SEO

One of the most popular marketing goals for local business owners is to improve their organic rankings in the local listings of search engines, such as the map sections found in both Google and Bing. In addition to verifying your business address with Google and collecting quality online reviews, ensuring NAP Consistency is a surefire way to improving your local presence on the web. The higher your consistency, the higher your rankings. Here’s a quick…

These days, it seems like everyone wants to be a blogger, because they assume it’s easy. Any full-time blogger will tell you earning an income from blogging is anything but simple. While anyone can write a 600-word Op-Ed about cooking, parenting, and the like, drawing traffic to that blog in a sea of similar information takes knowledge in search engine optimization, a set of generally accepted best practices meant to maximize site visibility in search rankings….

Depending upon the server you use, whether you use upper or lower case in your URL structure may or may not matter. While Windows OS regard URLs to be the same as long as the spelling is the same, Linux and UNIX servers interpret different capitalization as 2 different pages, which can cause problems later on down the line. Can I have an example please? Sure! Wisegeek.org provides a good example of how this can…

The concept behind press releases is that they should be used to share newsworthy content with interested parties. Press releases can also be used to complement your existing SEO strategy which may already include a social presence, blogger outreach programs, blogging, or content marketing. That being said, press releases today no longer hold the same SEO value they did several years ago, as Google started recognizing that some companies were using them principally to gain…

Now that we have looked at the history of link building and how we got where we are now, the next logical questions is, “What’s next?”  Putting the history behind us, you hear the same advice pretty frequently in the industry, you need to have a “good” backlink profile with high quality links, and you should avoid “bad” backlinks that can harm your website in the longterm.  But what does that really mean?  Better yet, how…

Want to discover something about your website that will absolutely shock you? All you have to do is conduct an SEO audit on your website. An “SEO audit,” in spite of its dry-and-boring-sounding name, is one of the most jaw-dropping, eye-popping, mind-blowing experiences that could happen in the life of your business. Why? Because an SEO audit uncovers dozens of unexpected, under-the-hood, hidden, or nefarious things that could be going on in your website. Without…

  What is Anchor Text? What is anchor text? See how when you hover over the first line of this blog, you are enticed to click? From there you are directed to a webpage that answers the query. That is anchor text, plain and simple. Or, according to Moz, “anchor text is the visible characters and words that hyperlinks display when linking to another document or location on the web.” Why Anchor Text Is Important…

When you develop online content, the HTML coding behind the scenes plays a big role in your search engine rankings. For SEO purposes, two of the most important examples of this are your Title Tags and H1 Headers. Each of these are crucial for helping both Google and users understand your content. Used correctly, Title Tags and H1s can increase your position in search engines. Used incorrectly, however, these tags can negatively impact rankings and even…

Reviews, comments, and other forms of UGC (user generated content) frequently become a focus of social media marketing and brand management – but did you know that they are also important for ecommerce SEO? Yes, reviewing or commenting on products and posts can indeed give you a better page ranking, provided you use the right tools and make commenting options easy to find and use. Read on to find out why you should be encouraging…

Since Volume Nine tracks the search rankings for a large number of clients, we noticed a shift in March that has led to significant fluctuations in Google search results.  As of now, there has not been an official statement from Google regarding an algorithm shift, but SEO Roundtable had some interesting findings when looking at manual penalties. Given the variance across a number of websites, the recent shifts have the makings of a potential algorithm…