World digerati take centre stage at Brighton
Imagine you're a very busy CEO or senior digital manager (and if things are hectic, you'll know that's no joke)... Here's a quick 'helicopter' view of the sessions for you from BrightonSEO September 2017.
That key thought to have 'front-of-mind' is, as ever, there's no quick fix these days that will miraculously propel any digital venture to overnight success. Time and money are usually key essentials - and not forgetting resources, e.g. People, computing power and related tools.
It takes time to prepare the ground for great projects (e.g. SEO fundamentals), sow and plant on decent soil (e.g. write content + social media posts), nurture each element (e.g. content marketing + paid media) to reap a rich harvest (the millionaire lifestyle + live forever on the Maldives).
BrightonSEO founder Kelvin Newman met up with Smart Insights at the conference. He described the current…
A quick guide to small business SEO
There are more than 28 million small businesses in the United States alone, and they account for 99.7% of all businesses in the country. Are you among them? If the answer is yes, you know just how challenging it is to rise to the occasion and beat your competitors in the battle for customers.
In the 21st century, the battlefield is online – between 70 and 80% of people claim they research a company before choosing to do business with them. Evidently, in order for a small business to thrive, it has to boost its online influence. Still, no more than 17% invest in SEO.
Whether they do not understand the value of this marketing channel, or simply do not understand it, the fact is – SEO is essential for business growth. Whichever the case, here is the gist of everything a young entrepreneur should know…
5 sources and a process to help identify a penalty which reduces yours organic search traffic
Given the importance of organic search to many businesses, keeping on top of the latest ranking factors for SEO and, in particular, the changes to Google's ranking algorithms and webspam penalties, is a major concern for most businesses and a full-time job for many today.
If it's not your full-time job, discovering about a penalty will be a nasty shock and the names of the different webspam penalties can be confusing. To help keep marketers up-to-date with the changes that matter, we regularly update our 7 Steps guides summarising the latest changes and in this post we recommend 5 sources and a process shown in an infographic.
[si_guide_block id="5750" title="Download Expert Member resource – 7 Steps to Successful SEO" description="Our comprehensive SEO Bible aimed at explaining the main ranking factors and penalties to marketers so they can improve…
Explaining how you can use a range of SEO tactics to get your site ranking highly
When most people think about SEO (if they think about it at all), they think of a very specific kind of optimization: the kind that involves putting keywords on pages. And while that's an important part of SEO, there's a lot more to it, as well. In fact, that's just one part of a single type of SEO.
And if you want to get as much traffic to your site as you can, you're going to need more than just one kind of optimization.
Here are six SEO tactics that can help your site rank for the keywords you're targeting. You probably won't use all of them, but having a better understanding of how to improve your rank is always a good thing.
1. On-page SEO
This is the…
Chart of the Day: B2B marketers place SEO Rankings and Traffic Generation above Leads or Sales
SEO is one of the most important channels in any B2B marketing strategy but is often overlooked. Despite its track record in virtually every industry, B2B marketers can feel overwhelmed with the amount of work that goes into ranking your business in the results pages of Google (and Bing etc). When you first starting out with your SEO strategy you need to research keywords, identify your target keywords, write the content, generate links and even after all that you still may not appear in the SERPs due to Google's reluctance to tell anyone how it actually works. Which is why SEO remains a unique challenge for B2B marketers.
But if you get it right you may find that Traffic Generation is less of an issue and you need to focus on turning that traffic into leads…
Major 2017 SEO trends to get to grips with this year
Competition – it motivates all of us to become better at what we do. Marketers are no different, especially when they have to stay on top of the SEO game. They research the latest SEO trends; they use the best SEO tools out there. The problem is, unlike a sports competition, the goal posts for SEO are always changing. This, of course, makes the game more interesting, but also pretty frustrating for those trying to “keep up.” Looking ahead to 2017, these are some SEO trends that marketers might want to keep an eye on.
1. Dense Content Will Rise
Initially, content was provided in short little chunks – rather fluffy chunks, actually – and the same fluff was just repeated everywhere. When this ultimately proved ineffective for SEO purposes, marketers began to create volumes of lengthy content – the longer…
Follow these SEO trends for better rankings in 2017
SEO is a very volatile industry because of the many changes that take place in the Google algorithm within a period. The algorithm set in place this month may not be the same the next. It is an always evolving algorithm that encourages SEO specialists to stay on their toes and keep abreast with updates.
Now we are well into 2017, it has become more important for specialists to look out for trends that can affect search rankings for their keywords this year.
[si_guide_block id="5750" title="Download Expert Member resource – 7 Steps SEO Strategy" description="Newly updated, this comprehensive resource is a practical guide for marketing managers to increase the contribution of SEO to their business. It covers the activities they and their agencies need to work on to improve their ranking in the organic search results of Google."/]
Optimize for Rich Answers
Although aiming…
Debunking the biggest SEO myths so you don't fall foul of them
Poor SEO, so misunderstood! These days there are so many misconceptions about SEO that it is becoming ridiculous. It is now time to shed some light on the biggest myths of SEO. Unfortunately, anyone can write anything on the internet. This is how some of the biggest myths are born. Others myths seem to be embedded in people’s heads because they haven’t done their research.
It is common to see many businesses fall for at least some of these myths. This is quite disturbing because believing in some of these myths can cause detrimental effects to your SEO campaign (or even mean businesses do not use SEO altogether).
Some of these myths are simply bad SEO practices while others are outdated due to the ever evolving nature of SEO. Most businesses don’t even know they are following these myths that could…
Our round-up of this year's best seaside SEO conference
My trip to BrightonSEO this year was my first (and long overdue) time attending the conference and I can say with 100% confidence that it was worth the time and expense. Not only was there an awful lot of great lessons and insight from the conference but I was lucky enough to be in Brighton during the warmest weekend of the year so far!
One of the main motivations for attending BrightonSEO was my determination to stay up to date with the latest trends and developments. Although I am no longer primarily responsible for SEO in my current role at PepsiCo, being aware of how search is evolving and where it’s likely to go is still an important consideration, as I believe it will be for all types of business and brands in the coming years as I’ll highlight in the sections that…
Key SEO trends to plan for this year
The SEO industry can be treacherous – you never know when Google will roll out its next game-changing update.
For most SEO experts, every few days is another turning point that marks the need to review one’s strategy. But even if you’re that careful, there’s still a chance that you’ll miss one of Google’s 500-600 updates in a year.
There’s no sleeping on the job when it comes to SEO. If you want to secure your rankings, you need to be vigilant, adaptive, and aware of the ongoing trends in the world of search engines.
Based on the updates observed last year, here are some of the trends you can expect to continue for the rest of 2017:
The Rise of Google’s Rich Answers
SEO isn’t just about snagging the top position anymore. Google has a special place on top of SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) for content…
