Why entity search is necessary for SEO success
Keywords are foundational, but entities may be the future. At SMX Next, a panel of SEO experts shows how marketers can optimize their content for entity search.
Topic: User Intent
Your website doesn’t need to cater to everybody — and that’s OK
When you have your target audience at the forefront and keep a business mindset of catering to them, you will see the benefits.
The problem with the ‘structured content’ mindset
As Google gets better at understanding content it will more important to focus on real readability metrics and not something fabricated by your favorite SEO tool.
Google search quality guidelines update breaks down dictionary and encyclopedia results and more
Google added a new section for rating dictionary and encyclopedia results for different queries, emphasizes the importance of understanding the user intent and query.
Raising the stakes on product category pages
Aleyda Solis and Arsen Rabinovich discuss ways to make your category pages more competitive and adapt to inventory shifts.
Video: A.J. Ghergich on not chasing the Google algorithm and focusing on human intentions
From scaling your agency all the way to thinking about SEO in a deeper way - check out this interview.
How a physician review site recovered from Google’s ‘medic’ update
A website in the healthcare niche saw improvement after removing the Google auto-translate plugin and rating schema from their translated pages.
On-Page SEO
A main type of SEO is called On-Page SEO. This means anything that you can do to a page to make it seem like a good page. Well actually that’s not quite right – you need to do everything you can to make an *actually* good page. Google is trying to show people the pages […]
How Search Engines Rank Pages
Google ranks pages by using an algorithm to search its massive database of everything it can find on the internet, and find pages that seem relevant to each individual search. For popular searches, it will have cached the results (or some table of top results at least) so that it can serve them even faster. […]
SEO Ranking Factors in 2017: What’s Important and What’s Not
What are the most crucial search engine ranking factors these days? Panelists at SMX East discussed their findings and provided practical advice for putting this data into action.
It’s time to embrace new strategies for apparel: Broadening tactics through user intent
Clothing retailers, listen up! Columnist Thomas Stern explains why apparel brands must evolve their strategies and measurement beyond just conversions.
Study: How (and why) Google ranks videos differently from the way YouTube does
According to a new report from Stone Temple Consulting, when Google returns multiple YouTube videos in the results pages, the ranking order between Google and YouTube varies 56.8% of the time.
Understanding intent through voice search
Bing and Google are looking at the future of search, and both are seeing a future that involves search engines as the intelligence platform powering digital assistance with daily life — personalized help that enables people to get more done efficiently and spend real time focused on what they care about most. Today’s digital assistants, […]
Link Wars: The Force Awakens
Link building looked different a long time ago (in a galaxy far, far away). Columnist Winston Burton explains how things have changed and what works today.
LinkedIn Is Getting Smarter With Enhanced Search Features & Improved Query Results
Starting today, LinkedIn members will begin seeing a number of enhancements to the professional networking site, including a new unified search feature and a smarter query intent algorithm that continuously serve up more relevant results. With over 5.7 billion searches performed on LinkedIn last year, the new unified search experience is one of the most […]
A Test, Not A Bug: Bing Deep Links To Facebook, eBay, Craigslist Under Google’s Search Result
It looked like a screwup. If you searched for [google] on Bing, you saw Deep Links to Facebook, eBay and Craigslist underneath the main search result for Google. So, in my article earlier today, I called it a “strange bug” in Bing’s search results. I was wrong. It wasn’t a bug; it was a test […]
Keyword Classification: Understanding The “Why” Of SEO
Keyword classification is often the missing ingredient in SEO plans. Without understanding the reasons why people search, search engine optimizers will often misinterpret or improperly classify keyword phrases. How do we understand the "why" part of the optimization process?
Peeking Into the World Of Google’s Algorithm Changes With Google Search Quality Head Amit Singhal
Earlier this week, Google Fellow Amit Singhal gave the opening keynote at SMX London. Although Matt Cutts has always been the public face of all parts of Google’s unpaid search, his realm is primarily web spam. Singhal has been speaking publicly more often (notably when Panda launched) and oversees search quality. Or, as he described […]
QUIZ: Test Your Knowledge Of Searcher Behavior
Think you know the web searcher goals and behaviors that are important for long term search engine visibility? Take this quiz and find out.
Usability & Internet Search Marketing: A More Unified Approach
For years there were two camps – website usability and search engine optimization. Rarely did they acknowledge each other, let alone work as a team. Each side argued they knew best how to make web pages findable in search engines. They’re both right. The website usability house is focused on human behavior. They follow along […]
Five Visionaries Sum Up The Future Of Search
For the past several months in this column, I’ve been asking a number of people the same question: Where will search go from here? For the next two columns, I wanted to sum up what came out of those conversations and find the common themes. A Shift In Our Expectations Of Success A number of […]
Where Is Search Going: More With Yahoo’s Shashi Seth
In part one of my interview with Shashi Seth, the Senior VP of Search Products at Yahoo, we looked at what Yahoo’s current thinking is about search since the Yahoo/Bing integration. But the point of this series of columns is not where search is, but where search is going. And that’s where we’ll jump off […]
Live From Today’s Bing/Facebook Announcement
We’re here at Microsoft’s Mountain View campus, waiting for news from Bing and Facebook. I’m liveblogging the event; Greg Sterling is sitting next to me ready to provide the color commentary, and Danny Sullivan has written an in-depth analysis of the new features that we’ll link over to as soon as the embargo lifts in […]
3 Search Types All SEOs Should Know
Does your website accommodate common searcher behaviors? Here are 4 types of searches all SEOs should know...and how you can accommodate them on your site.
Bing’s Stefan Weitz: Rethinking The Search Experience
Way back when, in the dying weeks of 2009, I asked the question, “Where does search go from here?” It seems that everyone agrees we’ve barely scratched the potential that is web search, but what might that scratch reveal? What will our searching look like in two years? In five years, or even in ten […]
Google Doesn’t Want Searchers To Find SEOs & Web Designers
If you go to Google.com and type “hamburgers,” “shoes,” “candy,” “grills,” “beer,” and hundreds of other terms of ambiguous local intent, Google will almost always show you local results on a map that’s tied to your IP address. But type in “seo,” “seo company,” “web design company” and several terms related to these two types […]
Commercial Intent & Web Search Behaviors
When do web searchers have commercial intent? What types of search queries do they try before actually making a purchase?
Live Blogging SMX Keynote With Microsoft’s Qi Lu
I’m live blogging Danny’s interview with Qi Lu, head of search for Microsoft. Before the interview begins we first see one of the new Bing TV commercials, which is funny. Under the heat of the lights Danny and Qi Lu take off their outer shirts: Lu wears a Bing shirt, Danny has one one that […]
Yahoo: We’re Moving From Web Of Pages To Web Of Objects
Yahoo held a search event today in San Francisco at which the company connected the dots among a number of search initiatives that it has rolled out over the past couple of years: Search Assist, BOSS, Search Monkey, Search Pad and oneSearch. There was no announcement but a provocative reframing of all these efforts. The […]
Microsoft Live Search Tests: Best Match And Categorized Listings
The latest SEO talk this week has been all about Google’s algorithm changes that presumably favor big brands, but Microsoft Live Search has been experimenting with changes of its own that seemingly would help big brands the most (although ironically, big brands may not like it all that much). Today, I came across some interesting […]
Meta-Tag Optimization Tips: A Search Usability Perspective
I know. I know. Seasoned search engine optimization (SEO) professionals might yawn and roll their eyes when the subject of meta-tag optimization comes up, as they might think, "Meta-tag optimization is SO 1990s." Personally, I think meta-tag content gets a bad rap because, in the past, many SEO professionals and website owners exploited meta-tags to […]
Eight Keyword Research Mistakes That Are Costing You Money
One of the reasons search marketing is so effective is that it delivers information on products and services to people who are actively seeking them out. People enter search terms into a search engine and the engine provides sites and ads that are relevant to the terms. This arrangement is beneficial for the user because […]