Tag / SEO Work For Your Site

If you're familiar with making or writing for websites, you've probably heard of SEO, or search engine optimization. It's a practice that helps websites appear first when you search for something – for instance, if you type "digital trends" into Google, you'll know our website has SEO working if it comes up first. This is a crucial marketing strategy for websites because you're not going to spend time scrolling through thousands of sites to find the one you want – you're going to click on the first one that seems like it's what you want. So people obsess over it; it can make or break...

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~li~ Although the recent Penguin update wasn't quite the "game changer" that many SEOs believed it would be, the fact that the entire digital marketing community believed that major changes were on the way is proof enough that old school SEO is out for good.And if we can't rely on traditional link building techniques or on-page optimization tactics to secure high search engine rankings any longer, where can we turn to improve natural search performance?In fact, the answer to this SEO question might come from a separate promotional strategy that's been receiving plenty of attention in the online...

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I particularly enjoyed Jayson DeMers' article on the 3 pillars of SEO in 2013 " and I especially add my vote of emphasis to his pillar #3 " Making Friends, Engaging and Sharing Content. In fact, I would go so far as to maintain that public relations, in the form of quality content, is the New SEO. And I'm increasingly less alone in this idea and goal. But for the sake of discussion, if we can accept at least in philosophy that PR is increasingly becoming SEO's strongest vehicle and anchor, how can companies take best advantage of PR's SEO role?Here are my ideas (with help from a couple of resident...

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If your site isn't working, there's always a reason, and most SEO professionals won't stop until they've figured it out. They'll check the servers and hosting to make sure there's no downtime. They'll check robots.txt and meta tags to make sure it's not disallowing crawlers. They'll check Flash and JavaScript, sitemaps and status codes, page speed, and penalties.But rarely do they look at its users and what they're doing on the site.I've been working with our UX team the past few months on a variety of client projects, site audits, and even our own site redesign. Although it's been preached as often...

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You've just been given one day to do an SEO audit for a site, and you're asking yourself what to do with so little time. Instead of following your instinct to yell at the person who made the request, today's column will outline a practical approach to doing the best job possible in one day.The focus of this rapid audit is to identify issues at a strategic level - either because they are big impact items or may require large development team efforts to address. Given the one day restriction, we'll focus on identifying problems, not fixing them. This plan is not thorough, because you can't be in a day.The...

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~li~ Too often we, as SEOs, get our hands on a website after it has been built. Designers focus on making sites "pretty" and "usable." Unfortunately, they either lack the knowledge or simply don't care about the search value a website offers. This is where the ever growing feud between SEO and designer begins.Fortunately, there are a lot of compromises that can be made without sacrificing website aesthetics or search value. It all starts with identifying elements on the website and making subtle changes that could make a website continue to look great, but also have a fair shot at generating...

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B2B marketers, it is unbelievable that we are already halfway through 2011. While I hope your SEO campaign thus far has yielded positive results, it is not uncommon to fall behind schedule, as unexpected initiatives arise. Link building is often the first SEO initiative that we see clients getting delayed on, or leave unattended in these situations.If you are in a similar position (and maybe even if you are not), here are five recommendations for finding and acquiring inbound links through tools and reports likely to be already available, getting you back on track with B2B link building initiatives...

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Google may shift the rankings of your site, in what appears to be a random manner, before Google settles on a target rank.Let's say that you're building links to a site, and the site moves up in the rankings. You would assume that the link building has had a positive effect...Google then toys with you for a while before sending your site plummeting to the target rank. This makes it harder to determine cause and effect.If you're a webmaster doing anything at all that might be considered an effort to improve rank, then you're a "spammer". This is a messed up situation because even if you change what...

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For the past few months, I have been practically living in an analytics dashboard, constantly monitoring my clients' organic search data for even the smallest hint of a Google slap. If you haven't noticed, Google has been busy updating their search products (see: Nov , Dec , Jan , Feb , Mar ).On top of those changes that they have publicly documented, we are also seeing additional SEO-specific updates by Google. We've had a " page layout algorithm " update, Panda updates and even a bug in Google's system that caused sites to accidentally be delisted.Now, there's a Penguin in the mix. Pandas, Penguins...

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During a recent analysis, I ended up reviewing two sites that had very different site structure issues. Both websites held great content, but were structuring their content in a way that was causing problems SEO-wise. These "hide and seek" problems are inhibiting the sites in question from ranking well for target keywords, which is cutting into new visitors, advertising dollars, and sales. Note, although I'll explain the problems I encountered in detail, I'm not going to list the websites. The point of my post is to simply highlight site structure issues so you can avoid them when working on your...

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