MOZ team says, “Have you thought about what your pop-ups might be doing to your SEO? There are plenty of considerations, from their timing and how they affect your engagement rates, all the way to Google’s official guidelines on the matter. In this episode of Whiteboard Friday, Rand goes over all the reasons why you ought to carefully consider how your overlays and modals work and whether the gains are worth the sacrifice”. Pop-Ups, Overlays, Modals, Interstitials, and How They Interact with SEO MOZ  [...]

Jono Alderson says, “Websites, like the businesses who operate them, are often deceptively complicated machines. They’re fragile systems, and changing or replacing any one of the parts can easily affect (or even break) the whole setup — often in ways not immediately obvious to stakeholders or developers. Even seemingly simple sites are often powered by complex technology, like content management systems, databases, and templating engines. There’s much more going on behind the scenes — technically and organizationally — than you can easily observe by crawling a site or viewing the... [...]

Tom Capper says, “Back in September last year, I was lucky enough to see Rand speak at MozCon. His talk was about link building and the main types of strategy that he saw as still being relevant and effective today. During his introduction, he said something that really got me thinking, about how the whole purpose of links and PageRank had been to approximate traffic. Essentially, back in the late ’90s, links were a much bigger part of how we experienced the web — think of hubs like Excite, AOL, and Yahoo. Google’s big innovation was to realize that, because people navigated the... [...]

Dr. Peter J. Meyers says, “Just over 9 months ago, I wrote that 30% of page-1 Google results in our 10,000-keyword tracking set were secure (HTTPS). As of earlier this week, that number topped 50%. While there haven’t been any big jumps recently – suggesting this change is due to steady adoption of HTTPS and not a major algorithm update – the end result of a year of small changes is dramatic. More and more Google results are secure. MozCast is, of course, just one data set, so I asked the folks at Rank Ranger, who operate a similar (but entirely different) tracking system, if they... [...]

MOZ team says, “Net neutrality is a hot-button issue lately, and whether it’s upheld or not could have real ramifications for the online marketing industry. In this Whiteboard Friday, Rand covers the potential consequences and fallout of losing net neutrality. Be sure to join the ensuing discussion in the comments!”. Why Net Neutrality Matters for SEO and Web Marketing MOZ  [...]

Serge Stefoglo says, “If you work on an enterprise site — particularly in e-commerce or listings (such as a job board site) — you probably use some sort of faceted navigation structure. Why wouldn’t you? It helps users filter down to their desired set of results fairly painlessly. While helpful to users, it’s no secret that faceted navigation can be a nightmare for SEO. At Distilled, it’s not uncommon for us to get a client that has tens of millions of URLs that are live and indexable when they shouldn’t be. More often than not, this is due to their faceted nav setup. There are... [...]

Dmitry Dragilev says, “It’s tough out there for SEOs and content marketers. With the sheer amount of quality content being produced, it has become nearly impossible to stand out in most industries. Recently we were running content marketing for Pipedrive, a sales CRM. We created a content strategy that used educational sales content to educate and build trust with our target audience. This was a great idea, in theory — we’d educate readers, establish trust, and turn some of our readers into customers. The problem is that there are already countless others producing similar sales-focused... [...]

Miriam Ellis says, “Google’s widely publicized concept of micro-moments has been questioned by some local SEOs for its possible oversimplification of consumer behavior. Nevertheless, I think it serves as a good, basic model for understanding how a variety of human needs (I want to do, know, buy something, or go somewhere) leads people onto the web. When a local business manages to become a visible solution to any of these needs, the rewards can include: Online traffic In-store traffic Transactions Reviews/testimonials Clicks-for-directions Clicks-to-call Clicks-to-website Social sharing”. The... [...]

MOZ team says, “Hovering your finger over the big red “launch” button for your new website? Hold off for just a second (or 660 of them, rather). There may be SEO considerations you haven’t accounted for yet, from a keyword-to-URL content map to sweeping for crawl errors to setting up proper tracking. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand covers five big boxes you need to check off before finally setting that site live”. Launching a New Website: Your SEO Checklist MOZ  [...]

Kate Morris says, “Meta tags represent the beginning of most SEO training, for better or for worse. I contemplated exactly how to introduce this topic because we always hear about the bad side of meta tags — namely, the keywords meta tag. One of the first things dissected in any site review is the misuse of meta tags, mainly because they’re at the top of every page in the header and are therefore the first thing seen. But we don’t want to get too negative; meta tags are some of the best tools in a search marketer’s repertoire. There are meta tags beyond just description... [...]