Category: Search Engine Optimization

As an industry, SEOs have absorbed the message that ‘short is sweet’. We know that the attention span of surfers is limited. They don’t tend to luxuriate in the written word, enjoying writing for writing’s sake.

Instead they want short, informative, actionable content without the clutter of unnecessary verbosity. We’ve also fully taken on board the idea that content should be pitched at the lowest possible reading level, so as not to alienate potential readers and customers.

When done well, short, simple content is great.

When done badly, it results in poor content. This content is either too thin to be worth reading. Or, it appears to target an audience who has just finished reading a very simple children’s book.

Blogger lore suggests writing content simply. However, several reasons exist to add longer-form content for educated adults. SEO and content marketing both provide these reasons. In fact, including this type of content can noticeably benefit corporate blogs and websites.

Search engine optimization is a broad field that employs a huge number of different strategies to help sites rank well in the SERPs. From producing awesome content to technical strategies like implementing caching to speed up a site, many web owners are familiar with the basic practices of SEO, but what they don’t consider is the potential benefit of using a specialist SEO host.

An SEO host provides everything regular web hosts do. However, they offer an extra service. Standard web hosts do not offer this: multiple IP hosting. Multiple IP hosting depends on a company’s control. They need a large block of C-level IPs. Unfortunately, not all companies have this control. They may not have enough different IPs. These IPs also need to be in different geographical areas. Therefore, they cannot successfully offer the benefits of multiple IP hosting.

SEO hosting companies allow their clients to make use of the large set of IPs they control, and that has a number of significant SEO benefits.

Content marketing has always been with us. It has been called different things, but the creation of engaging content by brands has been a lynchpin of marketing for decades. I

n recent years, online marketers in particular have been forced by improvements to search engine algorithms, the ubiquity of social media, and users’ increasing immunity to traditional advertising methods to up their game in the content arena.

Many, however, remain to be convinced, seeing content marketing a passing fad or a distraction from the tried and true marketing and SEO tactics of the past.

In a post on the official Google News Blog, Google has warned publishers that publishing content that fails to clearly discriminate between editorial and advertising may harm their ranking and Google News SEO.

The decline of traditional advertising revenue has forced publishers to devise new methods of generating income from their content. One method that has rapidly gained popularity in recent months is native advertising.

Native advertising is akin to the traditional advertorial. Publishers publish promotional posts with much of the same context as editorial content. Such articles might include a subtle note stating they are promotional content. However, they look almost exactly like the regular content of the site.

While bloggers are well acquainted with the promotional guest post

Back in the day, SEO focused on pleasing algorithms. The goal was to create sites that appealed to them. Algorithms were especially happy with lots of keywords. They also liked many links with relevant anchor text.

The natural result was sites that appealed to algorithms, but weren’t quite up to snuff for human beings. Over the years, however, Google has improved its ability to determine what human beings like in their SERPs. Consequently, many previously successful SEO methods have become obsolete.

Over on Search Engine Land, the perennial discussion of the benefits and disadvantages of using subdomains vs. directories has recently been reignited.
In his post, 5 Whopping Lies That Keep SEO At Status Quo, Ian Lurie, presents as his 4th most egregious lie:

“We Can Put The Blog On A Subdomain. It’s Fine.”

The conversation on this issue has been swinging back and forth for a long time, with people on both extremes and quite a number in the middle who claim that it doesn’t matter at all for SEO. which is also Google’s stated position.

Micheal Martinez, of the excellent SEO Theory blog responds in the comments that:

“You and [Rand] Fishkin are completely wrong on the subdomain issue. It’s a shame this kind of misinformation is still being shared on major SEO Websites like Search Engine Land.” (more…)

When Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded the Google search engine, their core insight was implemented as the PageRank algorithm. Put simply, PageRank determines where a page should rank in the SERPs based on the PageRank of incoming links from other sites — it’s a recursive algorithm.

The higher the PageRank, the greater the assumed authority of a particular site. That authority can then combine with a keyword analysis of a page. Then, they use this combination to devise a ranking of pages in response to a search query.

Thus, PageRank is a proxy measure of authority. Google’s algorithms, in their early days and even now for the most part, couldn’t determine a page’s authority for a specific search query by just looking at the content.

PageRank significantly improved upon previous methods, as early search engine users remember. However, it wasn’t perfect. This imperfection created opportunities for manipulating the system through various link-building tactics.

Keywords are at the heart of any SEO strategy. They are the thread that links sites to customers via their search terms. Over the years, people have focused and speculated a huge amount about how precisely to use keywords in on-page content to signal relevance to search engines and to rank well.

Historically, people have talked about keywords a lot, often focusing on minute details like “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin”: where to place them in the content, how many words should separate them from the start of a page or heading, the ideal ratio of keywords to other text, and so on.

Some (not very good) SEOs strive to produce content that contains an exact percentage of keywords, often with the result of producing content that isn’t very readable to humans. And some stick to the old tactic of writing as many pages as possible stuffed with keyword variants and synonyms to cover all possible long-tail searches.