SEO

  As long as I’ve been doing SEO and digital marketing, I’ve pushed for the early adoption of new products, platforms, and technology. The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing (not an Amazon affiliate link, I swear!) has been a book I’ve leaned on since studying marketing in college. The first law states, “being first in the…

Simplifying a massively complex algorithm sounds like a fool’s game.  Google’s search algorithm is like a rope.  A thick rope full of fibers.  Some of the fibers (or smaller algorithms) are old, and some are new. Some are made for on-the-fly determinations, and some are looking for old school signals. A jungle of computation! Think…

Nowadays, SEO and PPC practitioners need to think outside the box, especially when it comes to eCommerce sites. In order to stay ahead of competitors, we need to invent creative ways to provide unique value through search engines. Ecommerce SEO isn’t just about rankings anymore. It includes ROI (revenue) from category pages, product pages, and…

We all know that links are an important part of SEO. They help users and bots navigate a site and give search engines information about its quality and authority. With links confirmed as one of Google’s top three ranking factors, we’ve all been reminded of the importance of quality, relevant backlinks. In order to get those backlinks, we have to put a good amount of effort into link building, and that often proves to be a big challenge. There are scaling issues. There are research and outreach management challenges.

These days, most clients and prospects I talk to believe they’ve run out of things to write about. One ceaseless option is to update (and improve upon) their existing assets and stale “evergreen” pieces. Yes—evergreen pieces do go stale. But this post is about new ideas in a modern age. The days of “one landing page per keyword” is SEO history. The emerging best practices for SEO content—in text form—is (again) long form, holistic copy. Searchmetrics has told us this for years. It’s not a 1:1—it’s not because Google inherently thinks long copy is better for them to serve. The correlation is likely related to Hummingbird, Google’s improvement in comprehension, and good old fashioned keywords and synonyms. Or maybe it has to do with the content’s improved power to convert (and lower the bounce). At the end of the day in 2014, the bigger net you cast, the more likely to capture Google’s attention and trust. At SMX East, Search Metrics’ Marcus Tober gave a great presentation providing more context. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t really need a study. I’ve been seeing it myself.

Necessity is the mother of invention. Many years ago, one of our clients bought a popular, content-rich website and redirected it to their current domain. SEO (and retaining the backlinks) were not on their radar at that time. Upon learning about the migration, we asked if they had redirected the site at a page-level or just redirected the site to their own homepage. The client had no idea how the redirection was done and they didn’t have a redirect list (list of the old, legacy URLs) to work from. We needed to invent a plan to gather up the data.

I remember a few years ago blowing the mind of a boss with a theory that Google would eventually rank (in part) based on their own internal understanding of your object. If Wikipedia could know so much about an object, why couldn’t Google? In the end, I was basically describing semantic search and entities, something that has already lived as a concept in the fringe of the mainstream.

As a search engine junkie, I’m always pulling for the little guy with a unique idea. I love competition in the marketplace. Sadly, the dominance of Google (and others) forced many of these into the shadows. But if you are curious like me, I present Greenlane’s active list of search engines: Baidu – The leading…