For modern digital marketing, that doesn’t just mean knowing what they want, but understanding how their search habits work as well. Search engines typically prioritize site titles, page titles, blog post titles, and headings. These titles also appear in browser tabs and search results, so it's important to write …

Let’s get one thing straight from the very beginning. If you care about your site SEO, you should care about Backlinks. Now, let’s debunk this mystical word that every SEO article and checklist talks about. If your website code is not search engine friendly, then the search engines …

Domain to page relevancy means the page linking to your website is relevant to your domain. The bottom line is that if you’re focusing on a small group of generic keywords, you’re probably not being found by most of the people who are searching for you. You should …

With Google's mobile-first index, mobile web pages are more important than ever. People view web pages on smartphones and it is important that your link can be seen on these devices. Additionally they also usually have low competition due to their specificity; however this comes at the cost of low …

As I mentioned, SEO is a long-term strategy. You won’t see results in the first week, and probably not even in the first month. Keyword usage on a page is much more complicated these days. SEO professionals used to go as far as calculating the number of times a …

There are far more unique search queries than generic ones. If you added up the search engine traffic of the most popular keywords, the number would not even come close to the amount of unique, niche keywords. This concept is known as “long-tail theory”. But what are some techniques that …

When you link out to related domains, it not only helps the search engines to understand your niche, but also helps to increase the trust and quality of your site which plays a vital role in your blog’s SEO. The main purpose of categories and tags are to help …

That is what it’s all about. SEM and SEO can be difficult topics to understand. Google explicitly states they don’t have a duplicate content penalty – but they do have a ‘thin content’ manual action… that looks and feels a lot like a penalty. Variables that consistently show an …

If you know what you’re writing, why you’re writing it and who you’re writing it for, then that can help the entire process to go that much quicker and result in a higher-quality, more targeted and, ultimately, more rewarding blog post. Like any good SEO campaign, your …

Search engines are adapting and beginning to favor natural, more speech-like content, so to keep up we have to provide content in the same way. We have to think like our customers and answer the questions they’re asking in as concise and an informative way possible. Links don't matter …

Most of a SEO-based budget will rely on content development. The main idea behind the traditional link building to measure all the do-follow links that a website can generate and totally ignore all no-follow links. Backlinks are a vote of confidence that someone outside of your own web property trusts …

The purchase cycle can sometimes involve a large number of clicks. It’s been consistent with Google’s message. Not only will you have your current customer base, but you can passively accrue traffic to your website by being present in the top 5 searches for your keywords. Nofollow does …

Too many backlinks from many unreliable domains can hinder the authoritative signals of your domain. Information Snippets are the block of text found under the main title of a google search result. The use of information snippets are important when writing an article. As these big establishments utilised SEO to …

Instead of searching for "running shoes," a user may search "what are the best running shoes for arched feet?" As queries have become more specific, search engines have moved beyond simply matching keywords to them. Compelling and unique images have always been at the forefront of link building strategies. Search …

It’s sometimes hardest to do organic search optimization projects in new category spaces, because the search interest is just not there yet. Try to improve your site speed and page load times, and make sure that your site is mobile-optimized to maximize your chances of getting sitelinks on mobile …

Use meta robots tags to “no index” URLs generated by the faceted navigation that are showing duplicate content. Link baiting is another popular way of promoting your site. If you produce a really popular unique post for your site, then other people may want to link to it. Website breadcrumbs …

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a specialized form of content writing that can be extremely effective in boosting the amount of traffic that comes to your website via search engines, like Google and Bing. There are far more unique search queries than generic ones. If you added up the …

The timeframes tend to vary for experimentation purposes, but SEO is to longevity as growth hacking is to brevity. If none of those works for you, then perhaps it’s time to consider that there might be a problem with the recipe. If the URL hasn’t been indexed yet …

However, a significant portion of searches take place on alternative sites, such as Microsoft’s Bing. Google and other search engines keep the inner workings of their algorithms a secret. All we can do is speculate and test. The problem with speculation is that if an idea seems believable, it …

Test the results of changes, and keep changes tracked in an Excel spreadsheet, or whatever you're comfortable with. Are you worried that your aesthetically appealing website is not getting you the right amount of traffic? Does it bother you that all the money you spent on developing a very creative …

The most common solutions to fix this consist of using absolute path URLs (including the “http://www.domain.com” portion) coupled with ensuring that canonical URLs always use the HTTP version. No high quality blog would accept your guest post if it has promotional backlinks going to the homepage of …

Search engine are not humans but the software that crawls the web page content. Since evergreen content will help you improve your SEO ranking, it goes without saying that you will drive more traffic to your blog. Local SEO services can help any kind of industry, from a small craft …

Thin content is essentially any content on your website that is not adding any value either to you or your user. Meta descriptions are technically HTML attributes that offer concise explanations of what a webpage is about. They can be used on search engine result pages to show a preview …

When a visitor looks at your site, it’s all pretty colours and clickable things. When a search engine looks at your site, it looks a lot different. If the search shows less pages than you actually have, then that means Google isn’t able to effectively index your pages …

As titles are prominently displayed in search results, showing results with the same title makes it difficult for users to decide which result is the most relevant to them. SEO and content marketing are two different processes. You could describe the main difference like this: SEO is narrow and technical …

These dependable performers are great to have around. Once you are done with cleaning up all the toxic backlinks pointing to your site, you need to file a reconsideration request with Google. This has to be polite and detailed, stating that you admit the mistakes you have committed, explaining the …

In 2012, Google released another update, Penguin, aimed at black-hat techniques that manipulated a webpage ranking through artificial link schemes. A handy thing to know when you are acquiring links from other sources is the difference between follow and nofollow links. One issue often cited by those who believe links …

A sitemap (with which you may well be familiar) is an HTML page containing an ordered list of all the pages on your site (or, for a large site, at least the most important pages). If you are talking about the types of goats on your farm, don’t make …

After putting these changes in place, we recommend going back to Google’s PageSpeed Insights Tool and seeing how your speed grade has increased. There are tons of reasons for project delays, but over the years I’ve noticed content is the most prominent and it pretty much can be …

When a search engine crawls your site, it moves slowly from one page to another by following the links on the page. As it does, it collects data about the content of your page. Google has built a giant database of hundreds of trillions of webpageswhich its algorithm then analyzes …

A strong online presence is essential for any business to be competitive. When a brand fails to work on good customer service, the implications can be so dire to the extent of bringing down a company. While domain strength is similar to domain authority and both are measured on a …

Trust between a potential customer and a company must be present for a potential customer become a customer. Any link that you create on your own should be set at “no follow”. The reason for this is that you’re essentially telling Google that the link was created to generate …

The question is not if you can learn SEO. The question is do you want to learn it. When people have questions, they type them into Google. That is why Hummingbird came about. Customer lifestyles, budgets and needs are all completely unique and you cannot afford to target one single …

copying the content from someone else’s website. Modern SEO is about so much more than keywords and meta tags. Search engines customize results based on individual searcher behavior. They continue to ramp up their efforts over time to understand not only searcher intent in aggregate but also intent for …

If nobody has heard of your brand or company name (and it’s not part of the important keyword phrases) put it at the end of the title tag. Users searching for your site on Google might not necessarily want to land on your homepage. Sitelinks on the SERP provide …

As a general rule, a high bounce rate reflects thin content. You get what you want—top rankings on Google and “free” organic traffic. Content is an On-Page Factor. This means that you can optimize your content by optimizing your On-Site and On-Page factors and making sure you setup your …

What is it about Google algorithm updates that send all of our thoughtfully crafted, tried-and-true, SEO strategies out the window? It sees the same content word for word across two or more sites and sees it as low quality and either penalises it by ranking it lower than other sites …

The internet today is overwhelmed with tons of DIY SEO tips and tricks. What might be even worse, there are countless case studies that show how great some particular tactic worked for a single website. Keyword research is an entire sub-discipline within SEO and it’s easy to go down …

One of the most important elements to building an online marketing strategy around SEO is empathy for your audience. Once you grasp what your target market is looking for, you can more effectively reach and keep those users. Answering the question “what is Negative SEO?” is complicated because there are …

SEO can be a fuzzy concept that feels like more art than science. Don't let yourself be intimidated; it's easier than you think. When you are trying to figure what keywords are best to target for your business, try putting yourself in your potential customer’s shoes. What are all …

Meta descriptions are technically HTML attributes that offer concise explanations of what a webpage is about. They can be used on search engine result pages to show a preview for a webpage. They are far less of a direct ranking signal as they once were (almost not at all these …

Once you’ve identified opportunities you’ll want to decide on whether to create a new page from scratch or to make changes and improvements to one of your current web pages. Google is looking for answers to the user’s query that provides the answer to the question in …

For example, a hack practice could be paying money for cheap traffic and then claiming it’s organic or from another less dubious traffic source. The underlying content is extremely important. Too many people skimp on content, but it's one of the major anchors that tether you to Google's relevancy …

Longer sentences are hard to follow onscreen. When possible, break longer sentences into multiple shorter sentences. Here, a text that is as descriptive as possible should be used as the anchor text since this determines the reader’s expectation of the hyperlink. When you've selected your focus keyword, ensure it …

Competitor analysis is nothing new, and companies have been researching their competitor’s links for years. However, by looking at the competitor’s backlinks and manually reviewing which links are worth having, you can then perform a link outreach and try to get a link from the same referring site …

User experience is important to search engines and one way they determine this is based on how easy it is to get around the site or the navigation. Use 3-4 internal links on each page, but make sure they are incorporated naturally within the body of the text. Don’t …

SEO heresy though it may sound, shoving ALT text on every image, even if no actual information is given, is annoying from an accessibility point of view - people with screen readers don't want to hear the information twice (once from the text, once from the ALT text). It’s one …

When I am reading articles, therefore a potential consumer, I have no idea whether a link is follow or nofollow. Clearly, a huge majority of people will not have the slightest idea that such a distinction exists! If I am intrigued by what is written about your product or service …

Web crawlers don't read a website in the same way a human does, since they only read through the HTML text of a page. Not only can these components, which are used to structure the page, be useful for readability, but also for search engine optimisation. These can not only …

The truth is that you can get bad links every day. Your competitors don’t want your website to rank well. They can plan a negative SEO attack, sending a lot of spammy links to your website. Oftentimes, low-quality scraper sites can steal content from eCommerce websites in order to …