#SMX 2013: The Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors

Here’s a recap of the first SEO track session of SMX 2013 – The Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors: 2013 Edition. This was a fantastic session with even better speakers: Matthew Peters (@mattthemathman) from Moz Jenny Halasz (@jennyhalasz) from Archology Marcus Tober (@linkvendor) from Searchmetrics Eric Enge (@stonetemple) from Stone Temple The session was [...]

4 Actionable Insights to Drive Business with Google Analytics

So, you have Google Analytics running on your site. Let’s sit back and watch the business role in. Yeah…keep dreaming. Having Google Analytics installed can be a powerful tool and can deliver valuable insights — if used properly. We need to get past the vanity report traffic view for the past 30 days. It’s a vanity metric because, although it looks cool, it’s not really telling us anything or giving us actionable insights.

Analyzing Google’s (not provided): Extracting Data About Visits with No Keywords

Google began sending visitors to websites without providing the keyword from the users’ searches. Google claimed this was done for security and privacy. However, when the search engine still passes the keyword for paid search, this seemed a bit disingenuous. For online marketers who care about driving inbound traffic to their websites, Google has taken a step backwards toward old media where it’s difficult to track and measure your marketing efforts. To counteract this problem, we looked at Google referral data across a variety of SMB and B2B websites and were able to measure how many website visits are affected by (not provided) using data from Optify in hopes to provide actionable SEO insights.

6 Tips for Improving Your Website’s Accessibility

More and more people understand that good SEO relies on relevant, high quality content. Customers who ask us to perform “SEO magic” for them (with no work on their part, usually), or to create 5,000 high-quality pages per day (you can’t), are a dying breed. So far, so good. What is often overlooked still is the other side of good SEO, which, in the professional SEO circles, is called accessibility.

How Many Homes Does Google Think You Have?

The homepage is the most important page and the crux of a website. It should be functional, relevant and engaging for the visitor. It should also be easy to identify over all other pages in a given site for the search engines that regularly crawl the web.

Having multiple versions of your homepage sends a confusing signal to search engines and makes ranking high for relevant terms more difficult. The issue with multiple homepages is that it dilutes the value of the homepage by channeling links meant for the homepage to different versions of the page. The goal is to make each individual page unique and as authoritative as possible, so focusing these links will help boost homepage authority. The homepage authority can then be passed to your category and content pillar pages via navigation and content links from the homepage.

Free SEO Tools That’ll Add Instant Value to Your Digital Marketing

Whether you’re just getting started with digital marketing and SEO or are looking for tools to add value to your programs without dipping into your marketing budget, I wanted to share some of our favorite free SEO tools that can come in handy for any digital marketing campaign.

On-Site Search: How to Get the Most Out of Your Data

You know that little search box in the header of every page? Most websites have them. These are designed to make navigation drop dead simple for larger websites, specifically aiding users in quickly finding the destination page they’re looking for. So how can we learn from them as marketers and leverage that information as sales professionals?