Search Engine Optimization

I’ve worked with most of the major SEO firms and have attended many, many presentations, seminars, conferences and staff meetings about search engine optimization. I’ve heard from almost everyone that SEO is the ‘secret sauce’ of audience development. It is actionable, quantifiable, and other *able things. And like most consulting fads (mobile, say hello to

Above all, the search engines love high-quality writing. The folks at Google explicitly state that their goal is to connect users with “useful, information-rich site(s)” containing pages that “clearly and accurately describe your content.” And, in fact, most of the advancements in search over the last decade have been aimed toward teaching machines how to

Like high school, search is primarily a popularity contest. Google’s inventors, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, built Google around a single insight — that the search engine didn’t have to determine what a website was about or if it was any good. People would do that for them. People would describe the content and vote

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

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

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

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