The industry's top wizards, doctors, and other experts offer their best advice, research, how-tos, and insights—all in the name of helping you level-up your SEO and online marketing skills.
At Distilled, we've recently acquired clients that would be categorized as large enterprises. Some of the challenges of working with large enterprises revolve around the complexity of how the company is internally organized. With so many different departments that may or may not have existing relationships, our roles as SEOs become more complex. In such circumstances, our task oftentimes becomes...
A couple of weeks ago, Rand went over his general SEO checklist for new websites. It's a great resource to reference and help give your site that initial advantage other new sites don't have. Keep in mind, though, that there are other factors at play when trying to rank in the local results specifically...
While working on a number of classifieds websites I have encountered an interesting phenomenon, which I would like to share with you. I have called it "landing page lifecycle", and in this case it concerns ad details pages on classifieds websites. However, I think that it applies to any landing page of temporary character (like news, articles, discussions). Traffic pat...
The old 10-result SERP isn't what it used to be. We put some of the lastest SERPs to the test with start-of-the-art eye-tracking data, including expanded sitelinks.
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After the fantastic tips in edbaxter's post on Optimizing Page Speed, I decided it was time for a beginner's guide on one of the most effective methods to increase speed that was only mentioned in that post: a Content Delivery Network (CDN). The purpose of a CDN is to put your website's static or unchanging files on very fast servers all over the world, so that requests to view the content by visitors to your site have the shorter possible trip to get your data. An example of these static files are images, css, and javascript files.
This week we noticed a new feature in our Google Analytics account – a set of reports called “Search Engine Optimization.” Google announced that these reports are out of beta and now available to...
It is an unfortunate, but ultimately unavoidable situation for any independent professional: something went wrong, and now you need to break the bad news to your client. In the SEO world, this can happen for a multitude of reasons. From a situation as simple as you being late with your deliverables due to unforeseen circumstances to much bigger problems, such as loss in rankings because of algorithmic changes, or worse yet, penalization of a client's site, there are dozens of things that can go wrong in any given project or campaign.
I'm constantly recommending thought leadership as a marketing strategy and, frequently, getting a lot of pushback. It started when I was a consultant, but continues to this day. It usually goes something along the lines of: Other Person: It's easy to be a thought leader in the fields you just showed, but what are the rest of us ordinary businesses supposed to do?
Not too long ago Google furnished us with a new reporting tool: Multi-Channel Funnels. The announcement on August 24 was very significant to those of us that cherish every single piece of data available on our traffic, mostly because we know what to do with it. We are able to derive Action Items and tactics based on data, and the more we have, the better we are at doing our...
When the iPad first came out, like many people, I didn't really get it. My initial thoughts were something along the lines of "Steve... what the hell?! You've produced a giant iPod and are somehow trying to claim its some sort of brilliant new product." I resolved never to buy one, considering it simply a folly for overly wealthy businessmen or an iPod designed for the visually impaired.
Tracking user behavior through Google Analytics can be quite tedious considering the limited path analysis options that GA has to offer. Funnel analysis can be especially prohibitive as you can analyze only one path leading to a given conversion. Calculating drop off rates in this case has its share of issues. Thankfully there is a handy workaround which has been explained in this post. ...
It's often pretty difficult to make a short title for a webpage that offers a lot of varied or super-specific information. At SEOmoz, we say that the best practice for title tag length is to keep titles under 70 characters. That's pretty pithy considering that the title also includes your site or brand name, spaces, and other nondescript characters. So, does it matter if you go over 70...
Since March 2011 I'm a supporter of Save the Children with a sponsorship (the child I support is called Christopher and lives in Malawi). Before you read this article, I invite you to consider making a donation to a non-profit organization and help some people less lucky than ourselves.
Before I even start saying anything about keyword research I want to take my hat off to Richard Baxter because the tools and methodologies he shared at MozCon make me feel silly about even thinking about bringing something to the Keyword Research table. Now with that said, have a few ideas about using data sources outside of those that the Search Engines provide to get a sense of what needs people are looking to fulfill right now. Consider this the first in a series.