SEO Blog Posts

SEO

[This post originally appeared in 2011 and was refreshed in 2017 by popular demand.] If you were to map out your website’s internal links, would there be a logical order to it, or would it look like a steaming plate of spaghetti? Be careful before you answer. Strip away all the fancy design, the hours… Read More

SEO

First order of business, this is a pretty long post on Shopify SEO best practices. Here’s what you’re gonna get. Contents Shopify SEO Basics Introduction Shopify URLs Shopify Title Tags Meta Description Image Alt Navigation 301 Redirects Wrap up Shopify SEO Basics Warning: This is not a full-bore Shopify tutorial, this is a deep walkthrough… Read More

SEO

TL;DR: I wrote a technical SEO ebook. It’s free. You should get it here. You’re probably all wondering where the hell I’ve been. I haven’t written a blog post in, what, four weeks?! I’ve been working on two projects. The first one is a free ebook: Technical SEO Best Practices. I wrote it as something… Read More

SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a bit of a mystery for most developers. So, I’ve put together this checklist of SEO essentials that will make your SEO team and your client very happy. Inspect the HTML source code Get picky about HTML source code: Is your HTML structure valid? Valid HTML structure makes the page easier… Read More

SEO

Update: Word vectors are a legitimate thing!!!!! I’m not saying you should ignore them. I’m saying there’s plenty of ways to take word vectors into account in your SEO approach, without diving down into Python and natural language processing. I’m also saying that many industry experts (term used advisedly) are talking about this concept without… Read More

SEO

Robots.txt is a small text file that lives in the root directory of a website. It tells well-behaved crawlers whether to crawl certain parts of the site or not. The file uses simple syntax to be easy for crawlers to put in place (which makes it easy for webmasters to put in place, too). Write… Read More

SEO

Pssssst! Hey, you! Want to know the best way to drive a client crazy? Talk. A lot. But tell them nothing. The SEO industry has a lot of people who are really, really good at that. We’ve seen some true artists; men and women who can speak or write thousands of words without uttering a… Read More

SEO

Whether you’re thinking about starting a company, revamping your current business, adding a new product line, or just making sure your current SEO approach is on the right track, keyword research is a fundamental part of the process. The reason keyword research is so indispensable is that it’s one of the easiest ways to get… Read More

SEO

SearchFest 2016 (aka the last “SearchFest”) had a load of great talks, but only a few were as immediately relevant to my work as the deep dive discussion of structured and unstructured data from AJ Kohn and Mike Arnesen. They lent great insight to my approach to these two different types of information, and deepened… Read More

SEO

A Quick & Dirty Google Index Diagnostic This article outlines a simple diagnostic technique to assess the health of your site architecture. For all the current attention being paid to Content (caps intentional), our ability to generate organic traffic still depends heavily on that content being found and indexed by a search engine’s crawlers.  … Read More

SEO

If search engines can’t crawl your site, SEO efforts do not amount to much. One of the problems I see most often are ‘spider traps’. Traps kill crawls and hurt indexation. Here’s how you find and fix them: What is a spider trap? A spider trap is a structural issue that causes a web crawler… Read More

SEO

Or, “How I Became a Certified Jedi Knight” Yay! Star Wars! I can’t wait for The Force Awakens! It comes out in a couple weeks and I have totally bought into the hype. I know I’m not alone, even after a certain late-nineties, floppy-eared, backward knee-walking, CGI disappointment, who shall remain nameless. Now here’s the… Read More

Internet Marketing

No. Epilogue All hail RankBrain! Remember this day when we’re all slaves to machines that barf information on us, filling up downtime and turning us into drooling screen addicts… Wait. Since I’m too late to do anything about that, I thought I’d get one thing out of the way: RankBrain doesn’t matter to marketers. Or… Read More

SEO

In the wake of Google’s Mobile-Friendly update (occasionally referred to as “Mobilegeddon“) many marketers are wondering how their sites were impacted. In this Portent U Webinar, we discussed how you can see whether or not your site was impacted by the mobile-friendly update, identify mobile traffic opportunities, troubleshoot common mobile problems, and put together an… Read More

SEO

As a CEO and father, I’m an expert on anxiety. So I understand why Google’s mobile search algorithm update (aka Mobilegeddon) has CEOs and marketing teams popping Xanax. Before you reach for the prescription, though, do this test. It’ll help you figure out if you need to take action. Then, keep reading to see your… Read More