All Things SEO covers a variety of topics related to improving website visibility in the natural (free or unpaid) listings of search engine results pages by employing the best practices for organic search engine optimization (SEO). Columnists share technical expertise on how to build search engine friendly websites, how to use search engine tools and webmaster dashboards, how to avoid common SEO problems such as duplicate content and spam penalties, plus SEO advice from a marketing perspective, opinion and commentary about algorithmic shifts in the search engine industry.

Programming Data Collection For SEO Research

Last month, I showed you three tricks I use when gathering data on websites. I used these techniques to download webpages into a local folder. In and of themselves, these procedures are not SEO; however, a search engine optimization professional working on a large or enterprise website ought to know how to do this. In this article, I'll show you how to: Make a list of pages inside a folder Set up a development environment Open webpages from a script and extract data If you learn these procedures, I am certain you will find legitimate opportunities to use each, together or alone [...]


Google’s Hunger For Structured Markup

Google is keen for structured markup -- to put it mildly. In the not-too-distant past, I wrote about Google's Data Highlighter for event data, a tool which allows webmasters to indicate structured data for events without having to actually mark up the site's HTML code. It has the charming feature that the resultant extracted data is viewable by the webmaster only in Webmaster Tools in the Structured Data section; and, of course, the data is available to Google itself. As there is no actual structured markup ever placed on the page (i.e., no schema.org, microdata or any other markup), th [...]


Optimizing Your Digital Assets To Boost Rankings & Branding

Let’s say you’re responsible for developing revenues from both traditional and non-traditional advertising. You work with a digital staff of talented people to create lead-generating Web-based content, or perhaps you are in e-commerce and sell products. Maybe you’re a brick and mortar with a website, or perhaps a pure-play Internet business with no physical storefronts. Regardless of whether you are a newspaper (publisher), e-commerce (products) or franchise (services) site, performing well within the SERPs will always lead to new customer acquisition. By identifying and optimizing al [...]


Google Continues To Experiment & Expand Authorship

If one theme was abundantly clear at SMX West in March, it was the question over the importance of authorship and how it might impact future rankings in Google. During the “What’s Needed For SEO Success In 2013 & Beyond?” panel, I asked Matt Cutts if Google planned to expand authorship credit (and potentially the rich snippet) beyond just written content (like blog posts) and begin incorporating other content types. In reality, content creators could truly author various types of content, including photos for photographers or video for videographers. Just because a piece of con [...]


How Latvia Teaches Us That “Think Global, Act Local” Is No Longer Useful In Search Marketing

Last week, I was lucky to join a number of great speakers at the iLive conference in Riga, Latvia. As with all conferences, I learned a lot. (I simply can't relate to those who go to a conference and say they've heard it all before.) I learned at least as much from the people I met and chatted with -- as well as from the people of Riga and Latvia -- as I did from the conference itself. Latvia -- A Country With A Population Less Than Houston, Texas Latvia is a very small country with a population of just over 2 million people -- around the size of a smallish Chinese or American city. The co [...]


How to Double Your Revenue With SEO

In 2012, I was privileged to handle SEO for some of the biggest Norwegian e-commerce sites. This is the story about how I doubled (and even tripled) revenue for them by following a simple, easy, yet unconventional approach that anyone -- even you -- can implement starting today. At the heart of this accomplishment lie two things which are related to one another: A focus on uncovering user intent, and then filling that need The ability (and budget) to do all that's necessary This may sound easy, but when you consult with a business that is stratified and compartmentalized into water [...]


SEO Branding: Appearance In Search Results Impacts Brand Perception

Stop a search marketer on the street, whether a grizzled veteran or relative newcomer, and ask him/her to list the top goals of ranking in the search results; they will talk to you about traffic, revenue and conversions. Likewise, in reflecting what is top of mind for search marketers, a perusal of industry websites shows a majority of articles focused on the same. Far less covered -- whether research, POVs or even "thinking-out-loud" blog posts -- is content focused on other benefits of appearing in the search results, such as brand development. For decades, marketers have invested in g [...]


Building A Macro To Download Webpages With Excel

When conducting research, it's not uncommon to perform repetitive tasks like downloading a group of webpages. A favorite tool I use to automate this is iMacros -- it's free and powerful. Just be sure to use the Firefox version, as its capabilities are limited in other browsers. Say you want a list of the Fortune 500 companies' websites. Normally, this would be an arduous task. CNN's Fortune magazine website links to the websites, but you have to visit every company profile on a separate page. Watch what I do with a spreadsheet and a macro. Get a list of company page URLs from the CNN Mon [...]


Google Autocomplete: Your Personal Brand’s First Impression

Pop Quiz:  What is the first thing a searcher sees when they type your name into the Google search bar? If your answer was related webpages found in SERPs, you're wrong -- that would be the second thing. The first thing they see are the Autocomplete suggestions that drop down from the search bar. This is your true first impression! There are three basic facts of our Google-centric world: first, like it or not, we each represent the brand of our personal name; second, we are humans, and thus, we all make mistakes; and third, Google searches for individual names are tremendously popular [...]


The Holy Grail Of Internet Marketing: Owning The Whole SERP

[caption id="attachment_155242" align="alignright" width="250"] Photo from drp.Used under Creative Commons license.[/caption] In many ways, taking charge of your search engine results page is like answering the age-old philosophical question, “Who am I” -- but for your business. You may still be in the dark about what motivates some of your personal actions, but if you’re a business owner, I’m pretty certain you know exactly what your business is all about. That’s the first step. Now you need to translate that into Google results. Sound easy? Didn’t think so. It’s a bit [...]


The Fallacy Of SEO Ranking Reports: How To Better Spend Your Time & Effort

For some time now, there’s been a growing buzz in the SEO community regarding organic ranking reports.  The conversation focuses on a significant short list of controversial topics including: accuracy of data, use of tools that violate terms of service to scrape data, necessity for client reporting, and the foundational question: are ranking reports essential for performance monitoring.  There are strong — and relevant — opinions on both sides of the debate. I would like to make the case that SEO experts’ time is better spent focusing on primary results metrics (such as organic tr [...]


The SEO Guide To Getting Started With Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools can be a powerful ally. But, if you make a mistake or put this power in the wrong hands, it can mean trouble for your search engine optimization. In this post, I provide a basic SEO Guide to Webmaster Tools to help get you started if you aren't taking full advantage of WMT yet. It is very important to point out that some of these things are more detrimental than others. Also, there could be multiple articles written about each of these tools and reports. This SEO guide to Webmaster Tools is a simple overview with a little insight. [caption id="attachment_153210" al [...]


A Primer On How To Get The Most Out Of Sitemaps

Search crawlers are becoming more and more effective every day in discovering new content pages on websites. But, that process of organic discovery can be slow and spotty, so it’s hardly any solace to sites that publish hundreds of new pages a day, or publish extremely time-sensitive content such as news articles, or publish a huge amount of specialized digital media content such as video. Even with the continuing improvements in organic search for discovering your content, it still takes time for search to find it all. It takes patience on your part, and in many cases, the content found [...]


10 Things Most SEO Consultants Hate

[caption id="attachment_151080" align="alignright" width="210"] Image via Crestock.com under license[/caption] Having spent over ten years as an SEO consultant, I've gathered a list of "top ten challenges" (or, as I think of them, my pet peeves) about the industry and our clients. I'm sure you've had similar experiences to share with our community. I'll go first, and list out 10 things that challenge and push SEO consultants to come up with their very best efforts. 1.  Fascination With Quick Fixes Our clients, normally savvy business owners, are strangely driven by the urge for "quic [...]


The Search Engine We REALLY Want To See Google (Or Microsoft) Build

When you sit down and think about it, search engines today have not changed all that dramatically in terms of depth-of-insight compared to their early days. Google recently added the Knowledge Graph for a subset of queries; but at its core, the level of insight available to the searcher remains primarily the Web links on the SERP. Yet, Google is looking to change that. With the addition of the Knowledge Graph, Google has announced its intention to evolve from a ‘search engine’ to a ‘knowledge engine.’ Matt Cutts said as much at an industry conference late last year, explaining Googl [...]


Have You Considered Privacy Issues When Using Robots.txt & The Robots Meta Tag?

Understanding the difference between the robots.txt file and Robots <META> Tag is critical for search engine optimization and security. It can have a profound impact on the privacy of your website and customers as well. The first thing to know is what robots.txt files and Robots <META> Tags are. Robots.txt Robots.txt is a file you place in your website's top level directory, the same folder in which a static homepage would go. Inside robots.txt, you can instruct search engines to not crawl content by disallowing file names or directories. There are two parts to a robots.txt [...]


You’d Want To Have A Thorough Doctor, Why Not Your SEO?

In the good old days, if you called your family doctor or GP after office hours, you'd get the nice homily... "Take 2 aspirin and call me in the morning!" That approach works well in general practice because most common ailments can be cured by rest and sleep alone. If only SEO problems can be solved just as easily, everyone would want to become an SEO consultant! The truth is, effective SEO needs a CT Scan, not just a Band-aid. Unfortunately, many clients come to SEO specialists like myself for more complex problems. Their websites don't rank well on Google They don't get a stead [...]


How A Slight Change In Reporting Can Change Your SEO Practice Forever

The past 12-18 months have seen a great deal of attention around the concept of Big Data in the marketing world. The numerous ways in which Big Data promises to increase insight into online behavior, customer profiling and more has been written about extensively. At Conductor, we agree that Big Data will lead (or has led) to new levels of insight for those marketers who choose to leverage its capabilities. But, any marketer digesting the ongoing Big Data commentary over the last 12 months or so could be forgiven for drawing the conclusion that when it comes to Big Data, the only requirement [...]


9 SEO Quirks You Should Be Aware Of

They say the devil is in the details. When it comes to search engine optimization, those details include some important quirks you need to know about. Conforming to search engine behavior Keeping-up with changes in search engine behavior Playing well with other websites to protect your SEO Avoiding common practices that obstruct SEO Here are nine examples of what I call SEO quirks. See how many you know about. 1. In Subfolder & File Names, Use Dashes, Not Underscores Good: http://www.domain.com/sub-folder/file-name.htm Bad: http://www.domain.com/sub_folder/file_name.h [...]


The Wine Enthusiast’s Guide To Tasting SEO Success

If you live on the left coast of the US, you know that wine is an integral part of the social culture. From California through Oregon to Washington State, some of the world’s best grapes are grown and magically transformed into world-class wines. Since moving to the Pacific Northwest 20+ years ago, I’ve become a bit of an amateur oenophile (it’s hard for me to escape it when the small city in which I live, Woodinville, hosts over 90 wineries and tasting rooms). I’ve also learned the proper process for not just tasting wine, but fully experiencing wine. (Hint: it’s more than glug, [...]


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