What comes to mind when you think of a product or concept described to you as “organic”? You might define an “organic” tomato as a vegetable produced without chemical processes. No shortcuts, but rather, made with extra attention to the crop’s impact on the soil. Perhaps locally grown. And with the extensive nurturing, a stupendous price tag. Your definition wouldn’t be far off. Food products…
The recent Google algorithm change has a snappy beak, and isn’t afraid to chomp spammy websites off search rankings with it. The “Penguin” update punishes pages that have been spamming Google for SEO purposes. Since its April 24th 2012 launch, SEO experts and website owners have flocked to web forums, speculating on the impact of the new change, and offering advice for how to tailor…
The Google algorithm overhaul from February 2011, dubbed “Panda” by Google Fellow Amit Singhal and his team of SEO engineers, has reared its head once again. And this time, it’s been delivered in less than 140 characters. On March 23rd, a tweet rang out from the official news update Twitter handle for Google, @google: “Panda refresh rolling out now. Only ~1.6% of queries noticeably affected.…
When the Wall Street Journal deems the latest Google algorithm changes “among the biggest in the company’s history,” small business owners with websites must sit up and take notice. Over the next few months, we will experience some major shifts in how Google delivers search results. The words to know: semantic search. As Wall Street contributor Amir Erfati explains, “ the search engine will better…
Get used to hearing “social discovery” tossed around by app developers and smartphone enthusiasts. It’s the phrase du jour at SXSW Interactive, a massive tech conference held in Austin, Texas. Over the course of the five-day festival, social discovery has intrigued journalists and techies alike. Twitter made its mark at SXSW. Could social discovery follow suit? But first, a definition of social discovery mobile applications:…
With traffic tracking tools like Google Analytics, measuring the effectiveness of your website comes down to numbers and figures. User insight is gauged by clicks, time spent browsing, traffic spikes, and number of visits, amongst other trackable web activities. Here you get the hard facts about your website; what works for users, and what doesn’t. As SixRevisions contributor Claudiu Murariu suggests, “the quality of a…
In a Google blog post last Thursday, Search Quality leader and “Distinguished Engineer” Matt Cutts announced that publishers with more ad space than quality content above the fold* could expect lower rankings in the coming weeks. Motivated by complaints from unhappy users who have clicked on site pages only to scroll through advertisement space to find the actual information, Cutts insists that the change is…
With over 20% of Google search queries currently geared at gaining “from around here” results, now’s the time to make sure that users can find your business on a local level. Tapping into location-specific keyword searches can improve your PageRank, and legitimize your business for the use of Google Maps, a massively popular service that relies on correct address information to populate their map search…
You hear it so often amongst web designers and marketing gurus, but this is one worn piece of gum that shouldn’t be retired to the garbage bin just yet: “Content is king.” It is! It reigns supreme! Just listen to the glistening words of Fast Company contributor Shawn Parr last month in an article titled “Content is the New Currency”: “Great communication is an art…
Search strategist Jason Acidre presents a strong theory for the future of search engine optimization in his recently published article, “Branding in SEO-The Big Shift in Online Marketing.” He predicts that business branding “is one of the biggest factors that search engines might rely on when it comes to determining authenticity for web authority/popularity.” Online branding strategies like link building to sites oft-visited by targeted…