Janet Driscoll Miller says, “Like any marketing channel, SEO is an investment. Whether you’re using in-house resources or hiring an agency to do the work, SEO isn’t free. To make the most of your SEO time (and perhaps direct financial) investment, it’s helpful to have an SEO strategy established to be your road map for execution. However, one of the bigger challenges to creating an SEO strategy is that the search engines (primarily Google) are shifting ranking factors and introducing new updates fairly regularly. Therefore, an SEO strategy has to be a living document, allowing for... [...]

Kate Morris says, “Meta tags represent the beginning of most SEO training, for better or for worse. I contemplated exactly how to introduce this topic because we always hear about the bad side of meta tags — namely, the keywords meta tag. One of the first things dissected in any site review is the misuse of meta tags, mainly because they’re at the top of every page in the header and are therefore the first thing seen. But we don’t want to get too negative; meta tags are some of the best tools in a search marketer’s repertoire. There are meta tags beyond just description... [...]

Nate Dame says, “Effective content marketing is a vehicle for modern SEO. Just as wheels without an engine leaves you pedaling, content without an SEO strategy can’t keep up in a digital marketplace. And just like an engine with no wheels, SEO without content is a shiny machine that goes nowhere. Content needs SEO to stand out in the din of mediocre blog posts clogging up the internet these days, and Google has said that one of the top three ranking factors for organic search is “content.” But what does that mean? Not any content, surely. Unfortunately, search engines are not handing... [...]

Darren Shaw says, “Since its inception in 2008, David Mihm has been running the Local Search Ranking Factors survey. It is the go-to resource for helping businesses and digital marketers understand what drives local search results and what they should focus on to increase their rankings. This year, David is focusing on his new company, Tidings, a genius service that automatically generates perfectly branded newsletters by pulling in the content from your Facebook page and leading content sources in your industry. While he will certainly still be connected to the local search industry, he’s... [...]

In the latest episode of Moz.com‘s podcast series, Whiteboard Friday, Rand Fishkin addresses how to do competitive research that will provide data that will enable you to improve your own SO position by responding to what you find in the competitive data. Fishkin reports, “By comparing top pages data from multiple sources against one another, you can get some really cool, powerful advanced SEO opportunities in your content and keyword targeting.” Fishkin identifies five bits of data that that can be found by analyzing competitive sites and that will help you: 1. Top pages by number... [...]

Ronell Smith says, “In all my years of SEO consulting, I’ve seen many clients with wild misconceptions about XML sitemaps. They’re a powerful tool, for sure — but like any power tool, a little training and background on how all the bits work goes a long ways. Indexation Probably the most common misconception is that the XML sitemap helps get your pages indexed. The first thing we’ve got to get straight is this: Google does not index your pages just because you asked nicely. Google indexes pages because (a) they found them and crawled them, and (b) they consider them good enough quality... [...]

MOZ team says, “How are you gleaning your competitive insights? We’ve got a ton of resources and tools at our disposal, and one of the best ways to learn what’s working for your rivals and how you can build your own success on top of those insights is via the top pages report. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand goes over how each data source can provide unique value and which questions you should be asking to get more out of that data”. How to Use Your Competition’s “Top Pages” Data to Bolster Your SEO Efforts MOZ  [...]

A sitemap is like a Table of Contents in a book. It shows where the major sections of your site are located and even what individual pages your site has. Some sitemaps are intended for human visitors; others are for search engines as they “crawl” your site. Those for humans are usually in text and contain links to the pages that are listed. Those for search engines are written in XML, a programming language that the search engines find easy to process. There are both kinds of sitemaps at IM NewsWatch, for example. At many, if not most, sites around the world, webmasters have been creating... [...]

Over the last 10 years or so, the influence of search engines, such as Google, has continued to grow. Marketers are scrambling to keep up. Techniques that worked to achieve a high ranking a few years ago now may actually lower a site’s ranking. Webmasters need to be on their toes to optimize their sites without antagnoizing the search engines. Chase Reiner is an SEO practitioner who has worked at keeping in sync with Google’s requirements. A while back he did a live stream presentaiton on what works in SEO today. You can watch his presentation here: YouTube  [...]

The nice thing about local SEO is the reduced competition. A national company is competing with many other national companies and, often, with some local companies as well. But a local business is usually only competing weith a handful of othr businesses. This fact makes the job of optimization easier. Chase Reiner, an experienced professional in local search engine optimization has created a live stream on Google+ that is now recorded, in which he shows how he goes about doing SEO for a local business, in this case, a Personal Trainer. If you operate a local business or if you are a marketing... [...]