AdSense Text Ads Get Title Highlighting

Google announced that it has updated all text AdSense ads to allow for the title color of ads to be changed when the user moves their mouse over a link. The company says after a period of testing, it found that this actually results in higher earnings for publishers, while also “increasing user and advertising value.” “As you can imagine, there are numerous combinations of link and background color across the ad units on all publisher pages,” says Stephen Yuan with Google’s AdSense engineering team....

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Google Encrypted Search Means No Info For Individual Queries

Webmaster Tools will still provide top keywords Google announced that it is going to begin encrypting search queries with SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) as the default experience at Google.com when you search logged into your Google account. http://www.google.com will become https://www.google.com. “This is especially important when you’re using an unsecured Internet connection, such as a WiFi hotspot in an Internet cafe,” says Google product manager Evelyn Kao. There’s a chance that your Google experience...

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7 SEO Friendly Site Features that Developers Often Miss

Web developers are great: without them, we wouldn't have, well… the web! But unfortunately, a lot of developers can have a bit of a blind-spot when it comes to SEO. While some on-site SEO features almost always come as standard now (ability to edit meta tags, image alt properties, etc.), there are some important areas under the hood that often get missed. Let's have a look… Analytics (Google or Otherwise) A decent analytics package is essential for any web marketing effort, both for measuring results and gaining insight into how your site is being...

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Convert Visitors with Content

Everyone wants visitors to convert. Depending on the organization, that could mean bookmarking the site, subscribing to the newsletter, purchasing the product or service, registering for an account, donating to the charity, or what have you. But visitors won't make the effort unless you make an effort. What exactly do I mean by that? Stoney deGeyter uses the analogy of being in the middle of a brick-and-mortar store without any sales assistants around to help. “Looking up and down isles, not finding an available employee within driving distance,...

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Link Building With Articles

There are many different ways that a link can be built. One that is often overlooked but which can have huge rewards is writing and submitting articles. The reason article writing and submission is arguably one of the best of the link building methods is that it not only functions as a link building exercise but also a traffic source. Honestly, can you think of a better use of your online marketing time than a tactic that provides for traffic and which can help improve your search engine visibility? Neither can I. That being said, simply whipping...

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301s versus Canonical

Resolving Duplicate Content Since the Panda updates from Google earlier this year, duplicate content has become an issue that no website owner can afford to overlook. While the update was designed specifically to target low value sites, content farms and scraped content, its paramount imperative was to reduce the amount of duplicate content that resulted in mass amounts of spam-ridden search results. As a direct result of the updates to the Google search algorithm, many thousands of both legitimate and nefarious sites were penalized with a significant...

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Facebook Beith Not The Devil

Social media is not going away, and nor should it. For all the nay-sayers out there who deem Facebook as the work of the Devil, just remember social media has always existed. Since the beginning of time, in fact. It was called word of mouth. The baker told the butcher about his latest new blend of grains, the butcher told the housemaid, the housemaid told the tailor, the tailor told the constable and gradually everyone knew about the fabulous new compilation the baker was using in his breads. Now, with the evolution of technology social media has...

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On-page Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

While off-page SEO is hugely important, we can't forget about on-page SEO. This consists of placing your most important keywords within the content elements of your actual pages. These on-page elements include Headlines, Sub-headlines, Body Content, Image Tags, and Links. Often times on-page SEO is referred to as "keyword density." It's very common that businesses will do too little on-page optimization or too much (keyword stuffing). While it's important to include your keyword as many times as...

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Building Inbound Links

Every website on the internet has the goal of reaching the #1 position in search engines but because there is only one top spot per keyword phrase, not everyone can make it So what gets a first place ranking? Off-page search engine optimization (SEO) is the most important factor to increasing your ranking results. Off-Page SEO is about building inbound links, essentially getting other quality websites to link back to you. Search engines call this authority or "link juice." The more inbound links...

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Part 1: Get Found Online

A great website isn't so great if no one visits it. This is why the first chapter is dedicated to getting found online, which covers the very top of the funnel of your inbound marketing strategy. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an absolute must-have to any website strategy, but it takes hard work and consistency when aiming for the top spot. These tips will help get you on your way to increasing your organic (non-paid) search engine rankings. In this part Building Inbound Links On-page SEO Title Tag & Meta Tag XML Sitemaps 301 Redire...

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Introduction

We all know how important a website is to a business's online strategy. Almost every business, whether B2B, B2C, non-profit, local or global needs an online presence to reach buyers in the internet age. A company's website is its virtual storefront. Shockingly, a recent survey by 1&1 Internet reported that up to 40% of small-to-medium sized businesses still don't have a website. Even if you're on social media, operating without a website is just silly. A website is an essential piece of your...

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