This is a reminder for the Website Magazine webinar scheduled on July 31.Website Magazine is hosting a webinar on Thursday, July 31 at 2.00 pm EDT. The topic of the webinar is “Did Google just penalize me?”.The WM team says, “That’s the first question everyone asks when their traffic drops. The mystique of search engines, and how they do what they do, lends itself to sensationalism. Mainstream media fans the flames with reporting about websites violating terms of service, with results ranging from penalties to page rank downgrades. The truth is, today few businesses... [...]

Barney Garcia say, “Having a well-designed landing page will go a long way when it comes to bringing in conversions. You could have the best product or service in the world, but if you don’t communicate that effectively, you could be missing out on new business. Follow these tips and best practices the create the ideal landing page for your business.When creating a landing page, one of the first things you need to take into account is your purpose. According to Wordstream, some of the questions you should ask yourself include, “What is my end goal? Who is my audience? Where are... [...]

Bill Slawski says, “I’m going to be asking you to take over as Panda for a little while to see if you can identify the kinds of things that Google’s Navneet Panda addressed when faced with what looked like an incomplete patent created to identify sites as parked domain pages, content farm pages, and link farm pages. You’re probably better at this now then he was then“.Unraveling Panda PatternsMOZ Blog [...]

Barry Schwartz says, “Data are wonderful things. Properly applied, data can provide insights into where to trim budget and where to increase it. Data will indicate what’s working versus what’s not, what’s a signal versus what’s an outlier. And, data help to determine the proper media mix for the overall campaign strategy.Data-driven, performance-based advertisers reviewing their online display metrics often find it easy to justify spend on retargeting. After all, it’s very simple to see that retargeting is a big winner when it comes to display. But beware! There’s a trap in... [...]

Barry Schwartz says, “Last night, Google pushed out a major local search algorithm update. The update has been pushed out to U.S. English based search results and seems to have had enough of a significant update that many SEOs, webmasters and local business owners have taken noticed. The update impacts both the organic local listings within Google Map Search and Google Web Search.We are naming this algorithm update the Pigeon update, for more on that, see our post over here.The algorithm is more tied into the traditional web search ranking signals, including search features from the knowledge... [...]

Rand Fishkin says, “By now, most of us have gotten around to doing testing of some sort on our websites, but testing specifically for SEO can be extremely difficult and requires extra vigilance. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains three major things we need to think about when performing these tests, and offers up several ideas for experiments we all can run!“.How Do I Successfully Run SEO Tests On My Website? – Whiteboard FridayMOZ Blog [...]

Ayaz Nanji says, “The volume of US Google searches about financial topics spikes in the beginning of the year; travel searches are most popular during the summer months; and retail searches start building for the holiday season in September; according to a recent report by WhosOn.The analysis examined five years of US Google Trends data for four key industries—automotive, finance, retail, and travel—to determine how search volume and topics vary from season to season.Below, key findings from the report.Search VolumeAutomotive: Search volume about automotive keywords traditionally... [...]

SamKusinitz says, “Trying to abide by Google’s ranking factors can often feel like trying to work with a boss who is impossible to please. No matter how hard you try to figure out exactly what the search giant wants, you can never quite right. When you finally think you’ve got it all figured out, Google always seems to change what it wants and refuses to reveal its criteria.Well, unfortunately, it doesn’t seem reasonable to expect Google to reveal its secret list of ranking factors anytime soon. However, perhaps the fact that Google’s ranking algorithm is a secret is actually an... [...]

Kelvin Newman says, “Recruiting the right talent for your team is tricky no matter what industry you’re in, but people working insearch marketing face some very particular challenges.There aren’t a lot of experienced and talented people to go around. Equally, experience doesn’t always correlate with talent.There are a lot of excellent search marketers with only a few years experience and others who’ve done the years but don’t have the skills.Lots of people are responding to this by taking on trainees, this can work a treat but does eat into one of your most precious... [...]

Neil Patel says, “Though Google gets roughly 3.5 billion searches a day, there are really only three types of searches that people perform — navigational, informational, and transactional. If you want get more people to find you in search, you need to know how to optimize your content for each of these types.In this article, I’m going to explain each of the three types of searches and give a bit of perspective on why each one is important. Then, I’ll provide you with some tactical methods for unleashing a strategy that will allow you to dominate the SERPs for that search type”.9... [...]