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Using Multiple Regression to Predict Organic Traffic
S

Using Multiple Regression to Predict Organic Traffic

As we wade through endless rows and columns of ranks, rates, and revenue, it is important to never lose sight of the metrics that drive our most actionable findings. If conversion is king, visits are vassals, the substantive backbone upon which a website’s success depends. Given that the maximization of traffic is key to our success as SEOs, it is vital to identify and control the factors that determine this metric.

SEO and Emotion
Gyi Tsakalakis

SEO and Emotion

Emotions are a strong motivator of human behavior. This is even true on the web. The more that ranking signals continue to evolve, the more significant the role that emotion-motivated actions play in search engine optimization. After all, one of our primary focuses as SEOs is to develop content that makes everyone who sees it want to share it and say wow.

Just How Smart Are Search Robots?
Michael King

Just How Smart Are Search Robots?

Matt Cutts announced at Pubcon that Googlebot is "getting smarter." He also announced that Googlebot can crawl AJAX to retrieve Facebook comments coincidentally only hours after I unveiled Joshua Giardino's research that suggested Googlebot is actually a headless browser based off the Chromium codebase at SearchLove New York. I'm going to challenge Matt Cutts's statements, Googlebot hasn't just recently gotten smarter, it actually hasn’t been a text-based crawler for some time now; nor has BingBot or Slurp for that matter. There is evidence that Search Robots are headless web browsers and the Search Engines have had this capability since 2004.

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Building The Implicit Social Graph
Justin Briggs

Building The Implicit Social Graph

Google Plus is Google's latest attempt at building an explicit social graph that they control, but Google has been building out an implicit social graph for quite some time. This graph is still relatively naive compared to the maturity of the link graph, but search engines continue to develop this graph. Since it is already directly influencing rankings, and its value will increase, it&r...

What Every SEO Should Know About IIS
David Sottimano

What Every SEO Should Know About IIS

IIS Server through the eyes of an SEO Disclaimer: This post is long and technical, but has been lovingly paraphrased for the benefit of non-technical SEOs to get involved and step out of their comfort zone. Recently, I’ve had to deal with sites running on IIS and rather than just prescribing universal SEO fixes, I decided to get my hands really, really dirty. This is what I’ve learned...

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Gaming Social Media Signals For Fun And Profit
Joe Hall

Gaming Social Media Signals For Fun And Profit

About two weeks ago I gave a talk at Pubcon titled, "Global Social Media Signals For SEO". During the end of the talk I briefly mentioned several techniques used to "game" social signals. Afterwords it was apparent that many were interested to learn more about gaming these signals. So without further ado, I would like to talk more about how to game social media signals.

Introducing SERP Turkey: A Free Tool to Split-Test and Gather CTR Analytics of SERP Entries
Tom Anthony

Introducing SERP Turkey: A Free Tool to Split-Test and Gather CTR Analytics of SERP Entries

Measuring CTR data in search engine results is notoriously difficult, and with Google's recent move to HTTPS for logged in users it is probably going to keep on getting harder. What I wanted was a simple way to measure the change in CTR for a given search query's results when I adjusted entries, but nothing existed.... so I built the SERP Turkey tool.

Mapping Keywords to Content for Maximum Impact
Kenneth Martin

Mapping Keywords to Content for Maximum Impact

When keyword targeting is approached separately from a content creation strategy, the concocted results can often leave us scratching our heads and pointing fingers at the malformed "Frankenpages." By fostering a more cohesive relationship between these traditionally detached endeavors, we can greatly enhance our results and deliver considerable value to our audience. ...