Category: SEO

I’ve said it before, and I’ll probably continue to say it in the future: Link building is hard. In particular, content-driven link building is hard because you’re hoping the idea and execution you’ve come up with is strong enough to attract links. You may think you have the best idea in the world, executed in a stunning way via a great design, but if the person on the other end of your outreach email doesn’t agree, your content can fail in spectacular style. While hard, executing a good link-building campaign…

Recently, I had the pleasure of presenting at SMX London on Supercharging your SEO with AI and thought I would share some of the insights with Search Engine Land readers. Google made global headlines with the demonstration of its new Duplex at this year’s I/O developers conference. This artificial intelligence (AI) system can “converse” in natural language with people to schedule an appointment at a hair salon or book a table at a restaurant, for example. To pass the Turing Test, AI must behave in a manner indistinguishable from that…

Have you ever experienced a rankings decline and suspected it was due to something a competitor was doing? For this second article, we are going to focus on the process of diagnosing whether or not you’ve been hit by negative search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. If you need a refresher or missed the first article, here it is: What Negative SEO is and is Not. As you progress through the following steps to try and diagnose what happened, you’ll need to honestly ask yourself whether the decline you’re facing is…

Looking for the extra punch your content needs in order to earn links from your outreach and publishing efforts? One important solution lies in a place that may not sound exciting: data. We all understand the importance of search engine optimization (SEO) and link building in particular. But earning links can be hard unless we understand why people link. Most people who link to a web page are looking for something to support a claim or back up their narratives; they are looking for data to support their ideas. Let’s…

Search engines exist to provide users with results that are relevant to the search query. Smart SEO campaigns are built on an understanding of how your audience searches around your industry, products and services. A key point here is understanding the intent behind a given keyword search. A user wants to find specific information, and search engines have advanced algorithms and large amounts of traffic they analyze to determine which results are the best match for a keyword. Understanding the broad categories of intent is crucial to developing a search…

Voice interfaces are not simply front-ends for search engines or apps. They are a whole new thing. Voice Interface Optimization has now become a thing, but it’s not yet a fully realized thing. Voice interfaces are showing up everywhere, most notably in intelligent speakers like Google Home and Amazon Alexa. However, the standards for this kind of interaction are still being hammered out, and the tools for brand differentiation are still fairly rough. But time’s a-wasting, with ComScore predicting that half of all searches will be voice searches by 2020.…

Understanding the intent behind the keywords you target simplifies the entire SEO process, says contributor Marcus Miller. Here is a look at how to understand and categorize keywords based on intent. Search engines exist to provide users with results that are relevant to the search query. Smart SEO campaigns are built on an understanding of how your audience searches around your industry, products and services. A key point here is understanding the intent behind a given keyword search. A user wants to find specific information, and search engines have advanced…

Image search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of optimizing attributes associated with images. The file size, file name, alt attributes, captions, XML sitemap inclusion and structured data on images all play a role in the visibility of images within search engines. All image traffic from search took a huge hit in January of 2013, when Google decided to add the “view image” button, content providers complained of drastic traffic declines across many verticals. From a study done by Define Media Group: These declines were even more drastic for large enterprise-level brands that had…