When looking at the rating for your business on Google or your product on Amazon, what’s the ideal score you should have? Most think that a 5.0 rating is the goal, but it probably shouldn’t be. When consumers see a score of a perfect 5.0 on a product or business, they instantly become skeptical of […]
SEO
What Google’s Latest Changes Mean for Your Site
Below are the slides from my talk at WordCamp Atlanta this afternoon. If you want to keep up with this stuff from Google going forward, you can use the email subscription box on the right or subscribe to the podcast here: You can download the slides in this PDF or browse them here: Googles Latest […]
Switching to the SEO Framework plugin?
I’ve been a big fan of the Yoast SEO plugin for many years. It does a great job of helping with the SEO (“Search Engine Optimization”) on WordPress-powered websites. I first shared it with you back in 2012 and I wrote this long post about how to use it in 2013. Even today we’re still […]
The SSL checklist
Having an SSL certificate on your website (making the address start with “https” and include that little green padlock) has always been important for eCommerce sites, but never very much for any other site. However, Google is now pushing that as an increasingly important ranking signal, so if you want your website to show up […]
Keep your old content forever
As time goes on, you’ll tend to accumulate quite a bit of old content on your site. People say that “Google likes fresh content”, which is true, but Google tends to like all of that old content too! David Meerman Scott recently wrote a great post that dug into this idea, and lead off with […]
Your Google search results are a big part of your brand
Years ago I was talking with a woman named Carol about personal branding in search results. Her philosophy was to focus on one platform (LinkedIn) so she could “avoid having too much info about her show up online”. It makes sense at first, but the problem with that approach is that when someone searches for […]
301 redirects now pass their full value to the recipient
If you ever need to redirect users from one page to another — due to website consolidation, new URL or some other reason — the ideal way to do it is via a “301 redirect”. A 301 redirect is considered a permanent change, and Google will use that information to update the search results. However, […]
What is the “duplicate content penalty”?
If you’ve done much research into search engine optimization, you’ve likely heard that you should be wary of duplicate content to avoid a penalty from Google. The good news is that there isn’t really a penalty for it, but you should still certainly work to avoid any kind of duplicate content-related issues. Mark Traphagen at […]
Google doesn’t change the rules for SEO
There are a lot of misconceptions in this world. Should you shake a Polaroid picture to make it develop more quickly? No. Is the “getting millions for spilling hot coffee on yourself” lawsuit an example of our legal system gone crazy? Our legal system may be a mess, but in that case I think she […]
Keywords in your domain name don’t help
As recently as a few years ago, you could buy a domain name that was loaded with keywords and automatically rank pretty well for those queries. For example, I could purchase “marietta-used-cars.com” and rank pretty well for “marietta used cars” and related searches. Thankfully, Google is working hard to discount those kinds of URLs, known […]