Tag Archives: SEO
Happy New Year! Our teams are back from holiday time with their families and ready for an exciting year ahead. But before we welcome 2012, we thought it might be fun to look back on some of our favorite stories of 2011. It seemed fitting to pick 11.
Here you have a list of eleven posts from across our offices, spanning topics from customer experience and branding to measurement and mobile. It’s a great overview of trends and technologies that shaped the past year of digital marketing.
We thank you for continuing to read Experience Matters and are looking forward to bringing you another year of timely and compelling points of view.
Knowing where to focus your time and energy when it comes to executing SEO tactics that will have value and drive rankings, traffic, and conversions is key to building a long term strategy to grow your online business.
Below you will find the 12 most overrated SEO tactics that don’t work. I am sure some of you will disagree with me on some of them, which is ok, but if you disagree with me, ask yourself if the tactic you disagree with is a long term strategy that aligns with building a quality online business and brand.
A good rule of thumb is to ask yourself “would I feel comfortable explaining this tactic to Matt Cutts, Lead of the Google Spam Team, or would I hide my computer screen if he was standing behind me watching me execute it?”.
1. Mass directory submission
If you have a website or search Google, I am sure you have seen those ads for submitting a website to 1,000 directories for $99.99. They claim that you can get hundreds of “high quality” back links for basically no work. This is not a good tactic, especially for new sites. It can hurt your link graph and be a signal to the search engines that since you are receiving a large number of low quality links, your site is a low quality website as well. If you are going to do directory submission I would suggest reading this post to get some information about valuable SEO directories.
2. Reciprocal links
We have all received those emails from random people asking to trade links (most of us just hit delete after getting a good laugh from them). This is an old strategy that was popular years ago when SEO was in its infancy. Read More
We’re going to change things up a bit for this month’s Tech Trends post. Instead of quickly discussing a handful of new trends in technology, the focus now will be on a single important topic. This month that topic is a hidden gem in HTML5 called Microdata. When we hear about the capabilities of HTML5, we typically see things like Geolocation, CSS animations, mobile-compatibility, native audio/video support, or even 3D WebGL experiences — but rarely is there any discussion about how HTML5 can help drive more traffic to websites via search engines. This is where Microdata comes in and it’s going to fundamentally change the way we discover and consume content on the web.
Microdata is a component of HTML5 aimed at adding more semantics and contextual information to existing content on a page. By doing so, Microdata provides others, like search engines or browsers, with more information about the contents of a page. This allows them to handle data in new and interesting ways. For example, a product detail page may list out a product’s SKU, pricing, reviews and availability — but there’s no real way for Google’s search engine crawlers to know exactly what that information means. With Microdata, we can explicitly tell Google how much our products cost and what rating our users gave it. But why would we want to do this? Read More
With the vast amount of SEO knowledge, tips and tactics found on the web, it can be difficult for businesses and individuals trying to learn how to do white hat SEO to cut through all the clutter and find sound advice. Below you will find a list of the 12 most valuable pieces of SEO advice that I can give you from the last 8 years of doing SEO for small local business websites, large content websites, and ecommerce websites.
1. Quality links beat quantity of links
Links are still a valuable metric and asset for a website to acquire. Where sites get into trouble is when they think they can take short cuts when building links. They get enticed by the “get 100 backlinks for $9.99″ emails and think there is a quick fix or automated tool for building links. This is exactly the wrong approach to take. Building links is a process that includes creating valuable content and then marketing that content to other blogs, websites, and social networks. Acquiring quality trusted back links is a slow (in most cases), tedious and difficult process, yet is a necessary evil for any new or existing website.
2. Don’t forget the users, balance is key
Many SEOs get so focused on ranking well that they forget that Google and the other search engines are taking into account bounce rate, user metrics, and overall content value when ranking websites. Balance is the key to most things in life, and SEO is no exception. There needs to a balance between designing for the users and building a strong SEO foundation; going to far in one direction will have negative affects overall.
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Hello World! I welcome you to the first installment of the new Tuesday Tech Trends feature–a monthly gathering of some of the most talked and tweeted-about tech stories. From HTML5 to emerging mobile technologies, you can expect to find it here (sprinkled with a little personal commentary here and there).
Title Junk
Page titles play a large factor in a site’s SEO performance — so it’s important to make sure all relevant keywords make it in there. In this post, however, John Gruber talks about how we often abuse the ever-important <title> tag. Whether it be unnecessary decorative symbols or keyword stuffing, Gruber provides a number of examples, from Fox News to CNN, of poorly constructed page titles and how it makes them inaccessible in search results, mobile devices, and bookmarks.
A Sneak Peek at Android 3.0, Honeycomb
Google gives us a peak into the next version of Android, Honeycomb. Android 3.0 is the first release of Google’s mobile operating system designed for tablet devices. It’s a preview of what is likely to be the most widely used mobile platform of 2011. This is one to keep an eye out on. The iPad might be hot right now, but just wait until tablet manufacturers get ahold of Google’s latest creation.
Last night I had the pleasure of speaking to the Chicago Interactive Design and Development group (CIDD) about SEO.
The audience was made up of a wide variety of people with diverse knowledge and backgrounds, so tailoring the discussion towards one particular skill set was not possible. Instead I started by talking about the foundation of SEO and how the search engines work and a brief history of what the search engines algorithms are based upon.
The primary content of the presentation focused around the basics steps someone should take when trying to optimize their website, but the fun part came once we took at look at the future of SEO.
When it comes to site optimization there are 3 essential steps I discussed last night.
1) Technical optimization – Ensuring that your site is free of roadblocks for search engines and is able to be crawled quickly and easily.
2) Content Optimization – Once the site is fully crawlable, you want to present content in meaningful manner that includes keywords that users are looking for.
3) Offsite Optimization – We want to drive traffic and spiders to the site from external sources. These sources would preferably be of high quality and related content to our website.
