One issue often cited by those who believe links aren't as important to SEO today is that they believe that spammers have made them less useful as a ranking signal. But it certainly can get as technical and detailed as you want to make it. Always avoid getting backlinks from …

Software programs cannot adequately interpret each of the various types of data that humans can-videos and images, for example, are to a certain extent less readable by a search engine This is why an evaluation of your homepage is absolutely critical. You need to see things from your customers' point …

So while the search engines were still relatively simple, (today this would be somewhat equivalent to the level of search functions available on websites) the website, which had a strong linking structure and included the searched keyword as often as possible, was favored. There are a number of off-page optimization …

You could pay for ads – but is this really a viable (affordable) long-term solution? Every piece of information about a page can be turned into a long list of words. If we build links, if we make changes to our site, it typically is going to take weeks, months, even …

Learning search engine optimization can be overwhelming at first. There is a lot to wrap your mind around. But becoming proficient in SEO is definitely an achievable undertaking. SEO is not just one technique, if you focus on just one thing you will not get the full benefits of SEO …

Google is making a real push to get to grips with any tactic they see as manipulating the rankings in a way that’s against their guidelines – from keyword cramming to paying for sponsored posts. You can hire good writers, but that is often an expensive proposition. You may be …

However, the modern Google algorithms feature a process known as semantic searchh. Original Content Is King, they say. The methods vary from technical practices you can achieve behind the scenes on your website (we tend to refer to this as ‘on-page SEO’) to all the promotional ’off-page’ approaches you can …

Not every piece of content will be interesting for each and every user out there. Your website will get in front of a random audience from time to time. However, your job is not to please everyone, but to create content tailored to the needs of your customers. While building …

Backlinks are a vote of confidence that someone outside of your own web property trusts your content and believes it has value. Google weighs up each of these links and assigns the linked-to webpage its own value. Now, words are linked to concepts, which are increasingly important to determine relevance …

And, so the reason why SEO can be hard is because you have to test things out yourself. Social media can be a useful tool in search engine optimization. When you write something new, tweet the link, encourage your followers to share the link and post it on social media …

Don’t be scared by the acronym SEO, it just allows sites like Google to read your website and rate you in terms of how relevant you are to the users search terms. What’s even better is that they can be a great way of attracting relevant traffic to …

Google is getting better every year at detecting spammer and low-quality links. Being proactive about taking a safe approach is the only way to avoid a penalty. If hackers break into your website with the goal of implementing negative SEO techniques, then it’s unlikely that you would even notice …

The bounce rate is an important metric to measure the relevancy of content to users. After a year long campaign, we go through an evaluation process to benchmark progress of the campaign. Real SEO is all about helping Google understand the content of your website. It’s about steering, guiding …

Use it before it ceases to be an enabler of competitive advantage. There are plenty of examples where a teen starts a hashtag at 9:35 pm in Philadelphia and within thirty minutes, twenty thousand people around the world are using it. Common extensions that appear at the end of …

In a time when attention spans are shorter than ever, you’d expect that shorter and easier to read posts would be winning points with search engines. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Google still privileges longer posts, and higher-ranking articles usually have more words than those …

Find out which keywords and phrases people frequently search for as well as what is trending. A look at what the competition is using could also help you. Google defines duplicate content as large blocks of text used across multiple pages, or even other websites, that are exactly the same …

By properly using HTML tags, on-page linking, and internal backlinking, you can streamline your site to best serve your customers. By creating relevant content that guides users through the marketing funnel, you can improve sales and generate more interest in your brand. No follow links are defined as the links …

In contrast, any person who happens to be in the area and has a cell phone can post a tweet with a hashtag and a photo or a video, which becomes available worldwide within a few seconds. Many SEO experts agree that a website's inbound links will be crucial this …

For small businesses, the best approach to identifying target keywords requires diligent research and the proper mindset. A variety of studies support the idea that Google incorporate social signals when ranking a webpage. A search result with a high CTR can often be given a boost by Google because it …

You won’t know how well or poorly your mobile strategy is going if the numbers are mixed in with the results and analytics of the desktop strategy. Often, the best SEO strategy is to focus on long tail terms—search terms that are highly specific, relevant, and with strong …

Stop using keywords in your URLs. Why? Because if you don’t know how to optimize a page without slamming keywords into the URLs, you don’t know how to optimize a Web page. To truly understand whether your SEO campaign is working, you need to learn which measurements deserve …

Linking out is huge. Don't be a link hoard; you're going to create content, so use it to gain favor with other people. I'll go more into depth below with specific tactics on linking out, but in general, you only have something to gain when you’re linking out. Keyword …

If your website or webpage suddenly or gradually changes focus over time (say from a carpentry guide to a best practice SEO guide – sounds unlikely, but you never know), then anchor text pointing to you will likely change in line with the different topic. Google may then decide that your …

How do your competitors rank? Pick out a keyword for which you want to optimize your site. Check out the top 20 search results: Are your competitors somewhere in there? What is your ranking for this keyword? This information should help you to find a good niche for you and …

Visual content has become very popular on the internet due to our own ability to process an image faster than any written text. This wins the first impression and it can be very powerful within the context of a page. Similar to duplicate content, scraped content are parts of your …

Search engines want to deliver the best results to searchers based on the search terms visitors enter. Content syndication is the term used for the tactical republishing of your original article on another third-party website. It’s particularly useful if you’re a smaller publisher or an up-and-coming writer who …

Most tools you use to build websites make it super easy to add important image tags, like alt tags. Both search engines and humans (those who look at a web page’s code) can read the information in image tags. It’s just one more way to include relevant info …

Stop words are the small words in your SEO phrase, such as up, with, is, a, etc. While it’s widely accepted as a best practice to remove these from your SEO phrase, sometimes removing them can actually hurt your SEO. For example, “What is a graco taco?” makes a …

Domain Authority is a score (on a 100-point scale) developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engines. We like to use Domain Authority when comparing one site to another or tracking the “strength” of your website over time. SEO is simply the process of …

To increase your CTR, create a custom description that describes what your page is about and what the reader can expect to get out of visiting your page. You also want to include your target keyword. Think about the searcher’s intent when crafting this description. So how do you …

Instead of looking for one-off guest blogging opportunities the entire time, look for opportunities that could win you regular contributions to a single blog or your own column. These links look very natural, you can get multiple high quality links a month, and if the blog has a decent audience …

Google scores ‘fresh content’ that’s updated regularly in a different way to a news article that doesn’t change. More and more, search engines have begun to incorporate social context into their search results. From its earliest days, Google's core search algorithm offered the most relevant and most organic …

With the increase in powers of content, the journey for internet marketing people has taken a knifelike turn. Not so long ago it might be comparatively easy for a marketer to secure his business in top search engine results. Paid links are links garnered in exchange for payment. They can …

While you want your sentences and paragraphs to be short, your overall content can be as long as you fancy – in-depth content is a big indicator of quality. The more pages you have give you more of a chance to rank well for a more diverse set of keyword phrases …

The old saying that “life is a journey, not a destination” can also be applied to SEO. Keyword research is the basis of all search marketing. It is the art of explaining what you do in the language that people use, and thus it should probably be the basis of …

Provide high-quality content on your pages, especially your homepage. This is the single most important thing to do. If your pages contain useful information, their content will attract many visitors and entice webmasters to link to your site. Information Architecture allows people and search engines to better understand the content …

Having a few 404 errors will not ruin your rankings completely, but they can lower your user experience, which ultimately can affect your SEO performance. Today, many sites use secondary menus to accommodate for additional content. Loads of site-owners can’t help but state that they “can’t squeeze all …

Write locally oriented content: It’s one of the best things you can do to improve local rankings. An effective link building strategy that simply makes a lot of sense is fixing broken links on your site and on sites that you’d like a link from. Your first step …

Not so long ago, SEO and social media marketing were different things. The idea was that SEO attracted visitors and social media marketing kept them coming back. Just like they have for on-page SEO, technical aspects of SEO have changed as search engines have become more sophisticated. You can get …

Schema.org is a code protocol developed jointly by the world’s top search engines. It’s created to make it easier for companies to structure the data they present on their websites After choosing a domain name, optimizing the URLs for your pages is the next SEO step. SEO …