Sergio Aicardi says, “No longer are we in a world where building links or a ton of SEO friendly content leads to top rankings. In today’s post penguin, post panda world, one must earn their rankings and it certainly isn’t easy to do so. Fundamentally, it’s obvious that Google is trying its best to combat spammers by identifying what the black/gray hats use to make their web pages show up at the top of the SERP’s in a manipulative way. What most people fail to realize is that Google has a job to do as a search engine and that job can be summed up to “providing users with the best answers... [...]

Amy-Mae Elliott says, “Whether it’s never-ending posts from annoying “friends” with verbal diarrhea, or repetitive links to stupid survey sites, the truth is that sometimes spending time on Facebook is more irritating than productive. The bad news is that Facebook’s algorithms to determine what appears in your News Feed are a closely guarded secret. The social media giant simply says, “The stories that show in your News Feed are influenced by your connections and activity on Facebook.” But there is hope — you have the power to tweak a few settings under... [...]

Rand Fishkin says, “Marketers of all stripes are hearing more about providing unique content and value to their audiences, and how that’s what Google wants to show searchers. Unique content is straightforward enough, but what exactly does everyone mean by “unique value?” What does that actually look like? In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand illustrates the answer“. How to Provide Unique Value in Your Content – Whiteboard Friday MOZ Blog  [...]

Jason Abbruzzese says, “Google’s grip on the Internet search market loosened in December, as the search engine saw its largest drop since 2009. That loss was Yahoo’s gain, as the Marissa Mayer-helmed company added almost 2% from November to December to bring its market share back into double digits. Google’s lead remains overwhelming, with just more than three-quarters of search, according to SatCounter Global Stats. Microsoft’s Bing gained some momentum to take 12.5% of the market. Yahoo now has 10.4%. All other search engines combined to take 1.9%”. Google sees... [...]

Alan Bleiweiss says, “There are several reasons a reconsideration request might fail. But some of the most common mistakes site owners and inexperienced SEOs make when trying to lift a link-related Google penalty are entirely avoidable. Here’s a list of the top 12 most common mistakes made when submitting reconsideration requests, and how you can prevent them. 1. Insufficient link data This is one of the most common reasons why reconsideration requests fail. This mistake is readily evident each time a reconsideration request gets rejected and the example URLs provided by Google... [...]

Jonathan Long says, “A massive pay-per-click and SEO budget can deliver high-quality traffic to your website, but if you are sending that traffic to poorly optimizedlanding pages you are essentially throwing your money down the drain. If you want to convert more of your traffic into leads, sales and revenue make sure that your landing pages feature the following seven elements: 1. Attention-grabbing headline If your landing page headline doesn’t grab instant attention, you risk losing a potential conversion in mere seconds. A great headline gives the visitor a quick overview of your offer... [...]

Alan Bleiweiss says, “This past March, I was contacted by a prospective client: My site has been up since 2004. I had good traffic growth up to 2012 (doubling each year to around a million page views a month), then suffered a 40% drop in mid Feb 2012. I’ve been working on everything that I can think of since, but the traffic has never recovered. Since my primary business is performing strategic site audits, this is something I hear often. Site appears to be doing quite well, then gets slammed. Site owner struggles for years to fix it, but repeatedly comes up empty”. Case Study:... [...]

Christopher Ratcliff says, “Whilst navigating your way through the murky world of black hat and white hat SEO techniques you may have come across another nefarious sounding term… negative SEO. The purpose of this post is to tell you exactly what negative SEO actually means, whether you need to worry about it and what you can do to defend yourself from it. What is negative SEO? As opposed to using black hat techniques in order to illicitly rank your own site higher up search engine results pages (SERPs), negative SEO is about using similar underhanded techniques to attack a rival’s website... [...]

Amberly Dressler says, “By this time in January most people have created a resolution or two – often focusing on their waste lines or bottom lines. Many Internet professionals, however, shouldn’t let the opportunity pass to resolve to improve their search rankings in quick but meaningful ways. Here are three quick SEO resolutions that almost anyone in an enterprise can own. 1. BE CURRENT Google+ is essentially a free, right-hand side listing in Google’s search result pages. Marketers (and the like) should ensure their company profile pages are up to date with phone numbers, website... [...]

Rand Fishkin says, “The beginning of the year marks the traditional week for bloggers to prognosticate about the 12 months ahead, and, over the last decade I’ve created a tradition of joining in this festive custom to predict the big trends in SEO and web marketing. However, I divine the future by a strict code: I’m only allowed to make predictions IF my predictions from last year were at least moderately accurate (otherwise, why should you listen to me?). So, before I bring my crystal-ball-gazing, let’s have a look at how I did for 2014“. 10 Predictions for the... [...]