MOZ team says, “Making changes to your brand is a huge step, and while it’s sometimes the best path forward, it isn’t one to be taken lightly. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand offers some guidance to marketers who are wondering whether a rebrand/redirect is right for them, and also those who are considering consolidating multiple sites under a single brand“. Should I Rebrand and Redirect My Site? Should I Consolidate Multiple Sites/Brands? – Whiteboard Friday MOZ Blog  [...]

Just deValk says, “Search engines crawl your site to get the contents into their index. The bigger your site gets, the longer this crawl takes. It’s important that the time spent crawling your site is well spent. If your site has a 1,000 pages or less, this is not a topic you’ll need to think about much. If  you intend on growing your site though, keep on reading. Acquiring some good habits early on can safe you from huge headaches later on. In this article we’ll cover what crawl efficiency is and what you can do about it. All search engines crawl the same way. In this article... [...]

Dr. Peter J. Meyers says, “For years now, we (and many others) have been recommending keeping your Meta Descriptions shorter than about 155-160 characters. For months, people have been sending me examples of search snippets that clearly broke that rule, like this one (on a search for “hummingbird food”). For the record, this one clocks in at 317 characters (counting spaces). So, I set out to discover if these long descriptions were exceptions to the rule, or if we need to change the rules. I collected the search snippets across the MozCast 10K, which resulted in 92,669 snippets. All of... [...]

Chris Sheen says, “Does content marketing need to evolve so it doesn’t go the way of the humble pager? We marketers talk about content and storytelling a lot, but we may have taken our eyes off the most important thing of all: what our customers think. A couple of weeks ago an article on LinkedIn piqued my interest. In ‘Is Trust the New Currency?’, Microsoft’s Geoffrey Colon tears into the marketing and advertising industry’s current obsession with content and storytelling. As someone who takes creating content and ‘telling stories’ pretty seriously, it was a pretty... [...]

Patricio Robles says, “Companies spend lots of time and money trying to climb the ranks of the SERPs, but fully maximizing how many people click on your results can be a difficult undertaking. In an apparent effort to do just that, online travel giant Expedia is employing an unusual tool: Emojis in some of its page titles. Google has supported the display of Emoji characters in search results on mobile since 2012, but only added desktop support last month. Following that, Search Engine Land was tipped off to the fact that Expedia has added Emoji characters to the titles of some but not all... [...]

Ayaz Nanji says, “Which search engine optimization tools are marketers’ favorites? To find out, G2 Crowd recently examined 310 in-depth evaluations of SEO tools written on its software review platform by business and marketing professionals. The researchers ranked the tools based on customer satisfaction scores as well as the size of their market presence. Overall, most marketers are very satisfied with their current SEO tool, with 85% saying it meets their requirements and 87% saying they would be likely to recommend the product they use. Moz is ranked as a “Leader” by... [...]

Sophia Smith says, “Google set the deadline of April 21, 2015 for an update in its algorithm which checked whether a website is mobile friendly or not. Mobile friendly websites which allow users to browse without having to zoom in and out can expect to get a boost in rankings. On the other hand, those websites which are not mobile friendly and offer a suboptimal user experience can expect to see a sharp drop. This update, dubbed as “Mobilegeddon”, will affect searches in all languages. Google has opined recently that the effect of this update is expected to be greater than its Panda or Penguin... [...]

Damon Rutherford says, “Optimising PDFs for search is one of the most overlooked SEO opportunities around today. The good news is that it isn’t hard to do, and as well as helping your website gain traffic, it also improves usability. As an SEO consultant I see companies in highly competitive markets implementing content marketing and link building strategies to improve their search rankings to increase visibility and sales. To improve search engine visibility (and avoid Google penalties) they target links from trusted, powerful websites that are in similar or complementary fields to... [...]

Kristi Hines says, “If you are a Gmail user, you have likely received some emails that stand out from the rest with a call to action button within the subject line. If you’ve booked a flight recently, your airline may have sent you an email that includes an interactive way to view your travel plans. Similarly, Google Inbox app users might have seen emails that look like this. These calls to action are courtesy of Schema.org markup for email. Just like Schema.org markup for web pages helps web pages stand out in search results, Schema.org markup for emails helps certain emails stand... [...]

Tom Anthony says, “We increasingly use apps, wearables, smart assistants, smart watches and smart TVs for searches, and none of these are returning the 10 blue links of days gone by. These technologies and trends are intersecting and converging, giving rise to a new paradigm of search: Data-Driven Search“. Search Trends: Are Compound Queries the Start of the Shift to Data-Driven Search? MOZ Blog  [...]