This is the fifth installment of our series on the basics of SEO (don’t forget to read the second, third, and fourth series). In this article, we will discuss the importance of keyword research within the context of search engine optimization. You’ll also learn the difference between short-tail and long-tail keywords, and how to use both of them in your website content.
Keyword research is a crucial part of any search engine optimization campaign. The process itself is straightforward. You use a keyword research tool to identify popular search-engine queries relevant to your business model. This process helps you determine which phrases hold the most value, in terms of traffic potential and relevance.
Continue reading SEO Basics: Keyword Research for SEO: Short Tail vs. Long Tail
Posted in SEO | Tagged best practices, keyword research, keyword strategy, link building, long tail keywords, short tail keywords |
This is the fourth installment in our series on the basics of search engine optimization (click here to read the second and third series). In this article, we will discuss some of the different link-building strategies you can use to boost your search engine ranking.
What are Backlinks?
In SEO terms, a backlink is a hyperlink that points to your website from some other website. They are also referred to as inbound links. A website with a higher number of quality links will outrank one with fewer links (with all other things being equal). Backlinks are not the only ranking factor used by the major search engines. Google, for instance, claims to use more than 200 “signals” when ranking websites. But links are still at the top of the list.
Continue reading SEO Basics: How to Get Other Websites to Link to Yours
Posted in SEO | Tagged best practices, link building, strategy, techniques |
How does a fine of £500,000 (around $800,000) for illegal use of cookies sound? If your online business operates within any of the 27 countries that make up the European Union, pay attention – since May 26, 2012, running a website just got a whole lot tougher.
The EU, created in 1993 and responsible inter alia for overseeing pan-European regulation, is set for a head-on collision with the business interests of companies around the world, although many of them don’t know it yet. The burning issue, one that has consumed huge tranches of government time and money throughout many EU member states, is the implementation of the 2009 ePrivacy Directive, which sets out to protect individuals’ rights to protection of personal data.
Continue reading The EU Cookie Law: A Different Flavor for Every Country – Mostly Sour
Posted in Website Development | Tagged Cookie Law EU |
This is the third installment in our series on the basics of SEO. In this article, you’ll learn how to manage an SEO program in 60 minutes a day.
Search engine optimization is a long-term commitment. It can also be time consuming and labor intensive. So you should make every effort to streamline the process. You must incorporate it into your daily or weekly routine.
There are many ways to tackle the “beast” that is search engine optimization. One way is to create a daily schedule that accomplishes various tasks in round-robin fashion. Here’s how you might go about it.
Continue reading SEO Basics – SEO in 60 Minutes a Day: A Sample Schedule of Tasks
Posted in SEO | Tagged best practices, strategy, techniques |
Too much of what is written about surviving Google’s algorithmic updates is uninspiring at best, leaving website owners uncertain and often ill-informed. Look at the problem from a different angle, and apply proven techniques for generating fresh, original content that adds value for visitors and drives conversions for your business.
Most articles and online comments about Google’s Panda and Penguin updates fall into one of two categories: statements of the obvious; or regurgitation of something that somebody else just wrote. When the solution to the problem is to read the rule-book and do what it says, you can only restate the rules so many ways without repetition. So, how do you ensure yours is one of the high-quality sites that Google favors?
Continue reading How to Make Your Content Marketing Strategy Truly Memorable – Follow the Example of the Masters
Posted in Content Marketing | Tagged best practices, strategy |
Since Google announced its Penguin update toward the end of April 2012, columnists, commentators, webmasters and search marketers have been generating reams of online of comment and opinion, all asking or attempting to answer, more or less, the same two questions:
“What exactly is Penguin?” and “How do SEO practitioners promote websites post-Penguin?”
Google wasn’t as specific with its explanation of Penguin as it has been in the past. It took a while before the update even had a name – Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team, initially limited himself to an announcement, buried in a regular blog post, that warned of the imminent launch of “an important algorithm change targeted at webspam.”
Continue reading Beating the Post Penguin Blues – The Path to Recovery
Posted in SEO | Tagged algorithm changes, Google Penguin Update, Penguin Recovery |
This is the second installment in our series on the basics of search engine optimization. In this article, we will discuss the importance of having a crawl-able website, and what you can do to achieve this goal.
Crawlability refers to the ease with which a search engine can “crawl” through your website. It’s also a key component of any SEO campaign.
If you want to maximize your search engine visibility and website traffic, you must make your website easy to crawl. People can only find your indexed pages when searching through Google, Bing, Yahoo and AOL. If your website has 100 pages, but only 50 of them have been found and indexed by a particular search engine, then you are losing 50% of your visibility through that search engine. People will only be able to find the 50 pages that have been indexed.
Continue reading SEO Basics: Five Ways to Help Search Engines Crawl and Index Your Web Pages
Posted in SEO, Website Development | Tagged best practices, crawlable website, index pages |
Too many search marketers fail to make best use of the greatest SEO tactic in the book – fresh, original content. The SEO Edition of MarketingSherpa’s 2012 Search Marketing Benchmark Report ranks content creation as the most effective SEO tool – bar none. It’s also one of the most difficult to implement correctly, as many webmasters are discovering to their cost in the aftermath of Google’s recent Panda and Penguin updates.
If you don’t generally give more than a passing thought to updating the content on your website, you probably don’t find yourself on the first page of SERPs that often either. You’re also in the minority – Search Engine Journal, commenting on a recent SEO infographic from Brafton, highlights just one statistic: “76 per cent of marketers who have strategic SEO campaigns in place invest in content creation.” You need to be there.
Continue reading Have You Been Penguined? A Content Marketing Strategy Can Save Your Site
Posted in Content Marketing, SEO |
Mention DuckDuckGo, and the chances are that someone will talk about privacy. After all, it’s the high-relevance search engine that doesn’t store your personal information, your IP address or your search history. Yet, according to a recent TIME interview with Gabriel Weinberg, founder of DuckDuckGo, that wasn’t the point of this up-and-coming alternative to Google – it was simply intended as a “spam-free” zone at a time when the Big G and all around it were being SEO’d to death.
In 2008, when Weinberg revealed his new baby to the world on TechCrunch’s Elevator Pitch, the cat-friendly serial entrepreneur was at pains to remind viewers of the hand-picked, “human-powered” nature of DuckDuckGo’s results. Suggesting that users should think of DuckDuckGo as “Google-plus,” Weinberger inadvertently anticipated, in name at least, one of his giant rival’s future features – one that today he would likely consider to be self-promoting spam.
Continue reading DuckDuckGo: Just Duck at First, But Now It’s Go, Go, Go…
Posted in SEO |
As a marketing professional, you probably already realize the benefits of search engine optimization. You know that an effective SEO campaign can bring a steady stream of web-based leads and sales. But what does your boss think about it? He or she may not be as well versed in the values of an SEO campaign. As a result, you may have to pitch these benefits in a way that gets the boss excited about them.
But how do you go about it? What does a CEO (or other executive) need to hear, in order to green light such a campaign? How do you summarize something as extensive as search engine optimization during a fifteen-minute meeting? In this article, we will discuss some of the key points you should cover along the way. If you check all of these boxes, your boss will have an easier time seeing the value of SEO.
Continue reading Pitching SEO to Your CEO (and Other Executives)
Posted in SEO |
This is the fifth installment of our series on the basics of SEO (don’t forget to read the second, third, and fourth series). In this article, we will discuss the importance of keyword research within the context of search engine optimization. You’ll also learn the difference between short-tail and long-tail keywords, and how to use both of them in your website content.
