MOZ team says, “It’s the season of giving, and that notion extends to search! Brand preferences have an almost tangible impact on several levels, from consumer affinity to a rankings boost on Google. In this holiday edition of our now-traditional Whitebeard Friday, Rand explains why it’s important to keep brand recognition at the forefront of your strategy, and offers up a framework on how to get started on giving searchers a reason to prefer your brand“.Giving Searchers a Reason to Prefer Your BrandMOZ Blog [...]

Dan Bagby says, “Don’t limit your SEO strategy to your own website. There are many ways to increase your brand’s exposure in search by optimizing social profiles and getting other sites to rank for your brand in search. This can help you 1) protect your online reputation by dominating the first page of search for branded search, and 2) rank for keywords faster than you would be able to with only your own domain.Optimizing Social Profiles For Branded SearchYour own site cannot dominate the first page of search results, which leaves you vulnerable to having negative content on other... [...]

Marketers typically concentrate their Search Engine Marketing on Google. That’s no surprise since Google is the top search engine.However, Bing and Yahoo! are also top tier search engines and they can drive a lot of traffic to your sites, too.Fortunately (for you), many marketers ignore them. You know better. Their users spend a lot of money online and you can get some of that bounty.Mark Bishop noticed a peculiarity in Bing’s ranking algorithm. He played around with this insight and and is finding it profitable to focus his marketing work on taking advantage of it.Bishop says that... [...]

Ginny Marvin says, “Another year, another whirlwind in paid search. What marked 2015 wasn’t one big change, like 2013’s Enhanced Campaigns, or even 2014’s move to Shopping Campaigns, but a lot (a lot) of smaller changes that added up to a need to be constantly on your game.From new reporting tools to new ways of categorizing what counts as a conversion to more automation and opportunities to target and tailor messages to certain audiences, 2015 packed in a whole lot in twelve months. It was also the year mobile search on Google surpasses desktop, so naturally there continued to... [...]

Trond Lyngbø says, “Going into the FIFA World Cup 2014, Argentina’s prolific scorer, Lionel Messi, widely considered the world’s best attacker, was expected to steer his team to victory. But he didn’t score a field goal in four games at the knockout stage — and his team lost in the finals!Just like soccer, digital marketing is also a team effort. To win in the long run, each element of your omni-channel marketing plan, including SEO, should work in concert with and build upon the others  to power your business to massive success.Do you work in a large organization, selling... [...]

Roy Hinkis says, “Last month Google made a big announcement, potentially signaling a game changer for search. Google is quietly rolling out app-only content indexing, even if that content isn’t actually hosted on the indexed app.So, what does that actually mean?The game-changing implication is that when you search Google from your phone or tablet, app-only content will “stream” directly to your mobile device — even if you don’t have the app installed.Thus, if I search for the key phrase “hotel tonight in Chicago,” I’ll see results from mobile apps that aren’t installed... [...]

Berry Levine says, “With software robots (bots) settling into what seems to be a permanent and major part of website traffic, a Detroit-based company is out with a report that takes a different angle.Instead of focusing on identifying and warding off bots, says “State of the Human Internet Report, 2015,” why not focus on verifying which visitors are human?That’s the mission of Are You A Human (AYAH), Inc., a company that tracks visitors on over three million websites in nearly 200 countries and determines which ones are clearly exhibiting human behavior. Its new report quantifies... [...]

Aaron Agius says, “Could social signals be one of the mysterious 200+ factors that Google considers in order to determine your website’s rank?SEOs and digital marketers have been debating the question for ages. But what does the data actually say?Here’s a new perspective that attempts to answer this constantly debated question.Google Says NoGoogle is often cryptic about what factors it uses to determine rank, but in the case of social signals, they’ve actually been fairly straightforward.Many Google representatives have mentioned that social signals are not a rank factor. One... [...]

MOZ team says, “You may have heard the term “AMPs” thrown around lately. What exactly are Accelerated Mobile Pages, what do they mean for search, and how can you prepare for it all? In this week’s BritishWhiteboard Friday, Will Critchlow and Tom Anthony of Distilled lay out all the important details“.What You Need to Know About Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs) – Whiteboard FridayMOZ Blog [...]

Taylor Tomita says, “Search engine optimization (SEO) has always been apparent within the internet world, but as Google’s ranking factors have been streamlined with their frequent search algorithm updates, implementing SEO into a website is becoming increasingly necessary in today’s digitalized world.SEO is the process of setting up a website in a way that allows it be visible within a search engine’s results page, based on the standard practices that all search engines use to organize the internet world.This can be boiled down to a number of strategies, but overall, SEO is impressing... [...]