SEO

Have you noticed that over the past year or so Google search results have become much more robust and eye-catching with the use of photos and special call out sections?  What most internet marketers don’t know is that priming your site to achieve those robust search results is not reserved solely for Wikipedia and other web giants. HTML markup is a way to take content you already own on your web site and call out…

When you decide to get a new website, it’s exciting! But that excitement can soon turn to anxiety as you realize how much work actually goes into a successful website launch. As an SEO Specialist at Volume Nine, I’ve been involved in many launches for all kinds of different websites. When clients take their time, stay organized, and implement our recommendations, we see some really great results! However, when site launches are rushed and the…

Since the birth of online searching, there has been search engine optimization, and for good reason. Anyone who follows search engine news (all 12 of you) knows that the #1 result on Google gets over 30% of the traffic for any given keyword. Organic search also drives more traffic to websites than all social media combined. And the truth is, those top rankings are even more valuable than you think. Brace yourself for what I…

Sometimes, in the SEO world, it can feel like you are bumping around in the dark. You take all the steps: Read all the right blogs, do trial and error, gain experience, talk to others and put a plan together….  But at the end of the day; some aspects of SEO remain very difficult to discern just what it is that Google wants.  It can still feel like a high stakes guessing game. That is why…

Managing redirects is extremely important.  A user who lands an on a 404 page isn’t likely to stick around to find the content themselves.  This is a tutorial on how to import a redirect map in WordPress using the ‘Redirection‘ plugin to upload a list of redirects.   Installing the Plugin You can install Redirection by visiting the plugin page on WordPress.  Click the red ‘Download’ button.  Your file will download as a .zip.  Leave…

No Google algorithm change hits completely unexpectedly. Word always seeps out when another Google change is imminent. Often enough, it’s Google themselves letting webmasters and SEOs know what’s in store for them down the road. In many cases, those changes are nothing less than disruptive. Google Penguin impacted more than 3% of English-language searches. Not to be outdone, Panda 1.0 affected as many as 12% of searches in the United States. Enough to keep webmasters…

Google, while the obvious first choice in online search, isn’t the only game in town. Rival search engines include other big dogs like Bing and Yahoo, as well as…lesser ones. Competitor DuckDuckGo.com has made complaints of a range of Google anti-competitive practices that have severely impacted its ability to market its services. Other search engines don’t have recourse to such an excuse for why they’ve been unable to capture a significant market-share of search users. Here are…

Website owners fear 404 errors for good reason. Broken pages can damage a website’s reputation, frustrate users, and result in lost sales.  So what can be done to ensure that this “page not found” error does not cause a loss in visitor traffic, a loss in the website’s search engine rank, or worse yet, a lost sale because the visitor couldn’t find the web page? This post will attempt to define 404 errors and proper strategies…

If your website has an XML sitemap (and it should for indexing purposes according to our 2014 SEO Best Practice Audit Elements ), Changefreq and Priority are two important sitemap tags for supplying data to the search engines. They affect when and how often search engine “spiders” (also called “robots” or “crawlers”) visit your site’s individual pages, which has various implications. Although using Changefreq and Priority XML sitemap tags is voluntary, they remain important for…

Read any SEO blog and you’ll likely discover that as undeniably important as keyword research and compelling content truly are for your website, SEO linkbuilding has a major influence on how search engines see your site. In fact, Moz estimates that what the Internet says about your web pages accounts for roughly 2/3 of the search engine algorithms. Let’s put it another way.  What people do in response to your site, in the form of…