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.
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 […]
On June 7, 2011 Google announced rel=author. There are many articles that explain the mechanics of how to setup rel=author tagging, including this excellent one by Rick DeJarnette on Search Engine Land. While this announcement got people thinking about author authority, an “authority strategy” for your business involves a lot more than rel=author. It invoves […]
Getting in the development schedule in an enterprise environment can be one of the most challenging parts of the job for an SEO professional. The dev team has so many different people coming at them with projects to do, and prioritizing those projects can be a mess. Add to that the frustrating reality that the […]
In most enterprises, PR generally focuses on creating a certain image or viewpoint about a company or its products. In doing this, PR departments seek to get coverage in print media and develop relationships with thought leaders and influencers in the company’s market space. The general purpose is to build the brand, resulting in increased […]
The need for integration between social media and SEO is steadily increasing. We have all read the articles about the way that content is +1’ed by people you follow is shown in Google results (or how content Liked by a Facebook friend is elevated in Bing results). You have also most likely seen articles about […]
At SMX West, I sat in on a panel with Adobe’s Warren Lee and he offered some great insights on Enterprise SEO. As a result of this panel, we had some follow up discussions about those challenges, and I asked him to write up some of the things we discussed. The column below is the […]
While the industry is maturing, SEO still remains a largely misunderstood discipline. There are three main reasons for this: The search engines keep the details of their ranking algorithms private. There is a lot of bad information and misperceptions that are presented as SEO wisdom online. The algorithms search engines use are frequently changing. As […]
SMX West is approaching fast, and one of the sessions that caught my eye was the Enterprise SEO – Challenges & Solutions. The panel is loaded with speakers with deep experience in enterprise SEO. I decided to reach out to the panelists and get a preview of their presentations, so I asked each of them […]
An increasing number of enterprises are engaging in PR, SEO, social media, and content marketing. Having these four areas covered is great, but many companies are not getting anywhere near the full ROI from their investment in them. In today’s column, I am going to explore the reasons why that is the case, and outline […]
During the week of January 4th, I had the privilege of spending a week with the Bing and adCenter teams in Bellevue. First off, I would like to thank them both for their tremendous hospitality. Today, I want to outline some of the most interesting conclusions I have from the meetings with the adCenter team […]
There are many things that categorize a Made for SEO website. Large scale sites are prone to fall into this trap, because their scale often has them already competing for a large number of search terms across their many pages. Some of the biggest factors that mark a Made-for -SEO Site are: Thin slicing on […]
I am of the opinion that website publishers need to differentiate or die. Earlier this year, I discussed some ways to differentiate in The Importance of Differentiated Content. One great option is to obtain lots of user generated content (UGC). Easy to say, but often not easy to do. Today’s column will go over some […]
The click-through rate benefits are enough to make markup in your content, particularly in those cases where it is already known to be supported, a worthwhile effort.
Successful SEO strategies demand differentiation. In today’s column, I am going to outline a seven-step process for figuring out how to differentiate your website. You may be struggling with how to do this because your product may be boring, and your space is crowded. So, I am going to start by taking a look at […]
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 […]
Internet Marketing is in a state of constant change. This places major stresses on organizations that try to keep up and are not quite sure what initiatives they should invest in and which ones are a waste of time. For many companies, one of the biggest current challenges is to decide how much energy to […]
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 […]
One of the hot topics at SMX Advanced in Seattle this June was the best way to handle paginated sites. It seemed like the topic that would not go away, as it came up in panel after panel. The reason this happened is that it is a complicated topic. There are two major scenarios that […]
Back in December, Danny Sullivan provided clarity for us on social signals that Google and Bing count as ranking factors. More recently, I spoke with Stefan Weitz who let me know that my results may be personalized if a friend of mine has “Liked” something related to my search query — i.e., that page my […]
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, […]
Since the advent of the Panda update (aka Farmer) people have been scrambling to understand what happened, and how to move forward. Vanessa Fox has provided some great info on Panda as well as the latest on Panda from SMX West. I decided to dig a bit into some of the data on the winners […]
I puzzled over the title of this column for a bit. The initial title I wrote was “The Importance of Unique Content”, and I actually mean something different than that. Most of the time when we talk about unique content we mean not simply using copies of someone else’s text (whether it be plagiarized or […]
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 […]
Recently I posted an open request for SEO questions on my blog. The first response was from Eric Itzkowitz, who asked about which business opportunities might become sustainable models in local search. The local search space is proving to be a major dynamo, and the rate of change is frenetic. Locally Oriented Searches Very recently, […]
The holiday season is underway, and unfortunately many of us have waited for the last minute to attend to our SEO for the season. SEO for the holiday season really is best done in August, September or October. But what if you didn’t get to it this year? Is it too late? Not necessarily. There […]
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 […]
Speculation time! In this week’s post I review scenarios where I believe that Google’s alleged ranking signals might not be what we accept or even conform to guidelines published in Webmaster Central help files. Here are some of the factors that I find ambiguous or unclear, along with some thoughts on why conventional wisdom might […]
Building links for a well known brand site that already has 100,000+ links (or even one million plus links) is an interesting challenge. If your site has that many links, chances are that your competitors have a lot as well. When your link building challenge is this big, you need to think about the problem […]
Many products are naturally seasonal in nature. For example, Halloween costumes are generally only sold in the weeks preceding the holiday each year. However, while this seasonal behavior is easy to conceptualize, it can frustrate your ability to measure the progress of your SEO efforts, and the traffic growth you would like to see from […]
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 […]
On May 11, 2010, Google was granted a new patent that basically states that all links on a page do not have to carry (or pass) the same weight. The concept is that the value a link should pass to a target page will be largely based on the probability that a user would click […]
Google continues to make a big push for improving your website download performance. Earlier in May Google’s Maile Ohye posted a video on the Google Webmaster Central Blog on the case for speeding up your site, tools for helping you find speed related problems, and some specific speed optimization tips. Some of the more interesting […]
Online marketing is complex, and it seems that the number of factors you need to consider to make sure you have the optimal strategy is only increasing. Therefore, it might be tempting to conclude that SEO, or more broadly, online marketing, is something that needs to be outsourced. There is certainly a strong case to […]
My last post focused on selling the benefits of SEO in a large enterprise. Once you have done that you will already have made great progress, but now you need to take the next step: getting your management team to understand what is means to pursue SEO, and how it affects the business at an […]
This is the first of a two part series on selling SEO in a large enterprise. Part 2 will be published as my next Industrial Strength column. In Part 1, the focus will be on why getting search traffic is important to an organization. Part 2 will explore some of the consequences of that realization. […]
Ecommerce sites featuring product catalogs present interesting search engine optimization challenges. Typically, these sites will carry large volumes of products, organized into various groupings. Let’s take a look at a snippet of the Zappos home page as an example.: Notice in the left menu the neat categorization of the shoes category of products on the […]
One of the most powerful link building tactics is to create great content to give to third party web sites and requiring an attribution link back to your site. Many web site publishers are constantly looking for quality content. For example, bloggers have a continual need to publish to maintain their relevance. This need is […]
The long tail is something that has been written about many times, by many people, including this article by me on Search Engine Land. In spite of all this coverage, the great majority of publishers (that I’ve encountered at any rate) aren’t aware of what I call the “decisive long tail advantage.” This is the […]
Your site will pay a penalty in search rankings when you make modifications to content, structure or domain name. Here's how to estimate what kind of hit you can expect to take, and how to minimize the damage.
Today I will make a case that nearly every organization should offer SEO training to anyone who even remotely touches the company’s web site, and why every senior manager should also be encouraged to attend. Failure to train people can lead to serious problems, with a frightful waste of time, blown schedules, wasted expenditure and […]