Despite the rise of social signals and the continued prominence of content as primary search engine optimization tools, high-quality inbound links remain one of the three big components in improving rankings. The automated processes have been devalued; low-quality posts, footer links, and sidebar links are a thing of the past and in excess can actually hurt a website. Strong, contextual links are still valid. In fact, some have shown that they’re more important than ever. In this infographic by Digital Net Agency, which comes to us via Honda Dealers San Jose, they examine the two different…

As bloggers we want our written articles to be seen, read and commented on. We want to provoke thought, teach something new, share news-worthy content with our readers and discover trends to connect us through the written word. However, I have noticed that many will publish an article and then walk away and it makes me wonder why, why would you take the time to write something and not use the provided share buttons on the website or blog? (I hope we are past the stage of not having social buttons) Discovery is only a part of the process, yes you added it to relevant categories and ensured there were tags/keywords…

No, it’s not spam, but it is associated with a pork product. Search engine optimization has a bad name in many circles. It is synonymous with spamming much in the same way that racial, lifestyle, and religious stereotypes work; the few bad apples make the normal, honorable “SEOs” look bad. With that said, this isn’t about them. People are getting more involved with their websites and they often ask what they should be focused upon to get their search rankings higher. I always tell them the same thing, and it’s held true since 2007. In fact, it’s become even more important. Bacon. Bacon is the key to…

At SXSW, Matt Cutts discussed many topics in his panel with Danny Sullivan. The most interesting portion was the answer to a question about how large companies were able to muscle out “ma and pa websites” with aggressive optimization techniques. Cutts replied by saying this: “What about the people optimizing really hard and doing a lot of SEO. We don’t normally pre-announce changes but there is something we are working in the last few months and hope to release it in the next months or few weeks. We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over…

A few months back, website owners got extremely upset because Google Analytics stopped telling companies many of the keywords that people used to get to their website; specifically, they started marking all keywords used by people logged into Google accounts to be marked as (not provided), which is certainly frustrating.  Officially they swear this is for security, but what possible security breach is it for clients to see how people got to their webpages without any identifying information?  Users cried foul but, of course, Google did nothing to respond. Now, it’s been announced that…

At SXSW Interactive, there has been a lot of discussion about data visualizations. The industry has exploded in the last 2 years and is quickly becoming both a preferred way of distributing large chunks of data as well as the bane of content creators everywhere. Is it possible to distinguish between true visualizations and invalid ones? Can true creativity, beauty, and usefulness be rewarded while spam is vilified? Yes and yes. The good side of infographics The advantage that visualizations have over spreadsheets and articles is that they can present a message in a way that is more easily and…

When the Demand Media witch hunt started a few months ago, journalists and bloggers called for action against what they termed the biggest “content farm.” There is little doubt that eHow is in essence exactly as described: a venue for low-quality, quickly-written and edited articles that rank well in search engines and draw in tremendous traffic to their ad-loaded pages as a result. Google changed their algorithm. eHow remains strong in the search engines. What happened? Not to toot our own horn here, but we said back in December that Demand Media’s business model is gold and we stand by the opinion…

It’s inevitable. No matter how big a company is, how carefully they go about doing it, or how sorry they are when they’re caught, black hat SEO techniques never end well. Google is the judge, jury, and executioner of search and they wield a sharp and heavy axe. JC Penney learned this the hard way this week. Thanks to a NY Times investigation, they were exposed as participating in a link-building scheme that sent them to the top of search rankings for hundreds, possibly thousands of important organic retail search terms. While the Times does a good job of putting the pieces together, understanding…