Michael Martin
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About Michael Martin

Michael Martin is a digital strategist at Ignite Visibility and recognized throughout the search marketing industry as one of the leading authorities on mobile SEO. Michael has a degree in computer engineering from UMass Dartmouth and a Project Management Professional (PMP) certification from the Project Management Institute (PMI), Michael has also taught accredited SEO courses at San Diego State University, wrote for Search Engine Land, has been a speaker at SMX and most major digital marketing conferences while being a contributor to The Art of SEO: Mastering Search Engine Optimization published by O’Reilly.

Michael Martin's latest articles

Apple

Searching For Mobile Apps May Be In The Cards

Mobile Application Search in both Apple’s App Store and Google Play is frustratingly similar to general online search in the early 2000s — and the tactics used to make them visible in search resuls also closely mirror the SEO best practices from that era. Searching for and discovering the right apps is a concern for […]

Apple

4 Mobile Search Trends Tackled At SMX West 2013

The 2013 SMX West conference could have easily be confused as the first SMX Authorship show with extensive interest in and questions surrounding Google’s use of authorship and the prominence of those articles associated with verified authors. However, it was mobile that led the way with one of the first sessions of the conference being Trends in Mobile Search. […]

SEO

Mobile App API As A Future Ranking Factor In Mobile Search Results

Toward the end of 2012, I read an interesting article theorizing that Google will be crawling APIs instead of mobile websites in the future. API means Application Programming Interface which allows software, including websites and mobile apps, to provide direct integration based on functions permitted by the API. Websites and mobile apps use APIs predominantly to share content […]

SEO

Google Patents The Mobile Search Blend

The United States Patent and Trademark Office recently approved a patent application from Google which forecasts a greater focus on mobile pages/versions in mobile search results going into 2013. Apparently the U.S. Patent office works on Christmas Day, or simply wanted to offer Google a Christmas gift before the FTC Antitrust case ruling, as it approved Google’s Blending Mobile […]

SEO

Mobile Search After The Final Mayan B’ak’tun

If you are reading this Search Engine Land column, then you survived the “final day” of the Mayan Calendar as the 13th B’ak’tun resets to 0 like an odometer after 1,872,000 days, and with it, the start of the 5th world, according to Mayan culture. This 5th world is said to be one of enlightenment, higher consciousness, and […]

SEO

Auto Industry Benefiting From Growth In Mobile Search

Approximately one-third of all search traffic for auto industry related terms comes from mobile devices. This underscores why it is critical for auto manufacturers, local dealerships, reviewers and local automotive resources to render their sites properly for nearly half of their current traffic, but to also be at the forefront of getting higher visibility for […]

Google algorithm updates

Responsive Design Alone Is Not Mobile SEO

Finally, Google and Bing have both made it official that for mobile search, it is best to have One URL to Rule Them All, something I have been advocating for over 2 years. At the recent 2012 SMX Advanced iSEO session, Cindy Krum stepped in to represent the “one URL” approach in the session’s debate vs the m. strategy. Although the […]

Google algorithm updates

One URL To Rule Them All For Mobile SEO

A core element of mobile SEO is to determine where the mobile content will reside in relation to that of the standard desktop orientated site. This debate was even broached a year ago. What Are The Mobile SEO URL Options? Same URL or One URL strategy An m. subdomain A third party site for mobile pages […]

SEO

Less Than 10% Of The Web In 2012 Is Mobile Ready

Mobile’s overall share of Web traffic in the United States has increased to about 9% (according to StatCounter) which is also the same percentage of Quantcast’s Top Million sites that are deemed ready for mobile in 2012 according to data from the Mongoose Metrics Data Series. Since there wasn’t the same data pull last year, it could […]

Apple

How To Achieve Mobile Search Ranking Clarity

Mobile search results not only produce different rankings from desktop search but can also vary based on the mobile device type that the query was performed on, as has been written about here at Search Engine from myself and Bryson Meunier among others. You can see mobile results directly from your desktop for feature phones at https://www.google.com/xhtml and […]

Apple

SEO Considerations For Google Mobile Search In 2012

Mobile search has never been just one result type. It  provides different results and presentation formats, depending on whether the search query is from a feature phone, smartphone or tablet. Google has just announced a specially designated crawler for smartphones apart from what it uses currently for feature phones, which foreshadows a deeper divergence of […]

Apple

How To Get Started With Mobile Marketing

Mobile marketing is now considered the 7th mass media channel after print, recordings, cinema, radio, TV, and the internet. So with this new mass media channel, the question is what’s the best way to approach marketing to users of mobile devices? A brief history of mobile marketing Marketing to mobile devices is widely believed to […]

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