Pete Prestipino says, “While the appeal of rich snippet markup is obvious, many Internet retailers have been slow to take advantage of the opportunity on their product pages. Whether the reason for this is the complexity of doing so, or because their e-commerce platform just doesn’t support such an initiative, those merchants that do deploy rich snippets stand to capture far more attention on the search results pages than their competition. The benefit of adding markup (Microdata, RDFa, or JSON-LD) to product pages specifically is that it provides search engines an opportunity to... [...]

Pete Prestipino says, “Branded keywords are the terms (and phrases) that are directly related to a company/enterprise or its services/products. Most enterprises rank quite well for these terms and phrases but not everyone. Let’s take a closer look at SEO for branded keywords. It’s actually quite common for brands to monitor social media and organic searches for references to their specific brand name but they should also be researching the other terms consumers use in association with their brand name (as well as that of their competitors). Doing so can help brands understand... [...]

Jesse Boskoff says, “When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), staying on top of trends is about more than sounding savvy when you talk tech with your colleagues. It’s also essential to the strength of your enterprise’s online marketing efforts. Here are six must-know SEO trends poised to make a big impact in 2017.1. Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)Google’s new AMP Project promises to deliver optimized content to mobile users at lightning speeds. An open-source project, AMP relies upon specialized HTML files that are designed to load at least four... [...]

MOZ team says, “It’s been a few years since we’ve covered the topic of comment marketing, but that doesn’t mean it’s out of date. There are clever, intentional ways to market yourself and your brand in the comments sections of sites, and there’s less competition now than ever before. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand details what you can do to get noticed in the comments and the benefits you’ll reap from high-quality contributions”.Comment Marketing: How to Earn Benefits from Community ParticipationMOZ [...]

Felicia Crawford says, “Now that we’ve comfortably settled into the first two weeks of 2017, it’s time to revive an annual Moz Blog tradition: the Best of 2016 is here!I’ve carefully collected data on all the posts, comments, and commenters you remarkable readers liked the most this past year, compiling it all into one big, beautiful blog post. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll rue the day you ever downloaded Pocket. But as we commence our journey into the insights and revelations of yesteryear, my sincere hope is that you’ll feel inspired. That you’ll... [...]

George Freitag says, “This is it. The full agenda for MozCon Local 2017 and LocalU Advanced Workshop on February 27-28. If you’re a brand with a ton of locations or an agency with local clients, you’re going to want to come to MozCon Local 2017. We’ve got an amazing line-up of speakers from some of the top brains in Local Search to help you put together the perfect local marketing strategy and get the most out of local search.Come visit us in Seattle and learn about local search, SEO, citations, reviews, enterprise-level strategy, and so much more. Interact directly with... [...]

Rand Fishkin says, “It’s that time again, friends… That time where I grade my 2016 predictions to see whether I’ve got the clout and foresight to get another shot in 2017. This year is gonna be really close, as I was more aggressive last year than in prior ones, so let’s see where we end up, and what I’ve got to say for the next 12 months.s always, my predictions will be graded on the following scale:Nailed It (+2) – When a prediction is right on the money and the primary criteria are fulfilledPartially Accurate (+1) – Predictions that are in the area,... [...]

Andrew Medal says, “Is your SEO provider about to get you penalized? Hopefully not, but there is a chance it might. It is too easy to put up a website and advertise SEO services without actually knowing what they are doing. There are also marketers out there who don’t keep up with Google best practices and still use old methods that are ineffective.If you have never been hit with a Google penalty, let me just tell you it is an experience like no other. Your heart falls into your stomach, you become short on breath and your eyes start to hurt from staring at your computer screen wondering... [...]

Joe Robison says, “Who doesn’t love working on low-hanging fruit SEO problems that can dramatically improve your site?Across all businesses and industries, the low-effort, high-reward projects should jump to the top of the list of things to implement. And it’s nowhere more relevant than tackling technical SEO issues on your site.Let’s focus on easy-to-identify, straightforward-to-fix problems. Most of these issues can be uncovered in an afternoon, and it’s possible they can solve months’ worth of traffic problems. While there may not be groundbreaking, complex issues that... [...]

Ryan Shelley says, “We’ve all heard the saying, “Content is king.” While in some respects this saying is true, in my opinion, this one phrase has done more damage to our industry than anything else.According to WordPress, “Users produce about 73.9 million new posts and 49.0 million new comments each month.” That’s roughly 2.4 million posts a day, and that’s just on WordPress alone. I would love to believe that all of that content has value, but in my experience over the years, I could make a very strong argument that most of it is junk.Google’s end goal is to deliver the... [...]