What affects search results? It’s an interesting question, because no one knows for sure. A site called Moz does a survey every year among the major SEO consultants in an attempt to create a snapshot of what matters right now in search. (It speaks to the squishiness of the field that the most credible source […]
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Conversations about search engine optimization can be confusing, but all the expert knowledge boils down to four fundamental necessities: You need great content — useful, clear writing on subjects that actually interest readers. You need to identify the words, phrases and questions that people use when searching for your content. You need links from authoritative
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Great writing is the silver bullet of search, but if you want people to be able to find your content, it needs to be properly set up in your content management system. It’s relatively simple, just identify your content’s key terms and don’t cut corners when you fill out the input screens. It’s difficult to optimize
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The search engine’s job is to match visitors with sites worth visiting. They prefer the same things that people like: compelling content from credible sources. From a SEO perspective (which, of course, is a limited view), all a site developer has to do is get out of the way of the content. Here is a list of
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Here’s my go-to list of Search Engine Optimization Resources Moz’s Free Beginner’s Guide to SEO and A Beginner’s Checklist For Learning SEO More Moz: 101 Free SEO Resources Yahoo’s SEO Basics Google’s SEO Report Card Matt Cutts (Google Search Product Guy) Search Engine Land SEO Book Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide (PDF Download) and the 1-page
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Search tools aren’t just for SEO, they can also be useful in getting a sense of what content your audience might be interested in. There is a big caveat with this approach: it is backward-looking, focusing on previous performance. However, it’s handy — if you don’t over-rely on it. Here’s an example of how this can
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It can be a waste of time, effort and money to publish an article that is only of interest for a week when, for the same amount of effort, you can publish something that will continue to attract readers long-term. Search tools can help with this as well. Does “Summer Reading” have legs? Is it of long-term interest?
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When is the best time to publish our article on summer reading? When to Publish Based on this Google Trends chart, we’d try to publish the “Summer Reading” roundup in late March — because it can take two weeks to begin ranking significantly on search results pages. After the page developed significant weight in the Google rankings,
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Google Trends is handy for suggesting key search phrases that can be incorporated into titles and body copy. Adwords can give even more detail. What headline should we give to our “Summer Reading” roundup? Based on the Google Trends chart above we should include the key phrase “summer reading” in our title and also “summer
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Can changing headlines post-publish impact readership of an article? According to Visual Revenue, an analytic tool provider, during the 2012 Olympics, USA Today underwent a testing campaign of their headlines. As you can see from the results below, the newspaper was able to almost double click-throughs in some cases. Upworthy.com famously considers headline tweaking to be
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