One thing is certain in SEO: outranking your competition can be difficult, especially for a relatively new site. It’s outright perplexing when competitors with spammy and weak backlink profiles comfortably sit above you in the search results. There’s no need to get agitated at your competitor’s seemingly easy success. In the context of SEO, there […]
Outranked by Websites with a Weak Backlink Profile?
Link Building 101: A Beginner’s Guide to SEO and Links
Link building is one of the most valuable things you can do for SEO. We look at how links influence SEO, what links are most important, and how to get started.
Google Announces Helpful Content Update
On August 18th, 2022, Google announced their Helpful Content Update on the Google Search Central Blog. This update will be rolling out over the next two weeks, and it appears to target low-quality content for possible demotion. Google’s announcement says they want to “better reward content where visitors feel they’ve had a satisfying experience, while […]
29 Things About Running A Website I Wish I Knew Beforehand
No one said running a website was easy. In fact, running a website successfully may be one of the hardest things you ever do. Depending on what statistics you go by, between 175 and 380 new websites are created every minute. That’s a lot of competition. Even if you go back more than a decade, […]
SEO Takes Time: Stay the Course
If your website used to rank high, but has slipped over time, ask yourself this question. Are you so caught up in running your business, it is difficult find time to improve your website? You and your team are on the road, going to trade shows, doing business development, handling sales calls, managing customer support, […]
Should You Use Google Entity Stacks for SEO?
The short answer is NO. “Google Stacks” aka “Google Entity Stacks” or “Google Authority Stacks” are a link-building tactic that leverage Google properties to build relevance and information about your brand, content, and keywords. These “stacks” use interlinking Google properties like Google Docs, Google Slides, Google Sheets, custom Google Maps, and Google Sites to try […]
How to Trigger Featured Snippets in Google
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 […]
Talking Google’s Long Term Thinking on The WP Minute
Recently my colleague Matt Medeiros, invited me to contribute a piece to his new project, The WP Minute. I wanted to share some observations on the long term direction that Google has had for it’s organic ranking algorithm. Specifically, I wanted to look at statements that the then-CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, made in 2008 […]
How to Remove Old URLs from Search Results
Occasionally, you may change some pages on your website, eliminate pages altogether, or migrate to a new website platform altogether. You may notice that Google still has old URLs that no longer exist in the search results. How do you get the new web addresses indexed, and make the old outdated web addresses disappear from […]
Core Web Vitals and Their New Role in SEO
Analysis of Core Web Vitals and how the June 2021 rollout will affect SEO. Looking at Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, Cumulative Layout Shift and how to improve each.