Eric Enge
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About Eric Enge

Eric Enge is President of Pilot Holding. Previously, Eric was the founder and CEO of Stone Temple, an award-winning digital marketing agency, which was acquired by Perficient in July 2018. He is the lead co-author of The Art of SEO, a 900+ page book that’s known in the industry as “the bible of SEO.” In 2016, Enge was awarded Search Engine Land’s Landy Award for Search Marketer of the Year, and US Search Awards Search Personality of the Year. He is a prolific writer, researcher, teacher and a sought-after keynote speaker and panelist at major industry conferences.

Eric Enge's latest articles

SEO

Do you have a shot at ranking for that phrase?

Ranking for a particular search query is no longer as simple as creating a targeted page and getting some links. Columnist Eric Enge shows why a deeper understanding of relevance is needed to know which keywords to target.

The power of “Anchor Influencers”

Producing linkworthy content is a big investment, and columnist Eric Enge explains how relationships formed with key influencers can accelerate your SEO efforts and help you maximize your content investment.

SEO

How And Why Content Marketing Works

There's no question about it: An effective content marketing campaign will increase your organic search traffic. Contributor Eric Enge discusses how you can implement a solid content marketing strategy.

SEO

Climbing The Ladder To Guest Posting On Tier 1 Sites

Content marketing is all the rage these days and, if you are pursuing guest posts as part of your link-building strategy, it is critical to target the highest authority sites possible. You want to find the sites where your presence builds your visibility and reputation (regardless of SEO) and where the links might get clicked […]

Is Chasing AuthorRank A Waste Of Time For SEOs?

On June 7, 2011, Google announced support for a new type of markup called the Authorship Tag. This was the rel=”author” tag. It did not take long before the speculation started — when would Google start using data from this new tag to impact rankings? The industry took to referring to this concept as AuthorRank. […]

Google Is Not Broken

In spite of what many think, Google is not broken. But wait, naysayers will say, Look at this search result, it stinks! This spammer is succeeding in ranking high, they emerged from nowhere and are now in the top three results! It’s true — there are many such examples that you can point to. Making […]

The Concept Of Sameness & Why It Should Matter

Long ago and far away, there was a world where there was no Web. Back in those early years (such as the 1960’s through the mid-1990s), there were certain basic concepts that guided the world of marketing. One of the facts of life during those times was that each market space tended to support somewhere […]

Why Enterprises Cannot Ignore Deep Link Building

Many enterprise websites, particularly those associated with good brands, obtain lots of links to their home page without any focused link building effort. In some sense, you could say that they get these links “for free.” Since this is the case, do these sites really need to have a dedicated link building effort in place? […]

Practical Tips For Central Management Of Multiple Sites

Many large enterprises face the challenge of dealing with a diverse portfolio of sites. This by itself is very complex, but that complexity is multiplied when those sites are operated by different teams of people. Some common scenarios where this happens are: Different product lines which are owned and operated by different business units. International […]

Yet More Tips For Diagnosing & Fixing Panda Problems

Here we are, five months after Panda and the only publicly confirmed Panda recovery stories are those that followed the Panda 2.3 update. This is notable because this particular update was one in which Google took actions to help restore some sites that were unfairly hit by the earlier versions of Panda. Google told Barry […]

Intervention & Rehab Time: How To Break The Paid Link Habit

So you have finally made the decision to get off of the paid links crack and go straight. Do you go cold turkey? Do you take this in stages? There are great questions and the ones I will take on in today’s post. There are two major reasons why you should make this switch, one […]

Speculating On The Next Shift In Google Search Algorithms

On February 23, 2011, the day that Google’s Panda update was released, a significant shift in search algorithms and SEO in general happened. For the first time, user experience and content quality became ranking factors in SEO for Google. Google clearly liked the impact of that change, since they followed more recently with an update, […]

The Rise And Fall Of Content Farms

With Demand Media having gone public last week, it is worth taking some time to discuss the future of content farms. Clearly, lots of people are seeing value in the business model, as shown by the street’s willingness to accept the IPO, and the acquistion of Associated Content by Yahoo! last May. But what is […]

SEO

Leveraging The Tension Between Conversion Optimization & SEO

In today’s post I am going to discuss the importance of conversion optimization (or landing page optimization), why it is critical to online marketing success and how it interacts with SEO. I am not going to cover conversion optimization in as much depth as the team that writes the conversion science column, but will set […]

Of Linkbait And SEO Bank Shots

There’s a subtle, but meaningful, connection between billiards and SEO. How so, you ask? Well, when I was younger I was a pretty good at billiards. I could see all the angles really well, and I understood when to use bank shots (using an indirect shot off the bank of the table rather than a […]

Leveraging Competitive Intelligence For Link Building Campaigns

One of the most common recommendations people make about link building is to find out who links to your competitors (aka backlinking your competitors). This is a great idea, but many people who do this miss the most important point of why you do it. Let’s explore the good things you can do while backlinking, […]

SEO

Choose Your CMS With Care

The best time to start working on SEO is before you start building your site. It goes back to that old saying: “If you don’t have time to do it right, will you have the time to do it over?” And, of course you don’t have time to do it over. One of the biggest […]

Do Search Engines Use Bounce Rate As A Ranking Factor?

Your web site’s bounce rate may be a significant factor in your search engine rankings. If the bounce rate on your site is high, you could end up with lower rankings in the search engines. Correspondingly, lower bounce rates may actually offer meaningful ranking boosts. (Don’t know what a bounce rate is? Hang on—definitions below.) […]

PPC

Trademark Protection Using AdGooroo

In my last Industrial Strength post, Using Competitive Intelligence To Protect Your Brand, I wrote about how to use tools like Hitwise to protect your brand. I am going to explore this topic a bit more, but this time show some of the unique features of AdGooroo. Since I did not show an example of […]

Using Competitive Intelligence To Protect Your Brand

Protecting your brand online is an ongoing activity. It requires hard work and due diligence. One area of concern is when others bid on your brand, or use your brand name in their ads. My current understanding of Google’s policy is that it’s OK to bid on a competitive brand name, but it is not […]

PPC

Don’t Automatically Dismiss The Content Network!

If you are like me, when you implement PPC campaigns one of the mental notes you have in your checklist is to go into the Campaign Settings for each campaign and prevent your ads from running on the content network. It turns out that this might be a mistake. At the recent SMX Advanced event […]

SEO

How Flash Can Be Search Engine Friendly

For a long time there has been a tug of war between developers and designers who love to use Flash and SEOs who know how bad Flash can be from a search engine crawler perspective. The designer wants the beauty of an all Flash site. The SEO wants to bring the site traffic. It’s a […]