So far, in this series on overlooked SEO skills, we’ve covered the importance of developing your communication skills and learning how to learn.  And while both of these are incredibly important pursuits – for anybody, not just for SEO marketers – there’s one final skill I want to discuss with you…

In fact, I hinted at this last skill in my post on learning, but today, I want to break things down on this topic into even further detail.  Are you ready to hear what the final most overlooked SEO skill is?
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In last week’s post, I talked to you about the importance of learning to communicate effectively – what I believe to be the most overlooked SEO skill of all.  If you have time to improve only one area of your professional SEO practice, I’d highly recommend investing your effort into that all-important area.

However, if you want to take things a step further, go ahead and focus some of your energy on what I consider to be the second most overlooked SEO skill – learning.
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For many companies, search engine optimization is one of those things that’s perpetually on the “to do” list – but always gets bumped off in favor of higher priority projects.  And really, this is totally understandable!  After all, as a business owner or professional, you’ve got tons of competing demands on your time – all of which play a vital role in your organization’s success.

However, this mindset turns into trouble if you fail to seek out other opportunities to have this important SEO work completed on your website.  Failing to implement the latest SEO best practices could have a serious impact on your website’s overall performance, resulting in traffic decreases, potential penalties and lost revenue.
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It’s time to play “20 Questions!”  Well, not exactly.  I’m not going to make you guess over and over again until you figure out what object I’m thinking of.  Instead, I’m going to lay out twenty crucial questions that you must ask potential SEO agencies before hiring one to work on your website.

There are a lot of scammers and fakers out there, so I hope you find this list useful when it comes to choosing the best agency for your job.
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Strip away all the images, graphics, videos and so on from the web and you are left with nothing but text. And lots of it. That text is what drives search. But that text was a mess so some people introduced microformats to help make sense of all that text. Unfortunately it wasn’t structured and there were different standards across the search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo!

Here’s why that’s a problem. Somebody on your page may clearly understand what your page is about. The search engines, however, won’t. Let’s say you are searching for a cougar. Do you want the animal or the car? If you wanted the Mercury Cougar, then you would need to search for “Mercury cougar.” If you just wanted to know about animal, then “cougar” would do.

Schema changes that by optimizing the content you are creating. Schema allows you to identify exactly what you are creating with simple tags that remove all ambiguity. This will work wonders for getting more visibility since you are telling search engines exactly what your page is about. Continue reading

I love SEO and I also love all of the algorithm changes Google has made over the last decade. It really makes my job challenging, and keeps me on my toes.

For example, when I first got into this business the SEOs number one goal was to get client websites to the top of search rankings. It was a pretty easy sell if you could do it. Your value proposition amounted to this: I’ll help you rank for these keywords by doing A, B and C. And it was really easy to report on, too. All your client had to do was search Google for those keywords and see where their pages were positioned.

Of course back in the day SEOs real struggle was to get clients to relax—it took time to rank high! Now our struggle is to get clients to STOP thinking about rankings. Google has made hundreds of changes, mostly small ones, but also huge ones that have changed the ranking landscape, Search+ being the biggest. Continue reading

If you are an SEO, then you probably love marketing. You probably love to think about a company and their website and how to position them on the web using all of the tactics in your inbound marketing toolbox.

But have you ever thought about how to market yourself? Have you ever thought about what makes you different from your competition? Have you ever thought about what distinction you can offer to clients that your competitors can’t? This way of market thinking is known as branding—and it applies to you personally. Continue reading

Sounds pretty crazy, right?  Really, no one expects to hear about an SEO professional who loves waking up to the news that Google’s latest tweaks have resulted in dramatic changes to the natural search results!

For most SEO insiders and webmasters, the news that Google’s made changes is often accompanied by panic and terror – but I’ve always taken a different approach.  In my years of working in the field, I’ve seen plenty of changes come and go, including all of the following: Continue reading