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As an industry, SEOs have absorbed the message that ‘short is sweet’. We know that the attention span of surfers is limited. They don’t tend to luxuriate in the written word, enjoying writing for writing’s sake. Instead they want short, informative, actionable content without the clutter of unnecessary verbosity. We’ve also fully taken on board the idea that content should be pitched at the lowest possible reading level, so as not to alienate potential readers and customers.

When done well, short, simple content is great. When done badly, it results in either content that is so thin it isn’t worth reading at all, or content that appears to be aimed at an audience who have just put aside their copy of Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes.

It’s become blogger lore that content should be written in this way; however, there are quite a few reasons, both from the perspective of SEO, and from the perspective of content marketing, that adding longer form content written for educated adults into the mix can actually bring some noticeable benefits to corporate blogs and websites. Continue reading →

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Search engine optimization is a broad field that employs a huge number of different strategies to help sites rank well in the SERPs. From producing awesome content to technical strategies like implementing caching to speed up a site, many web owners are familiar with the basic practices of SEO, but what they don’t consider is the potential benefit of using a specialist SEO host.

An SEO host provides everything that ordinary web hosting companies provides, but they offer an additional service that standard web hosts do not: multiple IP hosting. Multiple IP hosting depends on a company having control of a large block of so-called C-level IPs. Not all companies have control over a sufficiently wide variety of IPs over a sufficiently diverse geographical range to successfully offer the benefits of multiple IP hosting.

SEO hosting companies allow their clients to make use of the large set of IPs they control, and that has a number of significant SEO benefits. Continue reading →

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Content marketing has always been with us. It has been called different things, but the creation of engaging content by brands has been a lynchpin of marketing for decades. In recent years, online marketers in particular have been forced by improvements to search engine algorithms, the ubiquity of social media, and users’ increasing immunity to traditional advertising methods to up their game in the content arena.

Many, however, remain to be convinced, seeing content marketing a passing fad or a distraction from the tried and true marketing and SEO tactics of the past. The naysayers have a variety of arguments that are frequently used to stymie content marketing advocates, and those advocates are faced with some real problems when implementing content marketing campaigns. We’re going to have a look at five of the most serious problems content marketers face and offer possible solutions.

We Can’t Produce Enough Content

I hear this a lot. Producing content in sufficient quantities to keep hungry search engines fed and social media followers engaged seems a daunting task. Continue reading →

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In a post on the official Google News Blog, Google has warned publishers that publishing content that fails to clearly discriminate between editorial and advertising may harm their ranking and Google News SEO.

The decline of traditional advertising revenue has forced publishers to devise new methods of generating income from their content. One of the methods that has rapidly gained popularity in recent months is known as native advertising. Native advertising is akin to the traditional advertorial. Promotional posts are published with much of the same context as editorial content. While such articles may include a low-key notification that they are promotional content, they almost exactly resemble the other output of a site.

While bloggers are well acquainted with the promotional guest post, there is intense controversy surrounding the use of native advertising on more traditional news platforms. The Atlantic recently generated a storm when it published a glowing article about Scientology without making it clear that it had been paid for and wasn’t objective editorial. Continue reading →

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Back in the day, SEO was all about discovering what the algorithms liked and creating sites that tickled them in just the right spot. Nothing made the algorithms happier — to indulge in a bit of anthropomorphism — than to see lots of keywords and lots of links with lots of relevant anchor text.

The natural result was sites that appealed to algorithms, but weren’t quite up to snuff for human beings. Over the years, however, Google has become better at determining what it is that human beings like in their SERPS, and many of the previously successful SEO methods have fallen by the wayside. Continue reading →

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Over on Search Engine Land, the perennial discussion of the benefits and disadvantages of using subdomains vs. directories has recently been reignited.
In his post, 5 Whopping Lies That Keep SEO At Status Quo, Ian Lurie, presents as his 4th most egregious lie:

“We Can Put The Blog On A Subdomain. It’s Fine.”

The conversation on this issue has been swinging back and forth for a long time, with people on both extremes and quite a number in the middle who claim that it doesn’t matter at all for SEO. which is also Google’s stated position.

Micheal Martinez, of the excellent SEO Theory blog responds in the comments that:

“You and [Rand] Fishkin are completely wrong on the subdomain issue. It’s a shame this kind of misinformation is still being shared on major SEO Websites like Search Engine Land.” Continue reading →

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When Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded the Google search engine, their core insight was implemented as the PageRank algorithm. Put simply, PageRank determines where a page should rank in the SERPs based on the PageRank of incoming links from other sites — it’s a recursive algorithm. The higher the PageRank, the greater the assumed authority of a particular site. That authority can then be combined with a keyword analysis of a page and that combination is then to devise a ranking of pages in response to a search query.

Thus, PageRank is a proxy measure of authority. Google algorithms weren’t, and still aren’t, for the most part, capable of determining whether a page is authoritative for a particular search query by looking at the page content. PageRank, as anyone who used early search engines knows, was an enormous improvement on previous efforts, but it is far from perfect, and it opened up opportunities for gaming the system with various link-building tactics. Continue reading →

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Keywords are at the heart of any SEO strategy. They are the thread that links sites to customers via their search terms. Over the years there has been a huge amount of focus and speculation about how precisely keywords should be used in on-page content to signal relevance to search engines and to rank to well.

Historically, much of the talk about keywords has been of the “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin” variety: where should they be placed in the content, how many words should there be between the start of a page or heading and the keyword, what is the optimum ratio of keywords to other text, and so on. Some (not very good) SEOs strive to produce content that contains an exact percentage of keywords, often with the result of producing content that isn’t very readable to humans. And some stick to the old tactic of writing as many pages as possible stuffed with keyword variants and synonyms to cover all possible long-tail searches. Continue reading →