Category: SEO

A lot of people look at search engine optimization (SEO) as some sort of holy grail. They operate on the mistaken belief that if they can only master the sacred art of SEO, their website will shoot to the top of the search engine results page. To be blunt, this is false.

SEO is just one facet of website management. Together with social media marketing, content creation, lead generation and conversion; and web design, it’s part of a unified whole. Yet even if these five tasks are all done to perfection, it is not a guarantee of success.

Per Statista, in 2019 mobile devices accounted for about 51 percent of total web page views worldwide.  What that means for you is that if your website isn’t optimized to be viewed and browsed on the small screen, you’re potentially alienating more than half your audience. That’s not the only reason mobile optimization is important, either.

Google’s been pushing for websites to be more mobile-friendly since 2015. That push has continued through to today. In 2020, if your website is difficult or cumbersome to navigate on a smartphone or tablet, many aren’t going to bother with it.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are changing the face of search engine optimization and search engine marketing (SEO).

That’s the prevailing narrative, anyway.  The one pushed by media pundits and self-professed experts with only a faint understanding of their own content.

The reality is that AI has, in one form or another, been part of SEO for several years now. It’s only through recent advances in machine learning that it’s really coming to the fore.  It’s only recently that people are starting to realize how intertwined the two actually are.

It’s no secret that just as with Google, YouTube’s algorithms are a closely-guarded secret. Unfortunately, it also seems to be no secret that compared to Google, YouTube seems in many ways to be fumbling in the dark.

As noted by Ben Popken of  NBC News, YouTube wants people to spend as much time watching videos as possible, but its algorithms aren’t entirely sure on how.

By now, we’re going to assume you’ve had the basics of eCommerce search engine optimization drilled into you. 

You understand the importance of high-quality product photos and unique, well-written product descriptions. You know your website needs to be readable and navigable on mobile devices, and that your store needs a streamlined checkout process with plenty of payment options. And you certainly grasp the reasons why maintaining a blog is a good idea.

It’s common knowledge that Google jealously guards the inner workings of its search engine. While search engine optimization experts and marketing professionals can make educated judgements as to what a particular algorithm update does or how it works, based on careful observation of cause and effect, they are just guessing.

The only party that knows for sure how Google works is Google itself.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a surprisingly complex discipline. The ways it has evolved  in just the past few years alone are staggering. How can anyone be expected to keep up? 

To be frank, you can’t. And you don’t really need to, for the most part. All the major changes Google made to its search engine are all create a better user experience and to help users find the best, most relevant results possible in the least amount of time. 

Here are a few core SEO strategies to help you align your content, website, and marketing with that goal. 

There’s no shortage of search engine optimization tools and platforms on the web, both premium and free. The range of choices available to you is actually a bit dizzying, particularly if you’re new to search engine optimization (SEO).

Before social media, before Google, before smartphones and tablets, there were search engines.

But they’re not the search engines we know today. They were a lot simpler, a lot more basic. They operated by an entirely different, less advanced set of rules. And the process of optimizing content for them was different too.

The only real constant in the search engine optimization space is that it’s constantly evolving.

Keywords used to be the be-all and end-all of where a website placed on the SERP, until they weren’t. Then there was a bunch of stuff about inbound and outbound links, link juice, and nofollow. And we don’t even have time to get into all the ways social media has changed the face of search.