Outdated SEO best practices that still work...
There is a lot of information out there on SEO practices to follow. One of the most specific are from Google itself. However, there are situations where you should ignore Googles directives and continue with those best practices. Here are a few those: Image Alt Text Google is increasingly using machine learning to identify the content of images when crawling pages. The recognition is still not as good as it could be but represents a big shift from the days when images without alt text was impossible to crawl. However, regardless of this advance in image scanning, there are still many images that machine learning cannot identify or will categorize incorrectly. Avoid all these issues by continuing to...
Using Xenu to Scan and Fix Link Issues...
Whether they realize it or not, most websites have a lot of broken links. These links are both internal and external. It is important for both user experience and seo reasons that these broken links need to be identified and fixed. In addition there has to be a mechanism in place to regularly find and fix these broken links. This is where the Xenu link sleuth app comes in. A handy windows app that will scan your entire website and check for both internal and external links. It will then flag any broken links in its report. The scan itself can take sometime, with larger sites taking much longer, but the report will highlight any link related issues...
Important voice search ranking factors...
Google Home and the Google Assistant are making inroads in the home smart speaker market. As a result, it is also a big part of SEO and marketers are working to understand how to get information to the Assistant. Here are some of the key findings from a recent study that looks at 10,000 Google Home responses and compared the data to desktop search results. Page speed looks to be one of the most important factors. Voice search results almost always came from faster loading pages. It is not surprising considering how much Google pushes webmasters to focus on page load speeds. When it comes to authority, Google looks more at domain authority than page authority for voice...
2017 SEO Ranking Factors
Google made massive strides in the last year using machine learning to improve ranking and identification of spam. Google refines its ranking factors and is getting better and better at surfacing quality search results. Because of this rapid pace of improvement, what was once an important part of SEO just last year are no longer factors, with new signals like HTTPS getting prominence. A recent large-scale study made some interesting discoveries that affect the ranking factors this year: Security The study found that 65% of sites that occupied the top three positions for Google results are secure. Considering that HTTPS was only found on 18% of websites two years ago, it is a massive change. Google’s insistence on...
The function and benefits of internal links...
One of the biggest issues with content creation and marketing campaigns is the lack of a proper internal linking strategy. Every site should run an internal linking audit at least every quarter. Internal linking is a sound strategy for improving search rankings and is something that very few sites execute effectively. Here are some of the key functions and benefits of a proper internal linking strategy. A proper internal linking strategy will open direct pathways for search engines to discover pages lower down the site-structure. Sometimes it might take at least seven levels of links to get to a page. With proper internal links, you can elevate a page and guarantee search engine visibility. Proper internal links also...
SaaS marketing challenges
Software-as-a-Service (Saas) is a distribution model for software, where the provider hosts and provides access to the system over the internet. The primary draw of SaaS providers is that you do not need to install and set up the application in-house. Promoting SaaS applications poses a unique set of challenges. Lead generation The biggest challenge is trying to balance SEO and lead generation. The traditional model for SaaS is to provide high-quality gated content that helps capture leads. The problem is that search engines will not spider that content, so it takes marketing dollars to promote the gated content. You have to decide at some point if you want lead generation or traffic using SEO. Content protection Google...