Category: Search Engine Optimization

Turns out Google’s in the market for an SEO Manager. Apparently, the company’s product pages – search aside, of course – don’t actually have the best SEO in the world. Who would’ve thought?

The job listing states, “As a Program Manager for Technical SEO, you will collaborate with various teams. These teams include Marketing, Sales, Product Development, and Engineering. Your goal will be to boost organic traffic and business growth.”

You’ve probably been told on a few occasions that social media’s a pretty important component of content marketing – that social SEO is something that you as a content creator should understand.

Maybe you paid attention to the advice, maybe you didn’t. Either way, research recently released by Pew has revealed that more Americans than ever are using Facebook and Twitter as their primary news source.

There was a time when a website’s content didn’t matter all that much. As long as the SEO expert responsible for marketing it played nice with Google’s algorithms, it ranked high. Those days, however, are now far behind us.

Today, Google is much more selective. It carefully chooses which sites rank highest. Furthermore, Google is far harsher on tactics it considers underhanded.

That means if you engage in black hat SEO, Google will penalize you. If you let too much spam appear on your site, Google will penalize you.

And if your site consists of low-quality, ‘thin’ content, Google will penalize you.

If you’re like most webmasters, you likely saw something troubling last month. Search engine rankings in your industry were all over the place.

Some websites completely tanked, others rose straight to the top; worse still, it all happened seemingly without rhyme or reason. Not surprisingly, SEOs quickly went wild with speculation.

What was Google doing?

It’s official: as of April 21, 2015, “mobile friendliness” is now a ranking factor. That means if your site isn’t optimized for mobile browsing, it won’t just leave you with dissatisfied users. It will also result in a ranking penalty.

Even if it’s a small penalty, there’s no point in getting hit with it if it’s easily avoided.

Right now, the thing that everyone’s buzzing about is semantic search. Search engines, we’re told, are getting smarter – better at providing us with precisely what we’re looking for. The prevailing slogan of this shift, trumpeted by the likes of Google, is “things, not strings.”

It’s pretty easy to see where all this stuff came from, too. Smartphones and tablets have become more or less ubiquitous in modern society.

With their spread, we’ve seen an increased focus on conversational search – on people asking questions of their devices rather than keying in a few search terms.

I suppose there’s a certain allure to algorithm chasing, really. You’re on the bleeding edge of search engine optimization; an expert that all other marketing professionals look to for advice on how they can game the system created by Google.

You’re constantly adapting, modifying, and re-working your strategies to adapt to the latest algorithmic change.

Thing is…that’s kind of an uphill battle. No one outside Google knows how its algorithms work. Also, search engines constantly change. This means new tactics soon become useless. As a result, a site’s search engine traffic often looks like a roller coaster.

The birth of Google’s Penguin algorithm – designed to cut down on link spam – had one rather unfortunate side effect. No, I’m not talking about all the webmasters claiming the algorithm unjustly penalized them. Rather, I’m talking about a new, underhanded tactic all the black hat search engine marketers are practicing.

It’s called Negative SEO. In lieu of properly optimizing their own site, certain individuals in the SEO community have taken to setting up link farms and spam sites designed exclusively to penalize their competitors.

The idea is that their actions will ‘fool’ Google’s algorithms into thinking their target has engaged in manipulative link building techniques.

In the world of content marketing, there’s a longtime misunderstanding even greater than the mislabeling of big data. I’m talking about demand generation and lead generation. People use these two terms interchangeably far too often.

The truth is that they’re two very different approaches to content creation – and using the wrong one can mean a whole lot of wasted effort on your part.

Note: This guide assumes at least a basic knowledge of Drupal, including module installation. If you run into trouble, read through the Drupal Tutorial.

It may not be as popular as WordPress, but you’ll nevertheless find plenty of website owners who swear religiously by Drupal. It’s not hard to see why, really. There’s a lot to love about it.

It’s an incredibly secure platform and frequently updated besides. Drupal’s also easy to customize, with a bevy of both free and premium plugins available to webmasters and an intuitive web interface that makes it ideally suited to manage a large volume of content. Last but certainly not least, it’s extremely powerful from an SEO standpoint. (more…)