Reading Time: < 1 min While it’s been well-established that users don’t click on the “blog” page for most sites, having those posts can still be incredibly valuable. The purpose of most blogs (not this one) are to drive people to the website via Google search, and then lead them to the pages that matter (registration, purchase, etc). For those […]
SEO
Artwork is signed because it matters who created it
Reading Time: < 1 min I’ve mentioned a few times on here that I’m not a fan of companies that put a “designed by” link in the footer of websites that they create. Google clearly says not to do it, and putting a link there is entirely for the (misguided) advantage of the designer, to the detriment of the site […]
Why should your website rank higher than theirs?
Reading Time: < 1 min A few weeks ago I was chatting with a friend and he was upset that his site wasn’t ranking first on Google for a particular keyword. We ran the search, and sure enough he was in fifth. I proposed a very simple challenge: click the top ranking, and then tell me if his site really […]
Marketing isn’t magic
Reading Time: 2 min I was talking to a friend a few weeks ago that was working with a new company. That company had been outsourcing their SEO (Search Engine Optimization) work to another firm for a few thousand dollars a month, but it was unclear exactly what that other firm was doing. When asked for details on what […]
Branded searches matter too
Reading Time: 2 min When companies invest in SEO (Search Engine Optimization), their main focus is on unbranded terms. For example, if you’re a roofer you might be trying to rank for things like “roof replacement”, “roofing in Marietta” and other terms like that. This is a fantastic approach, but it often overshadows the value of focusing on your […]
SEO hasn’t ever really changed
Reading Time: 2 min If you’ve ever done work on your website to improve your search engine optimization (SEO), and you’ve done it in a legit way, the techniques really haven’t changed much over the years. Google’s Danny Sullivan recently tweeted (via SE Roundtable) that very thing with two comments. First, he simply said: “Our good advice then remains […]
Location pages are no longer helpful for SEO
Reading Time: 2 min Nearly a decade ago, I wrote a post explaining how Google doesn’t really change the rules when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO). While they change the algorithm quite often, virtually all of those changes are simply to tighten up what they’ve been telling us for years. Now they’re coming after useless “location pages” […]
Hashtags are just words
Reading Time: 2 min You’ll find hashtags on almost every social media platform, and occasionally on some websites. While they can be very helpful in certain cases, they tend to be wildly overused. First, they almost never help with rankings. If you include the hashtag “#DigitalMarketing” in a post of yours, the only value that brings is if other […]
AI is going to kill SEO
Reading Time: 2 min It may take quite a while, but peak SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is behind us, and the relevance of it will only go down from here. That’s not to say that SEO isn’t important, as it still can be a major source of traffic for many sites, but the value will slowly erode over the […]
Keyword-rich domain names can cause problems
Reading Time: < 1 min It’s long been known that keyword-rich domain names don’t really help with search rankings. If your site is “www.cheap-used-cars.com”, you’re not going to rank better for “cheap used cars” simply due to the domain name. That said, I never really saw much downside to them. They don’t help, but they don’t hurt. However, Google’s John […]