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... [...]

Khalid Saleh says, “Efforts to drive more traffic and rank better on search engines sometimes seem to be in conflict with those for increasing conversion rates for your website. But, as improved user experience becomes a stronger criterion for search engines, search engine optimization and conversion rate optimization are becoming a complementary, multistep process in marketing your business. Don’t sweat it: Your SEO efforts won’t ruin conversions on your site. And your CRO (conversion rate optimization) strategies won’t harm your findability, either. When setting your marketing plan,... [...]

Ronell Smith says, “Some of the best talks at MozCon each year come from the community speakers—those who’re able to make a pitch to grace the stage. This group enjoys the same privileges as the other speakers, including being able to deliver a keynote-style talk, and are always well-received by the audience. If you’re eager to be a member of this group, step right up. We’re now open for MozCon community speaker’s pitches. We’d be happy to have your best effort. The nuts & bolts: Submitting is as simple as filling out the form below Only submit one talk... [...]

Nate Dame says, “There are at least 200 ranking factors in Google’s algorithm (not to mention RankBrain), which means a thorough SEO audit could lead to dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of SEO tasks. Few companies have the budget or resources to complete every potential SEO to-do item — and doing so would be an incredible waste of time and resources anyway. Some SEO tasks are critical and cannot be ignored; others just aren’t worth your time. Prioritizing an SEO task list is crucial. Focus your resources on SEO work that is actually going to improve rankings, increase clicks and... [...]