Kelsey Libert says, “Some content is designed to “go viral,” while other times a piece of content intended to stay among friends takes the Internet by storm. But whether planned or unplanned, rapidly-shared content has several commonalities. One of the key factors is that the content creates a strong emotional response in viewers. Through our research on viral emotions, we’ve found that certain emotions are better than others at driving people to view and share content. In other words, creating the right emotional response is extremely important to getting your content widely shared.... [...]

Anna Korolekh says, “When I joined the PSD2HTML team in November 2014, the site had been suffering from a manual penalty related to spammy backlinks for over a year. They’d tried everything to promote a recovery, but nothing worked. They were ready to admit defeat. The penalty resulted in the loss of over 80% of their organic traffic. The story of how this happened is very interesting. PSD2HTML was one of the first companies to market PSD to HTML conversions in 2005. At the peak of their success, they transitioned to an SEO company. In 2013, our relationship with a well-known agency... [...]

Kane Jamison says, “I’ve been obsessed with Facebook Ads for the past few years. It probably didn’t hurt that the first test campaign we ran earned an excellent $0.04 cost-per-engagement from a $10 budget. I’m obsessed because I’m convinced Facebook Ads are one of the most powerful tools we currently have as digital marketers. Whether you’re looking to spend $200 a month advertising to a single zip code or $20,000 a day reaching sports fans, you can reach the ideal target audience for your organization with targeting criteria that no other ad network, search... [...]

Joy Hawkins says, “Local SEO can be confusing for those businesses that don’t have a physical store for customers to walk into. Unlike businesses with a brick-and-mortar storefront, service-area businesses (or SABs) go out to meet with their customers, as opposed to their customers coming to see them. This often results in them servicing multiple cities, which can be problematic—the #1 ranking factor in local SEO is the physical address of the business. In addition, business owners are also usually concerned about privacy, as many of them use their home address and can’t utilize some... [...]

MOZ team says, “We tend to put a lot of effort into writing great content these days. But what’s the point of all that hard work if hardly anybody actually reads it through to the end? In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Dan Petrovic illustrates a new approach to writing for the web to increase reader engagement, and offers some tools and tips to help along the way“. How to Write for the Web—a New Approach for Increased Engagement – Whiteboard Friday MOZ Blog  [...]

Rebecca Maynes says, “You are exposed to an average of 362 online display ads a day. How close are you to buying anythingwhen you see those ads? Online display ads have been around for over 20 years. They’re nothing new. But over the past 2 decades, the content, format, and messaging of display ads have changed dramatically—because they have had to! The click-through rate of that first banner ad in 1994 was 44%. CTRs have steadily declined, and were sitting at around 0.1% in 2012 for standard display ads (video and rich media excluded), according to DoubleClick. Advertisers had to do... [...]

Jennifer Slegg says, “If you’re a webmaster, you probably received one of those infamous “Googlebot cannot access CSS and JS files on example.com” warning letters that Google sent out to seemingly every SEO and webmaster. This was a brand new alert from Google, although we have been hearing from the search engine about the need to ensure all resources are unblocked—including both JavaScript and CSS. There was definite confusion around these letters, supported by some of the reporting in Google Search Console. Here’s what you need to know about Google’s desire to see these... [...]

Bill Sebald says, “A process can easily become a habit. A habit may not change without awareness or intervention. Before it becomes a habit, a process should be adjusted to change along with new goals, constant learning, experimentation, and so on. Considering your time in analytics, are you engaging in a process, or in an outdated habit? That’s a real question that digital marketing practitioners should ask themselves. Inherently, marketers tend to be buried with work, reusing templates to speed up results. But many agencies lean on those templates a little too much, in my opinion. Templates... [...]

Bridget Randolph says, “As mobile technology becomes an increasingly common way for users to access the internet, you need to ensure that your mobile content (whether on a mobile website or in a mobile app) is as accessible to users as possible. In the past this process has been relatively siloed, with separate URLs for desktop and mobile content and apps tucked away in app stores. But as app and mobile web usage continues to rise, the ways in which people access this content is beginning to converge, which means it’s becoming more important to keep all of these different content locations... [...]

MOZ team says, “Outreach. It’s arguably the most important part of the link building process—and also the most grueling. Good personalized outreach is impossible to scale effectively, and it’s easy to fall into a rut. What should you be doing to maximize your success rate and to stand out from the crowd? In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand offers up some methods of bartering value to earn genuine links, catching your target’s attention, and gives actionable advice on what exactly you need to include in your outreach correspondence“. Link Building Outreach in... [...]