Reading Time: 2 min Over the years, much has been said about optimizing images to help rank better in Google, and it’s mostly accurate. The key is that images will generally only help you rank better in Google Image Search, not in the main search results. Google’s John Mueller laid it out pretty clearly in a recent SEO Office […]
SEO
Google sees different types of web pages essentially the same way
Reading Time: 2 min Your website likely includes a wide variety of content types. You have some normal pages, some blog posts, maybe a custom feed for podcast, some category pages for your blog, things like that. Which does Google prefer? They don’t really care. It’s not that every page will rank as well as the others, but that […]
Be careful when measuring your targets
Reading Time: 2 min A few weeks ago, Seth Godin shared a pretty simple statement from Charles Goodhart: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.“ To be honest, it took me a little while to understand what he meant. We set a lot of goals at our company, and we measure our progress […]
You don’t need more website traffic
Reading Time: < 1 min A goal of almost every website owner in the world is more traffic. “If I’m making $100/day with 1,000 visitors, then if I double my traffic I’ll double my revenue!“ It’s not always that easy. Getting more traffic on your site isn’t a bad thing, but rather than getting more traffic you should work on […]
Don’t overthink SEO
Reading Time: 2 min There is a tendency to think that ranking well in Google is a big, mysterious, complex thing. It’s really not. I said years ago that Google doesn’t change the rules for SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and that still holds true. Things change frequently, for sure, but most of those are just Google getting better at […]
Spot the imposter
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 […]
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 […]