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

I’ve made it pretty clear in some of my previous posts on here that part of the reason I got into SEO in the first place is my love of the internet and the background science that drives it.  It’s fascinating to me how much our society relies on this vast network, even though most people haven’t the faintest clue how it operates – and those that are “in the know” are often scrambling to make sense of search engine algorithm changes.

Given how much I love SEO, I spend a lot of time reading industry blogs and participating in SEO events.  Not only does this help to keep me on my game when it comes to helping my clients’ sites perform better in the natural search results, it also gives me some insight as to what’s coming up in the future of the industry.

So with that in mind, the following are a few of my predictions as to what we’ll see in the future of search: Continue reading

There’s no arguing with the fact that it’s been a rough couple of months for webmasters and SEOs alike.  In addition to being pummeled by various Panda and Penguin updates and refreshes, Google has been investing significant resources into stepping up its monitoring and penalization of low value link building strategies.

Even if your site hasn’t received one of the unprecedented number of unnatural links warnings issued recently by the search giant, it’s worth taking some time to evaluate your site’s backlink profile and remove low value links at this point.  Given the recent push we’ve seen recently by Google and the other search engines to weed web spam out of their natural search results, there’s no reason to believe that these are the only link-oriented penalties we’ll see. Continue reading