Larry Kim says, “Quality and relevance are different things, yet we often discuss them as if they were the same. SEOs have been optimizing for relevance all this time, but are now being asked to optimize for quality. This post will discuss what that means and how to do it, with a focus on what I believe to be the single most effective and scaleable tactic for improving your site’s overall level of quality in most situations. It doesn’t matter how relevant the page is. The only way to get that page to rank these days would be to buy a lot of links, but then you’re dealing with... [...]

Brian Hughes says, “Need help with SEO? Picking a reputable digital marketing strategist can be a challenge, especially for small businesses that are vulnerable to being exploited by less than scrupulous, fly-by-night organizations. With tight marketing budgets, it’s all too easy to fall prey to big promises offered by SEO firms: “We guarantee you’ll get on the front page of Google results in one month!” “You’ll rank in the top of local search results.” “More traffic than you know what to do with!” Yikes. Those three statements are huge red flags. Why? SEO takes time. Period.... [...]

Larry Kim says, “One of the biggest areas of speculation, contention, and confusion within the SEO universe over the past six years or so has been whether (or how much) social media signals impact organic search rankings. But even if Google isn’t directly using social share counts in their search algorithms, there ought to be some other explanation out there about why high share counts correlate with high organic search rankings. Well, that is exactly what we’re going to research in this post. Are social shares a ranking signal? People have noticed the connection between social shares... [...]

Timothy Carter says, “When small business owners think about getting involved in SEO, they often become intimidated (or frustrated). They see massive corporations and large businesses dominating the search engine world, and it’s no secret why they’re able to. They have access to tens of thousands of dollars (or more) to spend on online marketing, a highly talented full-time staff to oversee campaign management, and perhaps most importantly, they’ve been around for years, so they’ve had time to cement their authority in their respective niches. Seeing all this, you might think that... [...]

Emily Green says, “Many companies have a daily struggle with trying to figure out what they are going to do as far as SEO/Content marketing goes. Building a team in-house can be quite costly and with all applicants referring to themselves as “SEO Gurus” it can be hard to pick out the right hire. Choosing a company to take care of your content marketing and SEO can be just as difficult. There are those SEO marketing companies that are full of pros while other companies can be a few people in a living room with outdated knowledge. With all of the technical talk that SEOs tend to do when... [...]

Stephanie LeVonne says, “You’ve probably heard the phrase “duplicate content” being thrown around from time to time, and like any savvy webmaster, you’d never dare to publish the same content twice — but have you? Duplicate content is the equivalent of overdrawing your checking account, except instead of paying costly fees each month you’ll be sacrificing your precious crawl budget. Manifesting itself in several forms, duplicate content may be one of the most elusive and widely overlooked problems that can affect your site’s ability to rank. It oftentimes stems from a sites’... [...]

Marcus Miller says, “This may seem strange coming from an SEO guy, but there are many situations where organic search may not be the best option for a given marketing challenge. In fact, there are times when SEO is just simply not a good fit. In this article, I am going to look at a few common scenarios we see at my agency where we have been contacted for SEO and have fed back that we believe that SEO is either not aligned with their requirements or there is some other form of mismatch (speed, budget, etc.). 1. Budget This is the first and most common issue we see. The business wants to... [...]

Bridget Randolph says, “Here at Distilled NY we’ve been running a hiring cycle, and it’s really brought front and center for me the key elements that make a digital marketing (and specifically SEO) candidate stand out from the crowd. So I wanted to share a few things I’ve learned in the process. For the purpose of this post, I’m going to tackle this topic from two angles (with 5 points on each, in true “10 Things I’ve Learned…” style): Part I: 5 attributes I now look for in any new analyst or consultant hire (and what you as an employer might want to think about before... [...]

MOZ team says, “Knowing what content to create is one of a marketer’s most difficult jobs. It’s all too easy to imagine your target audience and what they already appreciate, then create more of that. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand discusses why that’s a bit short-sighted, and we should have a broader vision“. Why It’s a Bad Idea to Only Create Content for Your Specific Target Audience MOZ  [...]

We found this infographic through the Huffington Post. Source: 99 MediaLab 99 MediaLab  [...]