A sitemap is like a Table of Contents in a book. It shows where the major sections of your site are located and even what individual pages your site has. Some sitemaps are intended for human visitors; others are for search engines as they “crawl” your site. Those for humans are usually in text and contain links to the pages that are listed. Those for search engines are written in XML, a programming language that the search engines find easy to process. There are both kinds of sitemaps at IM NewsWatch, for example. At many, if not most, sites around the world, webmasters have been creating... [...]

Over the last 10 years or so, the influence of search engines, such as Google, has continued to grow. Marketers are scrambling to keep up. Techniques that worked to achieve a high ranking a few years ago now may actually lower a site’s ranking. Webmasters need to be on their toes to optimize their sites without antagnoizing the search engines. Chase Reiner is an SEO practitioner who has worked at keeping in sync with Google’s requirements. A while back he did a live stream presentaiton on what works in SEO today. You can watch his presentation here: YouTube  [...]

The nice thing about local SEO is the reduced competition. A national company is competing with many other national companies and, often, with some local companies as well. But a local business is usually only competing weith a handful of othr businesses. This fact makes the job of optimization easier. Chase Reiner, an experienced professional in local search engine optimization has created a live stream on Google+ that is now recorded, in which he shows how he goes about doing SEO for a local business, in this case, a Personal Trainer. If you operate a local business or if you are a marketing... [...]

Khalid Saleh says, “Efforts to drive more traffic and rank better on search engines sometimes seem to be in conflict with those for increasing conversion rates for your website. But, as improved user experience becomes a stronger criterion for search engines, search engine optimization and conversion rate optimization are becoming a complementary, multistep process in marketing your business. Don’t sweat it: Your SEO efforts won’t ruin conversions on your site. And your CRO (conversion rate optimization) strategies won’t harm your findability, either. When setting your marketing plan,... [...]

Ronell Smith says, “Some of the best talks at MozCon each year come from the community speakers—those who’re able to make a pitch to grace the stage. This group enjoys the same privileges as the other speakers, including being able to deliver a keynote-style talk, and are always well-received by the audience. If you’re eager to be a member of this group, step right up. We’re now open for MozCon community speaker’s pitches. We’d be happy to have your best effort. The nuts & bolts: Submitting is as simple as filling out the form below Only submit one talk... [...]

Nate Dame says, “There are at least 200 ranking factors in Google’s algorithm (not to mention RankBrain), which means a thorough SEO audit could lead to dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of SEO tasks. Few companies have the budget or resources to complete every potential SEO to-do item — and doing so would be an incredible waste of time and resources anyway. Some SEO tasks are critical and cannot be ignored; others just aren’t worth your time. Prioritizing an SEO task list is crucial. Focus your resources on SEO work that is actually going to improve rankings, increase clicks and... [...]

Simon Penson says, “What will you learn from this post? How to get lots of Search Console data quickly and easily How to run a Python script And who can do it? Hopefully, it should be accessible to any beginner. Why do we use the API to get Search Console data? At Distilled, we often want to use Google Search Console data, but getting it from the interface is incredibly clunky: You’re limited to the top 1,000 queries You have to apply each filter one at a time The interface is slow And if you want to do this regularly, you have to repeat this process often. We can get around that by... [...]

Simon Penson says, “Incredible, isn’t it? Despite all the fanfare and pageantry that has followed content marketing over the last few years, fewer than 6% of marketers confidently claim to be executing content marketing strategies properly. It’s just one of a handful of eye-popping stats to come out of the State of Content Marketing Survey, a major new survey of senior UK marketers this month as part of a campaign to help create healthy debate around the misunderstood tactic. With more budget than ever before pouring into the approach (60% of those surveyed said they were opening the... [...]

Stefanie Flaxman says, “Whenever someone questions the importance of proofreading, my go-to response is: “Pubic relations is quite different from public relations.” We all sometimes make a typo that omits or changes a letter in a word. A typo like that is difficult to spot when the mistake is still an actual word (or words). Just last week, I wrote “head lice” instead of “headline.” Again, two completely different things. But I have an effective proofreading process that helps me find and correct errors before they are published. (Except, of course, when the error is a joke.) Do... [...]

Marie Haynes says, “It has now been six months since the launch of Penguin 4.0. In my opinion, Penguin 4.0 was awesome. It took ages for Google to release this update, but when they did, it was much more fair than previous versions of Penguin. Previous versions of Penguin would cause entire sites to be suppressed if the algorithm thought that you’d engaged in manipulative link building. Even if a site did a thorough link cleanup, the suppression would remain present until Google re-ran the Penguin algorithm and recognized your cleanup efforts. I saw many businesses that had looooooong... [...]