Janet Driscoll Miller says, “I often teach classes on SEO, and I start my presentations off by talking about keywords. When it comes to organic search, keywords form the foundation of all of our SEO efforts. What search queries do we want our websites to show up for in search results? Everything in SEO really ties back to this fundamental pillar.The importance of effective keyword research is certainly not lost on marketers. In a November 2016 survey, Ascend2 found that keyword research was one of the top SEO tactics, but more than a third of respondents indicated that it was a difficult... [...]

Brian Childs says, “There’s a huge difference between making money from selling SEO and actually making a living — or making a difference, for that matter. A new marketing agency will quickly discover that surviving on $1,000 contracts is challenging. It takes time to learn the client and their customers, and poorly written contracts can lead to scope creep and dissatisfied clients.It’s common for agencies to look for ways to streamline operations to assist with scaling their business, but one area you don’t want to streamline is the proposal research process. I actually... [...]

Kevin George says, ”Navigating the web these days can make a person feel like Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz.There’s so much to be seen here that — until somewhat recently — was fairly unheard of. And we don’t know what’s good or bad. It’s as if we’re constantly coming across a new cast of characters and are forced to ask, “Are you a good witch, or a bad witch?”Replace the word “witch” with “bot,” and you might be summing up the modern digital landscape. There’s a lot of talk about AI, but it can be confusing. Is it helpful, or harmful?... [...]

Stefanie Flaxman says, “By now you know that — technical details aside — SEO is not separate from content marketing; it’s an integrated aspect of content marketing.Optimizing your content for search engines is part of your craft and a skill you can strengthen with practice.But even when you rank well for search terms your audience uses, the real test is what happens when someone clicks through to your website. As Brian wrote on Monday:“There’s nothing worse than a quick bounce.”To avoid a quick bounce, you need to focus on content optimization. Since you don’t want to miss... [...]

Rand Fishkin says, “One of the marketing world’s greatest frustrations has long been the lack of data from Google and other search engines about the behavior of users on their platforms. Occasionally, Google will divulge a nugget of bland, hard-to-interpret information about how they process more than X billion queries, or how many videos were uploaded to YouTube, or how many people have found travel information on Google in the last year. But these numbers aren’t specific enough, well-sourced enough, nor do they provide enough detail to be truly useful for all the applications... [...]

Ben Davis says, “Our Day in the Life feature recently profiled an SEO account manager within an agency, but now we’re turning the spotlight on a client-side SEO specialist.Jack Saville is an SEO specialist at Bynder. Here’s what he does with his days.And if you’re looking for a new challenge in digital our jobs board lists hundreds of open positions, and you can benchmark your own digital knowledge using our Digital Skills Index.Please describe your job: What do you do?I work as an SEO specialist for a digital-asset management provider in Amsterdam called Bynder.Bynder... [...]

Laura Scott says, “Often when we think about the holidays, we envision panicked crowds on Black Friday, Cyber Monday desk shoppers and last-minute gifters filling their cart on Christmas Eve. We think about the winter holiday season. That’s no surprise, since last year, the winter holidays accounted for over $658 billion in sales, according to NRF. They’re an important time for retailers; but they’re not the only time that search behavior and sales spike.Other holidays like Mother’s Day, Halloween and the Back-to-School “holiday” all compel shoppers to search for different needs,... [...]

Brian Clark says, “Imagine.Imagine a world without search engines …It’s easy if you try.No more surprise Google updates. No more worrying about XML sitemaps, robots.txt, and content analysis and optimization.And perhaps most importantly, no more keyword research.That last one means you’re going to have to go old-school to figure out the language of your audience to reflect it back to them. It’s going to take a lot more work.You didn’t think you were going to get out of that one, did you? “.Forget SEOCopyblogger [...]

Tom Capper says, “A little over two weeks ago I had the pleasure of speaking at SearchLove San Diego. My presentation, Does Google Still Need Links, looked at the available evidence on how and to what extent Google is using links as a ranking factor in 2017, including the piece of research that I’m sharing here today.One of the main points of my presentation was to argue that while links still do represent a useful source of information for Google’s ranking algorithm, Google now has many other sources, most of which they would never have dreamed of back when PageRank was conceived as... [...]

Michael Cottam says, “When Penguin 4.0 launched in September 2016, the story from Gary Illyes of Google was that Penguin now just devalued spammy links, rather than penalizing a site by adjusting the site’s ranking downward, AKA a penalty.Apparently for Penguin there is now “less need” for a disavow, according to a Facebook discussion between Gary Illyes and Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Land back in September. He suggested that webmasters can help Google find spammy sites by disavowing links they know are bad. He also mentioned that manual actions still happen — and... [...]