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By Tina Courtney-Brown

 

SEO is not a stagnant science. It’s a very dynamic process with tricks and tips that may propel you to the top one year, and literally do the reverse the next.

Google’s mission is simple: They want to provide the most accurate, user-friendly search experience possible. This means the search algorithms they generate are always in flux, as the mission is a truly complex goal.

The result is that companies need to stay on the current pulse of SEO trends. Since most small businesses don’t have the luxury of a full time SEO professional, I have outlined below the most common past practices that will no longer serve you in 2015. In addition to calling out the most common archaic practices, I also suggest some modern alternatives that will help you in your quest for better rankings.

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November 5th, 2014 – Posted by Casey Meraz

The author’s posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

Every business that competes in a local market and who competes for the display of localized results in SERPs will likely find the need to conduct a local SEO audit at some point. Whether you’ve hired an SEO in the past or not, the best way to beat the competition is to know where you stand and what you need to fix, and then develop a plan to win based on the competitive landscape.

While this may seem like a daunting task, the good news is that you can do this for your business or your client using this Ultimate Local SEO audit guide.

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By Katrina Manning

Any competitive website is constantly updating, understanding and enforcing its SEO. With billions of websites to compete with, ensuring that your website is appealing to your target audience as well as the search engines is absolutely essential. One of the most useful methods of improving content marketing SEO is using internal linking.

Why Use Internal Linking?

Internal links, unlike external links, provide instantaneous access to another page or section within the same website. External links, in contrast, point to information within external domains and other websites. Using internal links vastly improves the SEO of a website by providing clear paths to authoritative and relevant information for both Internet users and search engines. By pointing to specific pieces of interesting and useful information, internal links demonstrate the value and importance of your website, and highlight why search engines should display your website within their search results.

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Nearly half of TripAdvisor travelers say Special Offers influence their booking choices.1 Here are 12 tips to create successful Special Offers that convert travelers:

1. Always run an offer

Special Offers appear across TripAdvisor on high visibility pages. Don’t sideline your business by allowing your offer to expire or by not running one at all.

2. Give travelers a good deal

Appealing to travelers’ wallets will get you more bookings. Special Offers that do well are ones that give guests the best deal. But if you don’t have a big budget, don’t worry. Even a small value-add can appeal to travelers.

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By Adrienne Erin
 
Over the years, Google has made reference to its stable of human raters used to determine the quality of sites, helping to improve the algorithms used for search. Those raters use the “Human Rater Handbook” to check for a wide variety of things Google has dubbed important, and they rate sites according to how they fulfill all that criteria.

Sounds like a valuable tool for SEOs to get their hands on, huh? Well, in July a copy of the handbook leaked out onto the Internet, and people have been trying to glean insights from it ever since, looking for the key to rising through the Google ranks.

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The home page of your website is the most important page of your site. It’s the page that most people will see. Your home page must convince visitors that your website is interesting and it must enable visitors to find the other pages of your site.Your home page is not made for keyword optimization

The main purpose of your home page is not to rank for your keywords. The home page of Amazon.com does not have high rankings for the search terms “lcd tv”, “gardening equipment” or “buy books”. That’s what the other pages on Amazon.com are for.

The home page of your website has the following purposes:

Welcome the visitor on your website.
Guide the visitor to the interesting pages on your site.

If you want to get high rankings for particular keywords, optimize other pages of your website for these keywords. The more pages you optimize, the better. In general, you should optimize one page of your website for one search term.

A web page that is highly relevant to one search term is better than a web page that is somewhat relevant to many search terms. If you optimize many of your web pages for different keywords that are related to the same topic, you’ll show Google and other search engines that your website is relevant to that topic.

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By Adrienne Erin

 

You create content so that people will read it. Regardless of your ultimate motive – to drive conversions, to attract attention or to generate interest in a specific subject – it all starts with reaching the maximum number of readers in the most efficient way possible.

With this in mind, you’ve probably turned to social media. You’ve built a following and spend time engaging your followers. However, if the content that you’re creating isn’t sharable, your reach is limited to your existing followers. If your goal is to improve your online reach, you must put effort into creating sharable content. Not sure where to start? Keep reading.

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In a time not so far away…

In recent years, mostly in Europe tour operators would book entire hotels to fill up with guests that would travel on the tour operator’s planes. Hoteliers loved this model, because while price was low, occupation was guaranteed and often paid upfront.

However, as service degraded or competition increased, Tour Operators would book other hotels. Hoteliers that relied solely on a few Tour Operators would struggle establish new channels, or fail and go out of business. But what does all of this have to do with Booking.com?

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By Tina Courtney-Brown

 

Browse through any internet marketing message boards, and the buzz about Penguin; is deafening. When 2.0 launched in October of 2013, Google’s beloved update took aim at spammy practices and black hat backlinks tactics. Updates have continued to be released unexpectedly, but nothing significant enough to warrant a 3.0 label. It’s coming though – we don’t know when, but we know it’s on the way.

Rather than wait until the release hits and becoming reactionary, it’s wise to take stock of your site and SEO practices now to identify areas that require improvement. This article will serve as your handy guide to prepping for an onslaught of penguins. Act now, or prepare to get pummeled.

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(C) Copyright Josh Bachynski, 2014

(Note: If you would rather listen to a video of this article, including more explanation as to how I got the Panda Factors, go here).
The Ethics Of Panda
Google sets the Panda SEO rules according to their subjective standards which they do not outright publish other than a list of vague, unhelpful, questions.

Back in March, Matt Cutts and I had a discussion about the ethics of panda. My argument was it was immoral for Google to obfuscate the details of a quality algorithm that:

so clearly disenfranchises thousands of sites without warning according to nothing other than Google’s subjective opinion as to what they find “spammy” (a thinly veiled euphemism devised to punish sites that, we have to consider, must include, sites that simply do not fit into Google’s revenue model). But also:
there should be no danger (or so I thought, see below) in simply telling us what exactly is low quality or high quality in their eyes. The irony is that most webmasters do want to have a high quality site. And we have no choice but to rank highly in Google.

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