The SEO industry clearly has more than 9 lives. For every linkbait piece proclaiming the death of SEO, there’s a retort published on a marketing blog. Society can’t quite decide if SEO still has a pulse or not. As long as search exists, I don’t see SEO going away. SEO isn’t something that dies; it […]
Raven’s link building tool has been a staple for SEOs and online marketers for years. I want to make the distinction between on-page SEO and off-page SEO because I think there’s a lot of confusion about what constitutes search engine optimization and would like to broaden the use of the term. Then you can dig into Raven’s list […]
One of the greatest things about WordPress is the ability to find a plugin for just about anything. In fact, their developer community is second to none when it comes to CMS add-ons. Since plugins are a big draw to the WordPress platform, it’s common for many site admins to add a lot of plugins […]
There’s a current Web design trend that’s disadvantageous to your overall success on the Web. It’s called one-page websites – sites that only have one page and instead of linking to internal pages, just scroll when you click on the navigation. Single-page websites are neither findable nor sharable, and the user experience of unexpected scrolling is […]
People who surf the Web all day love shortcuts and efficiencies. When you’re writing an online article, it seems obvious to link out to websites that your readers might want to check out. You’re just making it convenient for them, right? That might be what you think, especially if you’re new to online marketing. Many […]
There’s a lot of new top level domains (TLDs) coming our way – almost 2,000 in all. The hope is that people and companies that couldn’t get the domain name they wanted with a .com or other common TLD will not only be able to get the one they want, but will also get one […]
Panda 4.0 rolled out over the past several days, and it seems to be a pretty significant update. While some Panda updates have been a ‘data refresh,’ there are a lot of bigger ripples this time around (~7.5% of English queries.) Panda is designed to keep websites with low quality content from ranking near the […]
A year and a half ago I spoke at a print media conference. It was all doom and gloom about how newspapers get closed down all over the place and how the future is about the Web. That’s true but only to some extent. Many problems are self-made, others are about unused opportunities, SEO for […]
Did you know? While the SEO and PR people are frantically training their outreach muscle there are already agencies that do outreach full time without even calling it marketing, PR or SEO. What do they do differently? Now don’t get me wrong. I have seen plenty of very promising and even quite advanced outreach methodology […]
It’s doesn’t matter whether you have 100, 1,000 or 11,000 issues after you audit your website for technical SEO issues. Fixing all the problems on the list can seem as impossible a task as putting a broken egg back together. That’s why people often ask me what to tackle first, especially after Raven released its […]
I remember the time when there was no Google and cluttered Web portals were the rule. Simplicity was the key to Google’s success, along with the quality of results. People rejected information overload and chose a clean interface and search result structure. Google also succeeded because it didn’t mix sponsored (paid) results with organic (non-paid) results. […]
They’re easy to ignore and time consuming to write. But well-written meta descriptions — a.k.a. snippets — can strongly influence the amount of traffic that your website receives from a specific search result. It’s important to know what details they should contain, in what format, so that machines can read them easily and display the […]
Bill Slawski and I share a path that’s very familiar for many SEOs. We both started out pursuing a completely different profession, but through happenstance found ourselves building, optimizing and marketing sites. I’ve always been drawn towards Bill’s writings, because he’s one of the only people who patiently monitors and studies Google patents. He’s also […]
Recently, another blog post “outing” a website for poor SEO practices went viral. Not only was a well-funded startup left looking bad, but its founders made excuses for their tactics, outing six other competitors in the process. Outing has always been somewhat of a hot-button issue in the SEO world. If you spend time digging […]
If you’re reading this, you probably work in Internet marketing in some capacity. But when you get together with family and friends, do you get asked questions about defining an audience or creating engagement? Probably not. Since you “work with computers all day,” chances are you’re the default tech support instead – regardless of how […]
What does building solid relationships have to do with marketing? Everything, really. How do we bring attention to our websites and businesses? By acquiring links from other websites to boost our online visibility. Raven’s link management tools can help keep your organized doing that. Through building links in an organized way, we’re doing something far […]
SEO gets more difficult. PPC is easier. Google opportunism pays. Are we following the mainstream, aka the path of least resistance? For almost a decade I have compared SEO to getting a driver’s license, while PPC is like paying for a taxi each time you want to get somewhere. Now imagine that just one company […]
This article is adapted from the Animal-Proof Your Website webinar. I remember when Google algorithm updates were named Bourbon, Vince and Florida. However, since 2011 we’ve been on an animal roll. While I would have picked more ferocious animals – like mosquito, hippo and Brazilian wandering spider – instead we’ve been subjected to the cuddly-looking […]
Did you know that you need just a few lines of code to protect yourself from mail address harvesters content framers URL spoofers and polluters? I’ve used three tiny JavaScripts for several years and still wonder why most websites don’t. These scripts can also help you improve and track your site. Coding like it’s 1999 […]
OK, so the keyword apocalypse is upon us. Pretty soon, you won’t be able to see what keywords are driving your organic search traffic. But this doesn’t have to mean you’re flying blind. I’ve been managing the SEO efforts for larger sites for more than a few years, and I’m here to tell you I’ve […]
