Featured Snippets are highlighted text, video, or text and image content at the top of the page in selected search results. Some digital marketers also refer to the Featured Snippet as “Position Zero” because it sits at the top of the organic search results. Snippets that are informational text are displayed with slightly larger text […]
How to Trigger Featured Snippets in Google
How Might Google Define “Good” Content?
Nearly every SEO article you will ever read give us the same advice. Create good content and you’ll rank higher. How might Google define “good content” for SEO? Better question, how would Google grade millions of pages that could match a search query, and decide if the content is “good”, “bad”, or “mediocre”? Also, the […]
Google BERT Update: Understanding Search Queries More Effectively
Published October 29th, 2019
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Google announced on October 25th, 2019 that they are rolling out a new update to their algorithm, named BERT. BERT is an acronym for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. The “transformers” are words that change the context or a sentence or search query. The “encoder representations” are subtle concepts and meanings in natural language that […]
Create Great Content and You’ll Get Links: Truth or Fiction?
Published August 17th, 2019
4 Comments on Create Great Content and You’ll Get Links: Truth or Fiction?
A phrase you’ll hear a lot: Create great content, and you’ll get links naturally. You may have found it’s much harder than that. Even when you create “skyscraper content” it can be difficult to acquire links. So how do you get back links in the real world?
Did the Google Search Quality Raters Visit Your Site?
What are the Google Quality Search Rater Guidelines? They are a checklist given to Google independent contractors, who are tasked with scoring the search results that Google returns for certain search phrases. If you want to see the Search Quality Rater Guidelines, there’s a link here. They were last updated publicly on July 20, 2018. […]
Should You Change the Publish Date of a Post for SEO?
Today’s question is, “What criteria does Google look at when they are trying to figure out the last time a blog post or article was updated?” “I have some blog posts that need updating. Some need a few tweaks. Others need major overhauls.” “But I need to know what they are looking for when reconsidering […]
A Tale of Two Companies
Today, I’m going to tell you the story of two companies. Company A and Company B were both founded in the same year, and sold a similar product line. Both companies went trade shows, built a distributor network, and were making sales calls every day. Each company had a decent looking website when they launched, […]
Presentation: Deep Dive on SEO (for Nevada County Online)
Published November 4th, 2018
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Recently, I had a chance to do a presentation for the Nevada County Online Meetup. This was a deep dive on SEO, which included a presentation, and answering questions from the audience, during a lunch and learn. Fortunately, this presentation was videotaped for posterity, and is available on the NCO YouTube channel. What I wanted […]
How To Do a SEO Audit
We want to show you how we do our SEO audits, because there is power in sharing information, and because most of our competitors won’t be anywhere near this thorough in their own “SEO audits”. Step by step breakdown of what we look for when auditing a website.
Do WordPress Tags Help SEO?
WordPress is currently the world’s most popular content management system (CMS), a fancy say of saying it’s a platform for building websites. If you have a blog on your WordPress site, you can label the posts with different categories and tags. These are ways to sort the articles into taxonomies, so people can find more […]