Digital marketing

Woke up this morning to see that Dixon Jones, who runs marketing for Majestic , will be transitioning out of his role and into retirement . Majestic has long proven itself to be a top shelf (maybe even THE top shelf, but more on that later) link index tool and his contributions to the industry have been equally top tier. I’m both sad and elated at the news. Dixon has been a huge help in getting the Local SEO Ranking Factors off the ground, graciously providing us backlink data for the first ever version of the study and has been a valuable partner ever since. But it’s always a good thing when people get to pivot or scale back their careers on their own terms. Cheers Dixon, you will be sorely missed. http://ift.tt/2BxsyZA

The redirects manager in Yoast SEO Premium is a real lifesaver. It’s a feature we at Yoast use many times a day. Once you used it for a while, you wonder how you ever lived without it. The redirects manager makes everyday website optimization and maintenance a piece of cake. It takes care of all redirect tasks, so you don’t have to think about that as much. In the end, it will save you lots of time and money. Here, we’ll shed some more light on the invaluable redirects manager in Yoast SEO. Optimize your site for search & social media and keep it optimized with Yoast SEO Premium » $89 - Buy now » Info What is a redirect? Before we get into the awesomeness of the Yoast SEO redirects manager lets take a brief look at redirects. A redirect happens when a particular URL is deleted or changed and the browser gets served another URL in exchange. If a site owner deletes a page and does not redirect that old page, visitors to that page will see a 404 error message/page. So, to send ...

Most of today’s SEO strategies and techniques have been done to address the updates made by Google. Every now and then, Google would announce updates and tweaks into their metrics and algorithms, to which SEO professionals would respond accordingly. These updates were made to optimize Google’s performance, and ensure that users are getting the best information possible. While most of these updates would only mean minor tweaks into your SEO campaign, major updates, like Google Vince and Google Venice, have caused major changes that can still be felt today. Here are how these two updates changed the SEO landscape to what it is today. Google Venice: Going local Before this update went online, the method that you have to use to track your local search listings is through Google Places. While this was handy method of going through local search results, there are occasions where some search results which add local listings, despite the search terms not asking for it. This changed in 201...

I went to the Pubcon 2017 Conference this week in Las Vegas Nevada and gave a presentation about Semantic Search topics based upon white papers and patents from Google. My focus was on things such as Context Vectors and Phrase-Based Indexing. I promised in social media that I would post the presentation on my blog so that I could answer questions if anyone had any. I’ve been doing keyword research like this for years, where I’ve looked at other pages that rank well for keyword terms that I want to use, and identify phrases and terms that tend to appear upon those pages, and include them on pages that I am trying to optimize. It made a lot of sense to start doing that after reading about phrase based indexing in 2005 and later. Some of the terms I see when I search for Semantic Keyword Research include such things as “improve your rankings,” and “conducting keyword research” and “smarter content.” I’m seeing phrases that I’m not a fan of such as “LSI Keywords” which has as much scie...

The Oldest Pepper Tree in California At one point in time, search engines such as Google learned about topics on the Web from sources such as Yahoo! and the Open Directory Project, which provided categories of sites, within directories that people could skim through to find something that they might be interested in. Those listings of categories included hierarchical topics and subtopics; but they were managed by human beings and both directories have closed down. In addition to learning about categories and topics from such places, search engines used to use such sources to do focused crawls of the web, to make sure that they were indexing as wide a range of topics as they could. It’s possible that we are seeing those sites replaced by sources such as Wikipedia and Wikidata and Google’s Knowledge Graph and the Microsoft Concept Graph . Last year, I wrote a post called, Google Patents Context Vectors to Improve Search . It focused upon a Google patent titled User-context-based se...

Source: http://ift.tt/1JJOg9H Photographer: McGeddon Creative Commons License: Attribution 2.0 Generic Navneet Panda, whom the Google Panda update is named after, has co-invented a new patent that focuses on site quality scores. It’s worth studying to understand how it determines the quality of sites. Back in 2013, I wrote the post Google Scoring Gibberish Content to Demote Pages in Rankings , about Google using ngrams from sites and building language models from them to determine if those sites were filled with gibberish, or spammy content. I was reminded of that post when I read this patent. Rather than explaining what ngrams are in this post (which I did in the gibberish post), I’m going to point to an example of ngrams at the Google n-gram viewer , which shows Google indexing phrases in scanned books. This article published by the Wired site also focused upon ngrams: The Pitfalls of Using Google Ngram to Study Language . An ngram phrase could be a 2-gram, a 3-gram, a 4-gram, ...

I remember my father building some innovative plastics blow molding machines where he added a central processing control device to the machines so that all adjustable controls could be changed from one place. He would have loved seeing what is going on at Google these days, and the hardware that they are working on developing, which focuses on building controls into textiles and plastics. Outside of search efforts from Google, but it is interesting seeing what else they may get involved in since that is begining to cover a wider and wider range of things, from self-driving cars to glucose analyzing contact lenses. This morning I tweeted an article I saw in the Sun, from the UK that was kind of interesting: Seating Plan Google’s creating touch sensitive car seats that will switch on air con, sat-nav and change music with a BUM WIGGLE It had me curious if I could find patents related to Google’s Project Jacquard, so I went to the USPTO website, and searched, and a couple came up. At...

In October of 2015, a new algorithm was announced by members of the Google Brain team, described in this post from Search Engine Land – Meet RankBrain: The Artificial Intelligence That’s Now Processing Google Search Results One of the Google Brain team members who gave Bloomberg News a long interview on Rankbrain, Gregory S. Corrado was a co-inventor on a patent that was granted this August along with other members of the Google Brain team. In the SEM Post article, RankBrain: Everything We Know About Google’s AI Algorithm we are told that Rankbrain uses concepts from Geoffrey Hinton, involving Thought Vectors. The summary in the description from the patent tells us about how a word vector approach might be used in such a system: Particular embodiments of the subject matter described in this specification can be implemented so as to realize one or more of the following advantages. Unknown words in sequences of words can be effectively predicted if the surrounding words are known. ...

One thing most SEOs are aware of is that search results at Google are sometimes personalized for searchers; but it’s not something that I’ve seen too much written about. So when I came across a patent that is about personalizing search results, I wanted to dig in, and see if it could give us more insights. The patent was an updated continuation patent, and I love to look at those, because it is possible to compare changes to claims from an older version, to see if they can provide some details of how processes described in those patents have changed. Sometimes changes are spelled out in great detail, and sometimes they focus upon different concepts that might be in the original version of the patent, but weren’t necessarily focused upon so much. One of the last continuation patents I looked at was one from Navneet Panda, in the post, Click a Panda: High Quality Search Results based on Repeat Clicks and Visit Duration In that one, we saw a shift in focus to involve more user behavio...

Modern workspaces have paved the way for incredible things: collaboration in open floor plans, healthier ways to work with standing desks, and, my personal favorite: office dogs. We are fortunate to be working in a day and age where if you land a job at a forward-thinking company, you might have the one standing office dog or even celebrate the adorable Bring-Your-Dog to-Work Day .… http://ift.tt/2il184F

How Do I Rank Higher in Google Local Search? Our Checklist for Local SEO was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips . The good news: Showing up in Google’s search engine can be extremely beneficial to your local business. The bad news: Google doesn’t care if you rank high or low. It cares only that there are quality results that answer the query to the total satisfaction of the searcher. So the pressing question is, how do you rank higher on Google Maps and Google local search results? Improving your local search rankings is possible, and the results are very real. A Google study found that : 4 in 5 consumers use search engines to find local information. 50 percent of local smartphone searches lead to a store visit in less than a day. 18 percent of local searches on a smartphone result in a sale within a day. If you’re asking, “How does Google local search work, and how can I rank higher in local search?” then this local SEO che...

Featured Snippets in Google have been on an upward trend during the past few years, with more websites looking to attain “position 0”, which puts you on top of the search engine results pages. This allows websites to attract more users to gain more traffic, and gain more leads. This also allows users to get the best results to their search terms, and give them the best information available. Despite the rising trend, the end of October and early November 2017 saw a drop. This means that search terms that have featured snippets are now gone, which would definitely affect a lot of websites and their traffic. The period of October 27 to November 14 alone saw a 10% drop in searched that has featured snippets. This is a kind of drop rate that would have people in SEO concerned. During that drop, there has been an increase in knowledge panels, which is also another SEO concern that needs to be checked. Let’s get to the bottom of things and find out. An increase in knowledge panels While...

Does it pay off to write a text that is nice and easy to read? Will readable content lead to higher rankings and more traffic? Is readability a ‘ranking factor’? At Yoast, we are strong believers in writing texts that are nice and easy to read. We’ve developed an entire tool to help people write readable texts . We truly believe that readability ranks. Writing readable texts will lead to higher rankings and more traffic. Learn how to write engaging copy and how to organize it well on your site: Combine our SEO copywriting and Site structure training. » $174 - Buy now » Info So why is readability becoming more important? I’ll discuss two reasons why we believe readability is of increasing importance for SEO. In our view, it’ll become essential for every copywriter. The first reason why readability will gain importance is because of the growth of and focus on voice search. The second reason is because of the fact the algorithm of Google is getting better and more ‘human-like’. Voi...

“I just love those video backgrounds and we need them on our new website.” No, you don’t. “They are so engaging and set a friendly mood.” No, they don’t. “It’s an amazing new feature and it helps conversion.” No, it doesn’t. Besides that, the conversation is annoying me. Video backgrounds suck big time. Our good friend Karl Gilis of AGConsult said it perfectly: “Video backgrounds are the new sliders. They’re a distraction.” And just like sliders suck and should be banned from your website , so do video backgrounds. Optimize your site for search & social media and keep it optimized with Yoast SEO Premium » $62 - Buy now » Info Why do you need that video background? I dare to state that video backgrounds were invented by web agencies trying to convince customers of a particular design: Hey, this will make you stand out! Now this really sets a mood on your website, don’t you think? Of course we can create that video for you at a mere x dollars extra Video backgrounds will ...

2018 is coming soon and people are starting to ask: what’s new? What should we do to keep up with changes in search and specifically in SEO in 2018? In this post, I’ll sum up the biggest changes in our world, and what you should be working on. The search landscape is changing Over the last decade(s), our computers have become faster and faster, and our phones have been catching up. The iPhone X is faster than many computers people have at home. The power of the small machines we have in our hands is slowly being utilized by apps and search engines alike. Optimize your site for search & social media and keep it optimized with Yoast SEO Premium » $62 - Buy now » Info Building on that growing power of the devices in our hands, the reliability of voice recognition has been steadily increasing. It’s now at the point where, in languages like English, voice commands can be reliably used to instruct our devices to do something. One of those things we can do, is search. Voice search...

As most of you will agree, the free version of Yoast SEO is already an awesome plugin. So, we understand that many of you frugal site owners and bloggers may be a bit reluctant to ‘splurge’ on Yoast SEO Premium. What more could the premium version have to offer? Well, as a matter of fact, it has a great deal more to offer! It has several features that help you drastically improve your site structure, make it easier to avoid 404s, and give more insight into your content. In this Ask Yoast, I discuss Yoast SEO premium features that are especially interesting for bloggers. Alexa emailed us this question: My audience are travel bloggers and I think they all use the free version of Yoast SEO. I don’t think they would pay for Premium unless they really understood the value. Can you share the main differences of the free vs. the paid version? Watch the video or read the transcript further down the page for my answer! Optimize your site for search & social media and keep it optimize...