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.
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Eric Enge's latest articles
The rise of personal assistants and the death of the search box
Columnist Eric Enge recaps the SMX West 2016 keynote by Googler Behshad Behzadi, who envisions a not-too-distant future in which voice search becomes more ubiquitous -- and may even replace the search box.
Test Your Knowledge Of SEO
Think you're an SEO guru? Take Eric Enge's SEO quiz and see how well you do!
What Is Your SEO Learning Program?
How do you train and onboard new SEO hires quickly and efficiently to ensure maximum productivity? Columnist Eric Enge shares how TripAdvisor (as well as his own company) is achieving this through education.
Six Key Themes From “Meet The Search Engines” At SMX East
Contributor Eric Enge recaps a discussion with Gary Illyes (Google) and Duane Forrester (Bing) about the current and future state of search engines.
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.
7 Steps To Semantic Content Excellence
What is semantic content optimization, why do you need it, and how can you implement it? Columnist Eric Enge answers these questions and more.
How The 100 User Model Can Change Your Approach To On-Page SEO
User experience has become increasingly important as a ranking factor in search, but how can you measure something that's seemingly so subjective? Columnist Eric Enge offers up his method.
Using Partnerships To Accelerate Content Marketing & Link Building
So you've built great content, but how can you take it to the next level to boost your visibility and attract more links? Columnist Eric Enge recommends partnerships.
Your First Steps In Content Marketing
New to content marketing and not sure where to begin? Columnist Eric Enge provides a helpful outline for SEOs (or anyone) looking to start incorporating this crucial digital marketing tactic.
Authorship Is Dead; Long Live Authorship
Google's authorship program may be over, but columnist Eric Enge notes it's still important to work on building authority.
SEO Nightmare: When NoIndex Goes Bad
Columnist Eric Enge discusses common issues that arise from improper implementation of the noindex tag.
Dealing With That Key Exec Who Thinks All SEO Is Spam
You may have a killer SEO strategy mapped out for this year, but that won't matter if someone in the C-suite thinks you're just a spammer. Columnist Eric Enge advises how to navigate this tricky situation.
So, The CTO Hates Your SEO Project…
Columnist Eric Enge shares his tips for working with a dev team that doesn't fully understand search engine optimization.
The 4 Hardest Parts Of SEO
I have been doing search engine optimization (SEO) since 2002, and I’ve overcome a fair number of SEO challenges since then. Ultimately, though, the hardest things about the job are not what you might expect. In my opinion, here are the four most difficult parts about achieving SEO success: 1. Identifying The Right Sources For Information There is a […]
How Google Is Using Dynamic Testing To Build Out The Knowledge Graph
Google is constantly testing new ways to answer user queries. Columnist Eric Enge has been watching these experiments closely and shares what he's observed.
Hold Your Horses: The Knowledge Vault Is Just A Research Project For Now
You may have heard buzz about Google's "Knowledge Vault." Contributor Eric Enge explains what it is and the real-world implications you should be considering.
It’s Over: The Rise & Fall Of Google Authorship For Search Results
Anyone who follows Google knows that nothing it creates is immune from elimination. Like so many efforts before it, Authorship is fading into the sunset.
Penguin: Google’s Punitive Algorithm – And A Call To Google To Fix It
For many years, a staple of my discussions with people who had been penalized by Google was the following advice: “Don’t worry — at Google, there is a culture of letting you repent of your sins and then be forgiven.” Even if you had made some bad choices, if you started doing the right things, […]
Assessing Hummingbird’s Impact On Search — 10 Months Later
On September 26, 2013, Google let slip that it had updated its overall search platform, which they referred to as “Hummingbird.” In this post, I am going to take a look back at the past year to see what impact Hummingbird may have had. One of my goals with this post is to help dispel […]
How Content Quality Analysis Works With SEO
The Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors panel at the recent SMX Advanced show stimulated some fresh thinking for me on the role of content analysis and SEO. In particular, Marcus Tober of Searchmetrics shared some interesting data from one of their latest studies. What I’d like to discuss here is the notion of co-occurrence […]
The Indirect SEO Benefits Of Guest Posting
If you follow the world of search engine optimization (SEO) at all, you know about Matt Cutts’ January 20, 2014 post, The Decay and Fall of Guest Blogging for SEO. For many people, this was a shock; but frankly, it was inevitable. Then, on March 19th, Google Penalized MyBlogGuest. This shocked people even more, largely […]
Syndicated Content: Why, When & How
Done correctly, syndication can be a very effective way to help develop your reputation and visibility online. To many, this is a controversial topic, but it really shouldn’t be. You just need to know why it can help you, when to do it and how to do it the right way. And that’s what I […]
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 […]
Just Say No To SEO (Sometimes)
There are some SEO rules that you should break. While conventional SEO wisdom advises certain types of behavior, there are times when that advice should be ignored. SEO must be viewed as part of a larger overall marketing picture, and sometimes other considerations must rule the day. Below are three situations where the standard SEO […]
99 Zingers – Tips That Will Challenge Your Digital Marketing Beliefs
I love using short, one-line zinger phrases to communicate key points about any given topic, and SEO is no exception. I have accumulated tons of these and decided to compile them into a single post! To supplement my list, I posted on Google+ to crowdsource more of them; for each of those provided to me, […]
What Everybody Missed About Hummingbird: Social Signals
Danny Sullivan joined me for a live broadcast event via a Hangout on Air (HOA) this past Halloween, and this included a major revelation about Hummingbird and Social signals. Scott Scowcroft has done an awesome job of extracting this part of the broadcast into a short, 5-minute HOA Nugget video (aka “The Scott Treatment”) for […]
Google And SEO Communications: Swahili Vs. Latin
There are many in the SEO community that get very frustrated with Google, and one of the reasons for this is simple: there is a communications gap. This is not a simple case of US English vs. UK English, but more like Swahili vs. Latin. Many publishers — and many who profess to be SEO […]
Study Shows No Clear Evidence That Google+ Drives Ranking
At SMX Advanced, I presented results from a study we had done that convinced me that links in shares from Google Plus and Facebook behave like traditional web-based links. My statements at SMX Advanced were later disputed by Matt Cutts during his keynote interview by Danny Sullivan, leading to a live discussion — Matt even […]
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 […]
Long Tail Content For SEO — 2013 & Beyond
There was the old way of doing SEO for the long tail. It worked for a long time, and lots of people made lots of money doing it. But those days are gone. What was the old way, you ask? In a nutshell: Research a long list of long-tail keywords Create a page for each […]
How To Evaluate A Potential Website Acquisition
There are a number of things to take into consideration when buying a website. For purposes of this article, I don’t mean the usual business considerations such as price, terms, etc. Let’s dig into how you need to look at this from an SEO perspective. You can also use this thinking to evaluate whether or […]
Removing URLs From The Index In Bulk
Need to remove URLs from the index? For a small number of URLs, this can be a relatively straightforward process — when you are dealing with thousands or tens of thousands, it can be a lot more complex, especially if you feel a great deal of urgency about the matter. This is what I am […]
Enterprise SEO Interview With ABC’s John Shehata
I spoke recently with John Shehata, the director of search for ABC News. Since he owns the SEO responsibility for a number of large media properties, I leapt at the chance to explore some of the things he has learned along the way. We dug in and explored the challenges of educating a large media […]
SEO Opportunities Begin Well Before New Website Development
Launching a new site, or any major site update, for a large enterprise comes with some unique challenges. A short summary of some of the most common include those listed below. SEO Challenges: New Site Launch Or Major Updates Too many decision makers. This is one of the more basic headaches. Product marketing, engineering, PR […]
Why Do Brands Overlook The SEO Opportunity For Non-Branded Keywords?
Many of the large enterprises we work with have a significant brand. They can mount advertising campaigns to create leverage for all of their marketing efforts. Sometimes, this comes out a bit sideways from an SEO perspective. What I mean is that some of these brands view SEO solely as a means to harvest the […]
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? […]
Why You Need To Complement Your In-House Team With External Expertise
I am a big fan of large enterprise organizations having an in-house SEO team. However, there are strong arguments for supplementing the efforts of your in-house team with help from external SEO expertise. Below are a two major reasons why. The Complexity Of Topics It has been stated many times by the search engines — there […]