Reading Time: 2 min When dealing with a professional of any kind, you expect that they know the lingo. For example, I’m not very knowledgeable about how a car works, but if I’m talking to a mechanic and I mention that I think I might have an issue with my transmission, and he responds with “what’s a transmission?”, I […]
SEO
Users don’t click on your blog page, and that’s ok
Reading Time: 2 min You’ve probably heard that having a blog on your site is a great way to increase traffic and awareness, and I wholeheartedly agree with that. However, most users that visit your site won’t go over and visit your blog page. If that’s the case, then why blog at all? Because it’s intended for everyone else. […]
Page Experience is becoming more important to Google
Reading Time: 2 min For the past few years, Google’s “page experience” update has essentially been used as a tie-breaker. If you have features such as HTTPS on your site (which you should), or your site loads quickly (as it should), those weren’t huge ranking boosts. In fact, Google confirmed back in 2015 that HTTPS was essentially just a […]
Why did that site show up in the search results?
Reading Time: 2 min Google has historically been pretty quiet about what causes site to rank well in the search results. They’ll give high-level ideas (fast loading, great content, etc), but no specifics, and you can read many of my ideas from over the years in the SEO category on this blog. They’re still not opening up a bunch, […]
Why did my website traffic drop?
Reading Time: 2 min I posted a few days ago about a simple change that some websites can make to cause a huge jump in traffic, and the resulting screenshots from Google Analytics show what that looks like. But what if the opposite happens? What if your traffic dips, and you need to figure out why? Google recently published […]
The magic checkbox
Reading Time: 2 min I wrote yesterday about how you should work hard not to confuse Google, and one of the things I mentioned in there was to “make sure your site isn’t doing something stupid“. While that could mean a variety of things, there is one thing that rises above pretty much all of the others, and it’s […]
Just don’t confuse Google
Reading Time: < 1 min I’ve written about Search Engine Optimization on here quite a few times over the years, as there’s a lot of details involved in it. From a high level, though, there’s really just three things: Make sure your site isn’t doing something stupid. Produce great content. Don’t confuse Google. I’ve talked a lot about the first […]
Too many internal links can be a problem
Reading Time: < 1 min When adding content to your website, linking from one of your pages to another can be a great thing! As I’ve mentioned before (and a great example of an internal link), Google ranks individual pages, not full sites. Internal links help Google move around your site and get a better feel for the structure of […]
Empathy is key for SEO
Reading Time: < 1 min If you want to write content that ranks well in Google, empathy is a huge part of helping with those efforts. It’s not that empathetic writing is more SEO-friendly style, but really understanding your customers will help you target the right keywords. It doesn’t matter what you think people should be searching for, but it’s […]
Google isn’t looking for tricks
Reading Time: < 1 min I’ve said for years that Google doesn’t really change the rules too often. Certainly we’ve seen a few major shifts in the last 20 years (SSL matters more, mobile functionality is huge, etc), but most of what Google looks for has been exactly the same — high quality content that your users find valuable. That’s […]