All Things SEO Column

Despite the many ways Google has changed the search game over the last five years, one truth remains: content is the vehicle that drives your consumer interactions, engagements, experiences and, ultimately, conversions. However, only 41 percent of marketers think their organization is clear on what an effective or successful content marketing program looks like, according to the Content Marketing Institute (CMI). Marketers aren’t just lacking confidence in their efforts; these are real and measurable deficits. In fact, only 20 percent of B2C and 50 percent of B2B content earns any engagement at all, my company’s research has found. That’s a lot of wasted effort and resources invested in content that ends up just floating around the web, winning zero business benefit for its creators. In this post, we’re going to take a look at content through the SMART lens. SMART is a goal-setting framework in which S stands for Specific, M for measurable, A for … [Read more...] about 14 ways to get smarter with your content and SEO

Most SEOs have heard by now that moving web pages with forms to HTTPS is necessary to avoid being shown as “not secure” in Chrome 62. Moving to HTTPS is a good step to take for a number of reasons, but there is also an unique SEO opportunity which is often overlooked — an opportunity that can significantly help your website with its SEO rankings, if done properly. So, what is the opportunity? Moving to HTTPS will encourage Googlebot to recrawl most of your URLs. Googlebot has its own mechanism for determining and prioritizing which URLs to recrawl; however, when Googlebot detects a move to HTTPS, it tends to temporarily increase the crawl rate in an attempt to crawl as many URLs as possible within a short time frame. As such, this is a unique, one-time opportunity to improve your overall website’s signals in the Google Index. Most sites have a certain crawl rate, based on a number of factors such as page speed, internal linking, external linking and popularity. … [Read more...] about Moving to HTTPS? Don’t miss this unique opportunity!

Google has long stressed the importance of “high-quality content” but has provided little, if any, help for those seeking to create it. Until now. Last month, Google’s Developer Relations Group publicly published five different guides aimed at helping its own creators “striving for high-quality documentation.” And “documentation,” when posted online, means digital content. Now available: Developer Documentation Style Guide HTML/CSS Style Guide JavaScript Style Guide Java Style Guide To put this in context, consider that these documents represent just a few of the many guides Google uses internally. The information provided is not new, unique, original, or even complete. That said, Google’s Developer Documentation Style Guides are an excellent resource for anyone interested in creating the type of high-quality content that users value and search engines reward. Each guide reinforces the idea that high-quality pages — … [Read more...] about ‘High-quality content’ tips from Google’s own style guides

The website conversion process starts with driving traffic to your site, but not just any traffic — it needs to be targeted traffic. That’s a small, but crucial, detail. What’s the danger of “untargeted” traffic? Well, for one, it’s a huge waste of time and resources. And two, if the search engines are paying attention (and they are), the untargeted traffic leaving your site can have an impact on your search engine rankings. Untargeted traffic is lose-lose. But let’s get back to the good kind of traffic. No matter what form of online marketing you are engaged with, all of them should have a primary goal to drive targeted traffic to your site. And there are a lot of ways to do that. SEO immediately comes to mind, but that may or may not be a driving factor in generating traffic to your business. You can make a lot of headway with brand engagement by developing content that satisfies what people are looking for, and then optimizing and sharing … [Read more...] about 4 (not so) ordinary conversion elements you may be abusing

They say a picture is worth a thousand words — and wow, are they correct! Today, I’m going to illustrate powerful ways to visualize your site structure, specifically as it relates to pages that acquire incoming links; however, we’ll also discuss other applications of this technique using analytics metrics or other third-party data. There are a number of reasons you would want to do this, among them to provide a visual context to data. As we will see below, visual representations of data can assist in quickly identifying patterns in site structures that may not be evident when viewed as a spreadsheet or as raw data. You can also use these visuals to explain to clients and other stakeholders what’s going on in a site structure. To build a visual representation of our site structure as it relates to incoming links, we will be: running Screaming Frog to gather internal page data and link structure. adding the number of backlinks each page has to the page’s … [Read more...] about Visually understanding your site structure and external link weight impact