Jody Resnick says, “For owners and managers of SMBs, taking time to understand the intricacies of search engine optimization (SEO) can seem unnecessary.  However, leveraging the latest digital marketing tactics is important to your bottom line. Here are five relatively simple SEO tactics that can help you achieve your revenue goals. 1. Write original content You’ve probably heard this before, but it’s certainly worth reiterating:  make sure your website content is original and well written. Duplicating someone else’s content is not only unethical, it will hurt your Google rankings.... [...]

Edwyn Raine says, “It’s safe to say that the influence that Google has had in the last two decades has been phenomenal. The search giant has completely changed the way we discover and access information, providing a faster and more direct path to what we are seeking. In fact, it is estimated that in 2016 over 2trn searches were made worldwide, equating to well over 50,000 per second. Introduction to responsive search While search engine innovation continues to push new boundaries of user experience, working harder than ever to understand search intent, it is still only the larger websites... [...]

Sonia Simone says, “Search engine optimization — SEO — is one of those “you love it or you hate it” topics. Some get a charge out of the challenge of keeping up with those wily engineers at Google. Others would rather eat a bug than try to figure out what “headless crawling” means and which redirect is the right one to pick in months that end in R. I have to confess, I’m in the bug-eating camp on this one. Fortunately, although technical SEO is still important for some sites, there’s a crazy-powerful optimization technique that people like me can get really good at. Yes, it’s... [...]

Britney Muller says, “A glimpse into Google’s machine learning? You’ve likely seen the People Also Ask (Related Questions) boxes in SERPs. These accordion-like question and answer boxes are Google’s way of saying, “Hey, you beautiful searcher, you! These questions also relate to your search… maybe you’re interested in exploring these too? Kick off your shoes, stay a while!” However, few people have come across infinite PAAs. These occur when you expand a PAA question box to see 2 or 3 other related questions appear at the bottom. These infinite PAA lists can continue... [...]

Nikki Gilliland says, “In the past few years, working with social media influencers has become common practice for many travel brands. The benefits of this naturally include greater brand awareness and an increase in consumer trust – but it can also have a positive effect on SEO. I recently spoke with Diego Puglisi, search marketing manager for Thomas Cook Airlines, to find out more about this topic, specifically related to his own experience of working with influencers. Here’s what he said. Econsultancy: First, could you explain how working with social influencers can positively impact... [...]

MOZ team says, “They say history repeats itself. In the case of the great 301 vs 302 vs rel=canonical debate, it repeats itself about every three months. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Dr. Pete explains how bots and humans experience pages differently depending on which solution you use, why it matters, and how each choice may be treated by Google”. Aren’t 301s, 302s, and Canonicals All Basically the Same? MOZ  [...]

Eric Enge says, “If you follow the world of Google and search at all, you’ve heard about Google’s intent to switch to a mobile-first index. In this post, I’m going to briefly review the main points we know about Google’s plans for this new index, but I’m going to go further and detail what we found in a mobile-specific crawl we did of one website. Based on this data, I’ll also talk about the implications of the switch and some of the challenges that Google faces with this process. Key points about a mobile-first index If you’ve already read about Google’s impending switch... [...]

Dr. Peter J. Meyers says, “Any SEO worth their sustainably harvested pink Himalayan salt knows that Google offers a variety of advanced search operators – special commands that take you above and beyond regular text searches. Learning search operators is a bit like learning chess, though. It’s easy to memorize how each piece moves, but that’s about 1% of your path toward mastery. I know that the pointy-hat guy in chess moves diagonally, but that doesn’t mean I’m about to take on Kasparov or Deep Blue. Instead of just listing all of the operators and telling you what... [...]

Barry Schwartz says, “John Mueller, a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, wrote a blog post explaining how SEOs and webmasters can handle site outages or closures that last for a day or longer. This is when a webmaster intentionally takes down the site for maintenance, site moves, religious reasons or other reasons. John offers three options: Block the cart functionality from Google and your users. Always show an interstitial or pop-up saying your site is offline today. Switch the whole website off for a period of time. Each option can be handled differently, but the easiest option seems... [...]

Kerry Jones says, “Do your link building results look something like this? – Start doing outreach – Get links – Stop doing outreach – No more links Everyone talks about the long-term benefits of using content marketing as part of a link building strategy. But without the right type of content, your experience may be that you stop earning links as soon as you stop doing outreach. In this sense, you have to keep putting gas in the car for it to keep running (marketing “gas” = time, effort, and resources). But what if there was a way to fill up the car once, and that... [...]