Brian Clark says, ““Link building” is something I’ve never done in my 19 years of publishing online. In other words, I’ve never spent any time whatsoever emailing strangers and trying to convince them to link to my content. I have, however, been on the receiving end of many link-building requests. And they’ve never worked on me. Now, I know there are smart people who work on behalf of clients to get links through these outreach initiatives. Strangely, I’ve never received a link request from a smart person. It’s usually just dopey people using bad email scripts and automation... [...]

Casey Meraz says, “For years, I’ve been saying that if you have a problem with spammers in local results, you can just wait it out. I mean, if Google cared about removing spam and punishing those who are regular spammers we’d see them removed fast and often, right? While there are instances where spam has been removed, it seems these are not fast fixes, permanent fixes, or even very common. In fact, they seem few and far between. So today I’m changing my tune a bit to call more attention to the spam issues people employ that violate Google My Business terms and yet continue... [...]

Megan Hannay says, “Just last October at the Street Fight Summit, many marketers ranked voice search as the most “over-hyped” marketing tactic of the year. I think this is because many of them aren’t seeing the full scope of the technology. We’re putting on our consumer brains and thinking about the current awkwardness of speaking to Siri in public, not of a future inside self-driving cars or those moments when we just don’t want to get up from the couch. Currently, most voice searches happen on mobile phones. But within the next few years, it seems likely that devices with... [...]

Matt McGee says, “SMX West was buzzing last week, and much of the conversation was about Google’s recent change to how exact match keywords will work in AdWords campaigns. Although the news just came out last week, the SMX programming team quickly organized a “flash session” that happened Wednesday morning before the scheduled agenda began. Panelists including Marketing Land’s Ginny Marvin and SMX moderators Matt Van Wagner and Brad Geddes took questions for almost an hour from a big crowd of concerned advertisers. They covered topics including impact on negative keywords. whether... [...]

McCoy says, “ In the rush to get on the front page of Google, a major SERP opportunity stands out as the most useful and most relevant available: featured snippets. The bits of text at the top of many informational searches in Google, featured snippets can drive a ton of attention toward your site and can be an invaluable weapon for marketers. How can you create content that has the chance of ranking in featured snippets? While many marketers assume featured snippets are the territory of SEO masters or brands with million-dollar marketing budgets, that isn’t true at all. What are featured... [...]

Ginny Marvin says, “The latest version of Bing Ads Editor is out. Version 11.9 offers support for Enhanced CPC bidding and the ability to export standard text ads to a spreadsheet formatted for enhanced text ads. If you’re not importing expanded text ads from AdWords, you can convert Bing Ads standard text ads to enhanced text ads (ETA) via Editor by selecting “Export as expanded text ads” from the Export tab in the Ads view. You’ll need to manually add a column titled “Title Part 2” to the Excel sheet. Once you update the ads to fit the ETA framework, import them back into... [...]

Laura Forer says, “We’ve written about trends in SEO and Google’s search algorithm updates, and today’s infographic continues our SEO theme by focusing on the technical aspects of the practice, thanks to an infographic released by Ice Cube Marketing. The architecture of your website is key in helping Google crawl your site easily, and the infographic outlines the structure your website should follow. The infographic also explains tools that are available to help your SEO efforts, such as Google Webmaster Tools, PageSpeed insights, and Screaming Frog. And it lays out clear... [...]

Dominic Woodman says, “Imagine you work for an e-commerce company. Wouldn’t it be useful to know the total organic sessions and conversions to all of your products? Every week? If you have access to some analytics for an e-commerce company, try and generate that report now. Give it 5 minutes. … Done? Or did that quick question turn out to be deceptively complicated? Did you fall into a rabbit hole of scraping and estimations? Not being able to easily answer that question — and others like it — is costing you thousands every year”. Structuring URLs for Easy Data Gathering... [...]

Justin Freid says, “There is no doubt the search industry has evolved. Just one look at how search engine results pages are currently laid out shows how things have changed. We have come a long way from 10 blue links. But have we gone far enough? At SXSW earlier this month, information access was a hot topic. People no longer head to Google’s search bar as their only way of accessing content. How we access information is changing Search engines used to be the primary (or sole) place a consumer would turn to when they needed an immediate answer. You entered in a phrase, clicked a link... [...]

Sonia Simone says, “Apparently, “March Madness” on Copyblogger is less about college basketball and more about finding things to say about SEO. One could say we painted ourselves into a corner by saying, “Technical SEO isn’t nearly as important for most sites as actually producing content worth consuming” … and then deciding to write about search optimization all month. One might even call us foolhardy. One may have a point. Nevertheless, we persisted … and it turns out, good things happen when you persist. On Monday, Jerod talked a bit about some of the easy-to-forget steps... [...]