Digital Marketing Mastery: Insights, Strategies, and Tactics for Success

SEO

The posts here look at Search Engine Optimization, what is it? why do I need SEO?

SEO Trends for Fall 2014

Talk about a needle in a haystack! There are literally billions of pages on the internet, and if your website’s content is deemed irrelevant by search engines, it’ll be as lost as a skipper on a 3-hour tour. That’s where SEO comes in. Search engine optimization is one of the most important tools you have of getting your website’s page ranking as high up on search engines as possible. And if you’re not keeping up with the latest SEO trends, you might as well close up shop. Some trends from last year are still going strong this year, and SEO experts are still recommending them to boost page views. Here are some of the hottest SEO trends and predictions for fall 2014.

How Does Defensive SEO Work?

Defend Against Negative SEO
Defend Against Negative SEO

Over the last two or three years the entire SEO world has gone through what most would call a major transformation. This has caused digital marketing experts and SEO specialists to have to rethink and change a variety of strategies. It is true that it is now more difficult to rank high in the SERPs than what it used to be. Many think that many of the negative SEO campaigns that have begun emerging are a result of black hat SEO tactics that no longer work. Negative SEO campaigns attack competitor’s sites and cause damage to their site ranking and in many cases can cause a site to fall off the first few pages of the SERPs altogether. The good news is that there are some strategies that can help you prevent the negative effects of such an attack, and there are ways to protect your site from coming under attack in the first place.

What is Negative SEO?

Negative SEO
Negative SEO

One of the latest difficulties that SEO experts and webmasters have to face is negative SEO. A negative SEO campaign is when another person performs actions which are intended to hurt a competitor’s ranking in the SERPs. There are several different ways that competitors attack a site and try to inflict malicious damage, some report sites to Google for using “black hat” tactics, others review bomb which means that they send a lot of 5-star reviews very close together so it looks like they were paid reviews. In most instances, negative SEO tactics are totally out of the control of the site owner and competitors try to obtain higher rankings in the SERPs by negatively impacting a competitor’s site.

How Does Search Work?

The internet … could it be more wonderful? You may or may not be old enough to remember, but it wasn’t that long ago that, if you needed to perform research, you had to schlep to a library, look through something called a card catalogue, pick out a bunch of books that might contain some of the information you’re looking for, and subsequently hunt through the library to find those books’ reference numbers. Then, if you were lucky, the books you needed weren’t checked out, or sitting on the librarian’s desk waiting to be returned to their rightful places, and you could start reading … and reading … and reading. Thank goodness we don’t have to go through all that today! Billions of users worldwide search the internet for information every day. Most people go to a search engine such as Google or Yahoo, type in a topic or a few key words, and hit enter. Then, when the pages of data appear, they click on the ones that interest them. But how many users actually know how searching the internet works?

SEO Best Practices for Ecommerce Websites

Over the last few years consumers have become increasingly secure about shopping through online resources. As they have become safer, there are more online purchases occurring than ever before. This offers the ecommerce site an opportunity to be taken advantage of, as long as they know how to stay competitive. This is of course the catch since ecommerce has become more difficult. Google acts like they want to be the only affiliate on the internet and with Amazon being the giant it is, it can be difficult to get notice as a valid alternative. Search engines also tend to remove commercial sites from their results and replace them with their own sets of ads or shopping programs. Search engines also tend to lean toward ranking results for content but not so much for products. There are several strategies and SEO best practices that can help improve an ecommerce site’s ranking in SERPs.

What is the Difference between Digital Marketing and SEO?

Many consider search engine optimization (SEO) and digital marketing to be synonymous. However, they have two separate definitions and are entirely separate. There are many ways in which SEO and digital marketing function similarly and today they work in tandem. An SEO company is hired to optimize a website so that its position in search engine results is improved. They will use a wide variety of strategies and SEO best practices to achieve higher rankings in the SERPs. SEO is actually a subset of digital marketing and there are many who would define an SEO specialist as one who integrates digital marketing and SEO best practices to achieve their goals.

How Does Digital Marketing Work?

What is Digital Marketing?

Marketing is defined as a process of communicating with an audience in order to inform them about various products or services which would be of benefit to them. Another term for marketing might be promotion. Marketing incorporates the use of a wide range of strategies to increase consumers’ knowledge of products or services. The goal of marketing is to present information about products to consumers in such a way that the consumer realizes it fills some need in their lives and they make a purchase. Digital marketing is simply using digital strategies to communicate business specific information to an audience in order to illicit a response.

What is the Best Blogging Platform for SEO?

Blogs have become a great way to express thoughts, promote, create an internet presence, and publish content. Using a free blogging platform like WordPress, Blogger, Weebly, Jux, and Tumblr, make publishing your blogs easy. Here is some in depth information on the best blogging platform for your SEO strategy and some tips on customizing and personalizing it.

When trying to figure out what is the best platform to run your websites blog on, you are confronted with many options. The spokesperson from Google, Matt Cutts, stated that WordPress was made to do SEO well. Coming from someone at Google, the advice should be well worth looking into. Here are some reasons that WordPress is the best blogging platform when it comes to SEO.

The Hummingbird Update and the Future of Search

Google Hummingbird Update
Google Hummingbird Update

It seems like Google updates more frequently than what we can keep up with them. Their latest update, the Hummingbird Update was announced recently even though they had been using it for about a month prior to the announcement. Some could take it personal when they are not “in the know” about which update is being initiated. The latest update to the algorithm is the Hummingbird update and it is one in which the entire algorithm has undergone a complete overhaul. Unlike some of the earlier updates like Penguin or Panda, Hummingbird is a total change to the algorithm. Penguin and Panda each dealt with one aspect of the algorithm, not the entire method. The latest update has refined how search results are gathered and displayed for users and it has sent ripples of discontent across SEO professionals. Knowing how the Hummingbird Update changes the world of search is important to web marketers and SEO specialists everywhere.