The search landscape has changed remarkably over the last two decades. Search results have become much more dynamic and personalized and this makes it more challenging than ever to show up in Google SERP real estate. The original ten blue links were easy to rank for; today it is a search results page that is amplified with multiple elements, greater vibrancy, and more context up front. Just look at how crowded it is today in the modern-day SERPs: As the search engine evolves, search marketing professionals evolve with it by combining and updating SEO and PPC strategies. They are not just focusing on being number one, but rather trying to snag more slots on the first page of Google. Both SEO and PPC help website owners to increase their visibility in the SERPs. But how does one choose the right strategy that will help your site? How does one find and maintain the right balance between organic and paid tactics? Your Industry in the SERPs To embrace Google's changes, and adjust to … [Read more...] about 4 Data-Driven Tricks to Find the Optimal Mix of SEO and PPC strategies
New jersey data center
Oklahoma, Where The Google Comes Sweepin’ Down The Plain
From California, Google has spread out across the great land of the UnitedStates. New York! Washington! Arizona! And now which of thefifty nifty United States isGoogle heading to next? Oklahoma! Below, some news of Google’s plans for theSooner State and well as a recap of what other states it has conquered overtime, as it builds the United States Of Google. Google is eyeing Pryor Creek, Oklahoma. Since the industrial park has its ownpower plant, the smart money is that Google will be placing another of itsenergy-guzzling data centers there (shouldn’tthey all go out in the desert now, with miles of solar collectors to powerthem?). From Computerworld: All Google will say about the Oklahoma site isthat the company is evaluating it. "We’re just sitting here in a corner of a state —out of sight, out of mind," says Sanders Mitchell, administrator of theMidAmerica complex. He says that with a bit of a chuckle, because his 7,000-acreindustrial park may be the largest … [Read more...] about Oklahoma, Where The Google Comes Sweepin’ Down The Plain
You Don’t Have To Be Nuts To Worry About Changing Your Domain
Enterprise SEO is all about mitigating risk. Slow and steady, fix what is broken, don’t let anyone do anything radical chasing the latest fads, don’t push the envelope into anything black or even grey and keep your IT department from inadvertently destroying your rankings. So what do you say when a large, branded site wants to go about changing a well-established domain? For the last 6 years or more, moving a website from one domain to another has been fairly straightforward and low risk endeavor. Set up a 301 redirect that maps all of your old URLs to your new ones and then sit back and wait 1-2 weeks while the search engines crawl all of your primary URLs and you were good to go. If you wanted to speed things along a little, you could also do a change of address in Webmaster Tools and submit critical pages through Fetch As Googlebot. Sure, Bing and Yahoo would take longer to update and, yes, it might take months for all of the pages in the supplemental index to finally … [Read more...] about You Don’t Have To Be Nuts To Worry About Changing Your Domain
Dissecting Google Conspiracy Theories
Part of every professional SEO’s job is to read between the lines — to be a conspiracy theorist of sorts. We are required not only to possess tactical skills like researching keyword semantics and using schema markup, but also to predict the future direction of organic search to reveal opportunities and risks within clients’ campaigns. The source of this information is often through analysis of what search pundits are saying, but it also involves reading between the lines, and at the very least, using some form of inductive reasoning to figure out what those pundits aren’t saying that could help site rankings, traffic and revenue. There are some logical applications of this kind of reasoning. For example, when we read: Page speed impacts user experience. Good user experience is highly correlative to good organic rankings. we can logically imply that good PageSpeed scores will correlate with good organic rankings. That’s not a conspiracy; that’s a … [Read more...] about Dissecting Google Conspiracy Theories
6 Tips to Reduce Bounce Rates in Google AdWords
Bounce rate refers to the number of people who land on your website, take a quick look around, and subsequently leave. They never move to a second page. Now this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. One page website design is all the rage right now, so there isn’t always a second page to move to. Perhaps you just did such a bang up job of answering the user’s question, there was no need for them to continue searching on your website. More often than not, a high bounce rate isn’t a positive thing. It is a quality metric that many think has a place in Google’s ranking algorithm. If your website is consistently running in the 70 to 90% range, it’s probably time to take a long, hard look at your website. An abnormally large bounce rate is concerning when it comes to your natural search traffic, but it is down right criminal when it comes to your paid advertising. If you are forking over $5 to $10 per click on a competitive ad term, don’t you want to … [Read more...] about 6 Tips to Reduce Bounce Rates in Google AdWords