Forecasting. Some account managers love it, some hate it. Others believe it should be owned by an analytics team. For the record, dear reader, I LOVE forecasting. Judge me as you see fit. Regardless of your position on the matter, a Q4 forecast is essential to building a solid holiday plan. It sets your client’s…
If you asked me 1000+ days ago if I thought I would consistently have some redesign, replatform, or migration on my to-do board I would have laughed. Not because redesigns make me laugh like Bill #Sebald stories, but because I “left” the design world for content and marketing back in 2011. However, even though I…
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 are aware of issues with the Indexation Tester. It is currently not working. Google has made a significant change that broke the sheet. We are exploring alternative solutions. If you’d like to be updated if we find a solution, please sign up to our newsletter at the very bottom of this page. If you’re…
Wouldn’t SEO be much easier if there was a way to predict just how much a change in a page’s SERP rankings would impact the amount of traffic that page gets? While the “opportunity score” formula isn’t new, we wanted to share the one we prefer – and show you how to make your own….
This is a checklist of technical SEO basics that you might not have known were basics. We know some of our readers are new to technical SEO, so we wanted to arm you with (what we believe is) the essential technical audit list of 2016. Focusing on becoming a full-stack SEO? This is the resource for you. Whether you’re a developer wunderkind or two steps away from luddite, this checklist is a great SEO go-to guide that anyone can run through.
The Wayback Machine is well known as a useful tool for viewing the way websites looked in the past. It’s always fun to pop in a URL from your favorite websites to see how far they’ve come since the early days of the internet (and maybe make fun of them a little). But the Wayback Machine happens to be a pretty helpful tool for SEO as well. Here are ten ways we’ve found you can use the Wayback Machine to improve your SEO strategy.
There are many XML sitemap generators available for purchase, or even for free. They do what they’re supposed to – they crawl your site and spit out a properly formatted XML sitemap. But sometimes there’s a problem with these XML sitemap generators. They don’t know what URLs should (or should not) be in the XML sitemap. Sure, you could tell some of them to obey directives and tags, like robots.txt and canonical tags, but unless your site is perfectly optimized, you’ll need to do some work by hand.
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.
If you’re not checking your client’s HTTP headers, you’re not giving them good service. I’m not talking about the stuff in between the
and tags, either. I’m talking about the server response that you get before you get all that nice HTML, or that fancy PDF, or whatever else your client’s website is slinging. That’s because, well, your client’s website isn’t slinging anything. It’s being slung by a server, and the server’s HTTP response is the first thing a web browser – or a web robot like Google’s crawler – will see.
Each year I lead an intro to SEO session for the brilliant students of Drexel University in Philadelphia in their New Media Marketing class. These are their questions and my answers.
