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SEO Insights and Resources
SEO (search engine optimization) is where local businesses can compete 1-to-1 with large national sites. Google values and rewards sites that participate in white hat seo practices. This category will cover SEO research, strategies and tips for businesses who are striving for increased rankings for high value and high converting keywords for their website.
This category will also cover SEO Process. Most of the technical side of SEO can be built on processes such as proper URL structure or how to return a proper header response code. This category includes posts that define some of those processes along with process checklists to help define the SEO basics of your website.
We also would like to extend a welcome to any experts in the field of SEO who would like to submit a guest post.
The Real SEO Value of URLs: Keywords, Clickthrough, & Social
I get asked weekly about URLs and the value they have from an SEO standpoint, or if a business should pick an exact match domain over one you will need to establish as a brand. We have all been told that keywords in the URL hold some weight in Google’s …
How To Find Valuable Keywords A Page Ranks For Using Google Analytics
Understanding which keywords are sending organic traffic to a specific page on your website can be helpful when trying to understand: Which keywords or phrases the page ranks for in the search results. Which keywords Google and other search engines value a specific page for. Engagement metrics (time on site, …
How To Find Keywords That Generated Organic Traffic But Don’t Anymore
When we talk about SEO measurement strategies we talk alot about keyword diversity as a Primary KPI. Ensuring that you are on a consistent trend of increasing the number of keywords or keyphrases that are sending traffic to your website from organic search is a great indicator of the level …
Big Brand SEO: Brands Need To Become Publishers To Succeed
As SEO evolves it’s imperative that not only small businesses understand and adopt the changing landscape, but brands do as well. Traditionally brands have relied on their “brand authority” to take over the search results for non-branded keywords, and much to all our surprise Google has allowed it to happen. …
SEO 101 Presentation and Training Session For Small Business
I recently had the pleasure of meeting with a group of small business owners, writers, and graphic designers from Chicago to teach them SEO 101. It was a great 2 hour training session that included topics such as: Personas What is SEO? Evolution of SEO TLCs of SEO What to …
I Know Someone at Google, I’ll Just Ask Them What’s Wrong With My Site
I think at some point every SEO hears this from a client, “I know someone at Google so I will just ask them what’s wrong with my site” or “we spend so much in paid search (Adwords) that we have an “in” at Google who can give us SEO advice”. …
SEO QA: New Page Creation Checklist Guide For SEO
Below you will find a basic QA SEO checklist for new page creation. It acts as a reference and guide for development, programming and QA teams to ensure that each new page contains all the basic SEO elements. Download The Page Creation PDF Here Create a unique URL Use all …
What is SEO: SEO Simplified Into Plain English and Video
What is SEO? In practice, SEO is a business strategy; inclusive of publishing, brand building, marketing, and traffic acquisition. It is about optimizing your website for high value keywords that drive both traffic and conversions by creating in-depth content that satisfies the users and the search engines. SEO in Plain …
12 Most Overrated SEO Tactics (That Don’t Work!)
Knowing where to focus your time and energy when it comes to executing SEO tactics that will have value and drive rankings, traffic, and conversions is key to building a long term strategy to grow your online business. Below you will find the 12 most overrated SEO tactics that don’t …
[Video] On-Page Optimization Tips For Advanced SEO
On-page optimizing is still a huge part of helping a site rank for primary head terms as well as mid and long tail keyword. A recent study by Conductor showed that optimizing on-page elements for the keywords marketers want to rank for is critical. On-page optimization for keywords identified by …
SEO And The Amazon Paradox
It was there all along and we unknowingly walked past. Apple’s reinvention of music and the phone created distraction. “Shock of the new” toys romanced us. In fairness, they are cool, empowering things, but the real revolution was happening quietly 850 miles north from Apple’s headquarters at 1 Infinite Loop …
Microsites for SEO: Adantages & Disadvantages of Building Microsites
I was recently asked by a client if they should create a microsite for a product set they were adding. This question really made me think about the value of microsites for SEO and branding purposes and if microsites for seo were good or bad. What is a microsite? People …
[Video] What Is Cloaking, The Definitive Answer By Google’s Matt Cutts
Video Summary A lot of people have questions about cloaking; what exactly is it, how does Google define it, and why is it high risk behavior. There is a lot of HTML documentation and Google has done a lot of blog posts, but Matt wanted to do this definitive cloaking …
How to Syndicate Content Without Hurting Your Rankings
Many websites and businesses operate on a distribution business model in which their sales come from other websites listing their products. These businesses sell their white label products into other businesses, and then the business utilize their own websites to sell the products through to the consumer. This business model …
Tips For Optimizing Video for Organic Search (Google, Yahoo, Bing)
In the past video has presented an interesting challenge for SEOs as it’s widely accepted that Google cannot see or understand this content. However, the popularity of video with consumers, and the correlation with an increased conversion rate, indicates that it should not be omitted from a strong marketing campaign. …
SEO Tips For Sites With A Distribution, Affiliate, or Reseller Model
Distributors. Resellers. Affiliates. All are names for business entities who purchase goods and products directly from a supplier to resell, or redistribute to consumers. Distributors offer the manpower and cash flow needed to promote and sell products directly to consumers, and take the burden of mass distribution off the manufacturer, …
Google Sitelinks FAQ: Where Do They Come From & Can You Change Them
We get asked this at least once a week by clients or prospects “where do the links under the first Google result come from?”, or “how do I get Sitelinks to show up for my site?”. So we decided to give our readers a resource guide for Sitelinks to answer …
HTML and XML Sitemap Creation Process and Benefits
Sitemaps can be helpful in the indexation and crawling of a website. Below are the two types of sitemaps that we currently use and the process for keeping them up to date. XML Sitemap An XML Sitemap is created based on specific protocols and helps the search engines discover pages …
SEO Audit Process: How To Perform An SEO Audit
Executing a SEO audit is a very involved process that touches on many of the aspects that can help or hurt your rankings, indexation and crawl rate in the search engines. Below you will find a few of the high level questions we ask when performing a website SEO audit …
Canonical Tags, Robots.txt, Meta Robots For SEO
Robots.txt Most search engine spiders only visit the places on a website where they have permission to crawl. When spiders access a site, they check a special file in the root directory of the web server called “robots.txt”. This file is a tool for blocking spiders from crawling and indexing …
Video Optimization: Process For Optimizing Videos
Optimizing Videos On Video Search Engines Video file should be keyword focused Title of video page should be keyword focused Description of video should be well written and focused on the keywords, much like any other piece of content. When linking out to YouTube videos, only use the link provided …
Page Deletion Process: What To Think About When Deleting A Page
If a page needs to be deleted, a reason for deletion should be created to help determine if there needs to be a mapping to a new page or if the page should be archived. Why? A page that is deleted has acquired some metrics from the search engines and …
Not So Common Questions about the SEOmoz Tools and Pro Campaigns
As seasoned practitioners know, SEO is all about the details. I’ve been using the SEOmoz Pro campaigns and tools for awhile and along the way have noticed minor quirks and details that raised some questions beyond those answered in the FAQ section. Thanks to much help from the SEOmoz support …
Guide To Finding Your Real Online Keyword Competition
So when working with clients there are many things we look at to determine how well they are doing online. One metric we analyze is a clients online competition. We look at this from two angles; competitive link metrics and competitive ranking metrics. The problem we often come up with …
Where Does The Description Tag Come From In Google?
There are 3 primary ways Google gets your description tag for the search results. The first being the meta description tag that is in the header of the code. This will show up most of the time if the keyword being searched for is in that tag (which is why …
Why Submit Your Sitemap To Google
What is a submitted or off-site Sitemap A Sitemap is a list of the pages on your website. Submitting a Sitemap helps make sure the search engines know about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by normal crawling process. Myths and Facts About …
Hit Counters: Why You Should Never Use Website Hit Counters
What Are Hit Counters? We have all seen those little counters on the bottom of older websites and blogs that count the number of “hits” (which is a word that nobody should use anymore) a website gets. Back in the 90′s during the time of GeoCities and other free site …
What is SEO: The Evolution of The SEO Job
The following post was inspired by Rand at SEOmoz A little background on me. I started in the SEO space about 8 years ago, after spending 6 years of building sites without SEO in mind. Over the years the responsibility of the SEO (Me) has changed, not in a bad …
Screaming Frog SEO Spider: Mac’s Version of Xenu’s Link Sleuth
What is Xenu Link Sleuth? Xenu’s Link Sleuth checks Web sites for broken links along with returning some valuable SEO data such as header code, title tag, page size. Xenu checks html links, image links, frames, plug-ins, backgrounds, local image maps, style sheets, scripts and java applets for broken links …
How to Optimize PDF Documents for SEO
Verify the PDF is text-based For this select Advanced > Accessibility > Add Tags to Document and then select Advanced > Accessibility > Touch Up Reading Order. Acrobat will then show you the various parts of the PDF, including what is actually text and what is seen as images by …
SEO Past and Present: Remember When SEO Was Easy
Remember when SEO was easy. When if you focused enough energy and time on the 5 things below you could rank for just about anything. Create a useful page for the user Use the keywords in the correct way Get high quality external links with focused anchor text Make the …
When to Involve SEO: Top 10 Signs SEO Needs To Be Involved
A big question we hear alot from clients is “when should I bring in SEO?”. This is a popular question since some companies are not well versed in what SEO actually can do or does on a day to day basis. Read our what is seo article for more information …
The Key To SEO: Acquisition and Optimized Distribution of Metrics
If one could bring all the details of SEO down into two simple concepts it would be the concepts of acquisition and distribution. Acquisition and distribution networks have been used in the offline business world long before the internet was around. These two concepts are inclusive of most of the …
SEO and URL Analysis and Planning Tools
KnowEm KnowEm allows you to check for the use of your brand, product, personal name or username instantly on over 500 popular and emerging social media websites. Grab your name and secure your brand before someone else does. Check out Linchpinseo KnowEm profile Website W3.org Check the markup (HTML, XHTML, …
URL Rules to Follow To Create SEO and User Friendly URLs
So your creating a new site, or thinking about rewriting your URLs to help your users and the search engines understand your website and its pages more accurately. URLs are important when it comes to indexation, marketing, click through, and when other sites link to your website. They should be …
What SEO IS, and What SEO is NOT
Many businesses think SEO is all about the small things; the title tags, the description tag, the rankings or the XML sitemap. These are all part of SEO, but by focusing on these minor things, businesses are missing the big picture about what SEO is really all about. SEO is …
List of HTTP Status Codes for SEO and What They Mean
The following is a list of commonly used and returned HTTP response status codes that a website can return. This includes codes from IETF internet standards as well as RFCs status codes that have not been standardized. These codes are valuable for SEO when determining if the pages are returning …
How to Gain Incremental Traffic By Cutting Out Website Pagination
So you have a well categorized website that has thousands of products and there are some categories or subcategories which paginate. I want to take a look at a possible cost of pagination compared to what I feel is a better option. The first thing to take a look at …
Tips for Writing a Google Reconsideration or Reinclusion Request
So your site has been de-listed from the search engines, your losing money, you don’t know why Google would do such a horrible thing to a great user focused website, and you’re going to submit a reconsideration. I will start by saying that most website owners 85-90% can figure out …
