Judging the Quality of a Link
The Google Penguin update has site owners running scared from link building. But just because Google is cracking down on webspam that doesn’t mean you can afford to abandon your link building campaign; you just have to be smarter about it. And getting smarter about your link building means making sure you are only building links that can actually help your SEO. Here are 4 ways site owners can judge the quality of a link: Relevancy One of the most important things that helps determine the quality of a link is its relevancy. Is there a logical connection between your site and that link source? For instance, there is an obvious connection between a website for a small business financial advisor and an Intuit.com blog. That’s a highly CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Are Your Priority Keyword Choices Ruining Your SEO?
A former B2B SEO client of mine was adamant that the only thing they really cared about when it came to SEO was getting on page 1 and improving visitors from a short list of priority keywords (about 15 or so of them). While there is nothing wrong with prioritizing your keywords, it’s practically impossible to target every potential keyword equally after all; my client was effectively limiting themselves and their SEO success by only caring about this short list of keywords. Here are two things I kept reiterating to my B2B SEO client and things you should keep in mind when divvying up your SEO efforts: It’s a lot easier to move from page 2 to page 1 than spot 2 to spot 1. In CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Evergreen Content 101: What Small Businesses Need to Know
This is a guest post by Amanda DiSilvestro of HigherVisibility. The term “evergreen content” has been around the Internet for quite some time; however many businesses still don’t stop to consider how it works. It’s not only important for businesses to understand what evergreen content is, but it’s important to understand why it matters and how to put it into action. Evergreen content is a great way to keep your website relevant for years to come, which is something every company wants. What Is Evergreen Content? Evergreen content is what some would call timeless. It refers to an article or a piece of content that will always remain relevant to your audience. In most cases, the bulk of the content on a homepage or CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Don’t Copy the Competition’s SEO
One of the most frustrating (and frequent) comments I hear from my SEO clients is “Well, the completion is doing it so why can’t we?” “It” can be any one of a number of black hat SEO tactics including link schemes, keyword stuffing, buying links, article spinning and so forth. As a business owner myself I can understand why it’s frustrating to see the competition investing in SEO tactics that supposedly are banned by the search engines and actually benefitting from it by ranking better in the SERPs. If they can get away with it why can’t I? How bad can it really be if my top competitors are doing it AND profiting from it? There are billions of sites online and a far percentage of CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Easy Win Links You Might Be Missing
Site owners are always on the lookout for “easy wins” when it comes to link building—minimal investment for maximum output. You’ll quickly find that truly valuable easy win links are few and far between, especially once you’ve been at it for a while, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t sitting on a potential goldmine of easy win links and just never realized it! Here are four relatively easy win links that you might be overlooking: 404 errors. Next time you’re in your Google Webmaster Tools account take a look at the Health tab. Any crawl errors in there? These 404 errors mean the Google bot was trying to access a certain URL and couldn’t because the page no longer exists. This is probably one of the easier easy CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
How To Get Your Social Accounts Top Search Results
This is a guest post by Amanda DiSilvestro of HigherVisibility. Social media is no doubt a great way to improve engagement and visibility in your niche, but most of the advice that businesses are given assumes that new people will be able to find these accounts. While putting a “follow us” button on your company website is great, an even better way to earn followers and connections is to show up on a search engine results page (SERP). This is something that many companies spend a lot of time and a lot of money perfecting, but usually the focus is on content—not social media accounts. For those who are unfamiliar, the idea of optimizing a piece of content or a particular webpage is known CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Are You Thinking Like Your Target Audience?
When it comes to keyword research one of the most important things to factor into your process is user intent. Two people could search for very different things and use the exact same search query. For instance, if I were to search for “apple” am I looking to buy a new computer or do I need a pie recipe? Which searcher is the one you want coming to your website? On the other hand, two people could be searching for the exact same thing and use very different search queries. After all, “gym shoes” and “sneakers” could very well mean the same thing to different searchers. At the end of the day it boils down to user intent—how is your target audience searching for the CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Steps to Make Sure Your SEO Doesn’t Disappear When Re-Designing Your Website
This is a guest post from Amanda DiSilvestro of HigherVisibility Optimizing your website takes a lot of time and energy, so it’s important that you don’t let all of these efforts go to waste when it comes time to revamp the layout and design of your site. Just because you want things to look nicer does not mean you want to start over when it comes to Google rankings, so you have to follow a few precautions to save yourself the headache. Unfortunately, many companies and blogs are quick to change the design of a website with the assumption that SEO will transfer over. In some cases it might, but in other cases you have to manually make sure that your SEO is surviving. This leads CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
SEO Can Be Frustrating But Don’t Give Up Hope!
As a small business owner I am responsible (with the help of the Brick Marketing team) for creating, executing and maintaining my own SEO campaign—so I understand firsthand how frustrating the SEO process can be. Yes, SEO can be incredibly frustrating and a little confusing if you don’t fully understand what you’re getting yourself into but that doesn’t mean you should give up on your SEO program! Here are 3 ways SEO can be very frustrating and how to keep the faith: Frustration: Google does what it wants when it wants. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, it’s a Google world and we all just live in it. I know that for some site owners, and plenty of SEOs, it feels like Google just does what it wants when CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Is Your SEO Agency Being Completely Transparent with You?
In my opinion, the best SEO agencies should strive to be as transparent as possible with their clients. After all, your SEO agency should be as invested in the long term success of your website as you are! A good agency-client relationship needs to be built on trust and mutual understanding and it’s incredibly hard to do that if your SEO agency is hiding behind smoke and mirrors. Here are 4 ways in which a good SEO agency should be transparent with you: 1. Sends completed link building reports. At the end of the day, the SEO agency you decide to hire is responsible for helping your website do better in the SERPs and drive targeted, organic traffic back to your website. One, among many, of the CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Twitter Might Add Different Buttons: Does Twitter Really Need Another Change?
The following is a guest post by Amanda DiSilvestro of Higher Visibility One of the things that make Twitter so appealing is the fact that it’s easy to use. There aren’t too many choices when it comes to Twitter, and it is synced up with many websites and different tools to help make sure you can always tweet when you want to tweet. Recently, Twitter has been making some layout changes that have gotten people talking, but it seems to be safe to say that these changes didn’t deter anyone from using the network. Some users are now starting to see changes not to the layout of the network, but to the buttons. Instead of a “favorite” option, Twitter is trying out “star” and “like” CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Take More Initiative with Your Link Building!
A common misconception I see with a lot of site owners is that they feel that once they’ve outsourced their SEO (hopefully to a white hat SEO firm) they can just wash their hands of link building completely. After all, that’s what they hired the SEO company to do, right? Well, yes and no. A white hat SEO firm is going to take their time to learn the ins and outs of your business, your products and services, your target audience, your current online brand and your business goals. Once they’ve taken a good look under the hood of your website and properly optimized it they’ll move onto link building. For the most part, a good SEO firm will be able to manage the majority CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Is Your Keyword List Too Long to Succeed?
One of the most important things to remember when doing your keyword research is to make sure you are targeting keywords that your audience is actually using, not just what you think is the best fit. For instance, if someone was interested in learning a programming language like Java how might they search? Keyword phrases like “learn Java,” “lean Java programming,” “java for beginners” and so forth are all probably relevant phrases to include in a keyword list. But a simple search in the Google Keyword Research Tool can pull up hundreds of keyword ideas that might be as equally relevant such as “java tutorial,” “lean java fast,” “how to code in java” and more. All of these keywords have their own value and could CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Online Marketing 2013 Glossary: Key Terms in the Industry
This is a guest post by Amanda DiSilvestro of HigherVisibility. The New Year can be stressful for new businesses because it’s a time to look back and improve—analyze different numbers, gather different data, and create new strategies. However, it’s also important that businesses consider what will be changing this New Year and what will be staying the same. There are quite a few terms in the online marketing industry, and the New Year is the perfect time to go over these terms with your staff and make sure that everyone is one the same page. Below are a few Internet marketing terms that will be important in 2013: 1. Content Curation. This term will become more important in 2013 as more and more original content CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
How to Find Content Marketing Opportunities
In my opinion, content marketing is what propels your SEO campaign forward. Onsite SEO and traditional link building are still incredibly important, but without a strong content marketing campaign chances are your SEO will stagnant in time. Finding new content marketing opportunities is key to keeping your content marketing campaign moving forward. Here are 5 ways to find content marketing opportunities: 1. Check out the industry blogs you read. I read a few big SEO blogs every morning just so I can keep educating myself and stay up to date with what is going on in my industry. What industry specific blogs do you read habitually? See if any of those sites have put out a call for guest blogging submissions or if they might be willing to CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
SEO Journal is Written by
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Nick Stamoulis:
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