I used to perform keyword research in the typical, perfunctory way—go to the Keyword Tool, type in some words, and punch out a list of terms. Easy. Quick. Simple. Today, things are different. The much-loved keyword tool has been replaced, long-tail keywords have the ascendancy, and it's harder to figure out what users are actually […]
Category: <span>SEO</span>
If you work in Local SEO, chances are you've been fielding tons of questions from clients since Google rolled out the Pigeon update in late July. Need a little extra support providing sound advice in what are still the early days of this development that has caused both organic and local ranking shakeups? Here's your […]
The recent Google Pigeon update that affected local search was just another example of why marketer's should never put all of their eggs in one basket. Online marketing has been rapidly evolving over the years and a major paradigm shift has happened which has caused marketers to stop building links and start thinking of how […]
Link exchanges vs. partnerships Six years ago, Yahoo! was called out (on this very blog!) for buying text links. Being the lone SEO at Yahoo! in the US at the time, training, teaching, guiding and policing all of the people involved in over a dozen Yahoo! Media websites, my heart stopped when I saw this […]
As a group, we SEOs still tend to focus most of our attention on just one place – traditional, organic results. In the past two years, I've spent a lot of time studying these results and how they change over time. The more I experience the reality of SERPs in the wild, though, the more […]
Write it and they will come. That's the drum we've been beating for a long time now. We optimize our pages and our content to please search engines and cross our fingers and hope that customers will convert. We can do better. But to do it, we have to think beyond Google. Yes, you still […]
Many of us in the search industry were caught off guard by the release of Panda 4.0. It had become common knowledge that Panda was essentially "baked into" the algorithm now several times a month, so a pronounced refresh was a surprise. While the impact seemed reduced given that it coincided with other releases including […]
I suspect I’m not alone in saying: I’ve never been a fan of the New Google Maps. In the interstitial weeks between that tweet and today, Google has made some noticeable improvements. But the user experience still lags in many ways relative to the classic version (chief among them: speed). Google’s invested so heavily in […]
I used to laugh at the idea of Hummingbird optimization. In a recent poll, Moz asked nearly 300 marketers which Google updated affected their traffic the most. Penguin and Panda were first and second, followed by Hummingbird in a distant third. Unsurprising, because unlike Panda and Penguin, Hummingbird doesn't specifically combat webspam. Ever wonder why Google […]
When ranking for incredibly competitive keywords just isn't a possibility, you can make like a barnacle on a ship, attaching yourself to the big sites that are. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains just what that means and how to go about it. For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard! Video Transcription Howdy, […]
