk level was relatively low”. WordPress SEO 2.2 Yoast Blog  [...]

Marie Haynes says, “Link auditing is the part of my job that I love the most. I have audited a LOT of links over the last few years. While there are some programs out there that can be quite helpful to the avid link auditor, I still prefer to create a spreadsheet of my links in Excel and then to audit those links one-by-one from within Google Spreadsheets. Over the years I have learned a few tricks and formulas that have helped me in this process. In this article, I will share several of these with you. Please know that while I am quite comfortable being labelled a link auditing expert, I... [...]

MOZ team says, “It was once commonplace for developers to code relative URLs into a site. There are a number of reasons why that might not be the best idea for SEO, and in today’s Whiteboard Friday, Ruth Burr Reedy is here to tell you all about why“. Should I Use Relative or Absolute URLs? – Whiteboard Friday MOZ Blog  [...]

Trevor Klein says, “Welcome to the third installment of our short (< 2-minute) video tutorials that help you all get the most out of Moz’s tools. Each tutorial is designed to solve a use case that we regularly hear about from Moz community members—a need or problem for which you all could use a solution. If you missed the previous roundups, you can find ’em here: Week 1: Reclaim links using Open Site Explorer, build links using Fresh Web Explorer, and find the best time to tweet using Followerwonk. Week 2: Analyze SERPs using new MozBar features, boost your rankings through... [...]