Evaluation

How to Qualify Link Opportunities

Breaking down what makes a link valuable is an essential skill every SEO should understand. It allows you to prioritize link-building efforts, helps uncover tactics used by competitors and even shows you what to remove or avoid. Effectively valuing links helps do things like: Create more valuable link-building campaigns. Perform... Continue reading
Image Alt

Image Optimization and Alt Text Best Practices

Image SEO isn't something I typically get a ton of call for, but it's definitely something I enjoy testing and playing around with. In this article, I’m going to run through the basics of image SEO and what best practices you can follow to earn more traffic to your site... Continue reading
Sight

Google’s “Ten things" Philosophy and the Connection with SEO

I can't even remember how it came up, but I recently found myself running through Google's "ten things we know to be true" and immediately started thinking of comparisons between the company philosophy and the future of search. Some of the comparisons aren't much of a stretch, but it all... Continue reading
Warning

Unnatural Link Building Examples

Back in the day, Google was sending out an average of 20 unnatural link warnings a day, and slapping manual penalties on quite a few sites (I had the pleasure of working on a few of those). However, in September of 2016, Google released Penguin 4.0, which instead of penalizing... Continue reading
Prospect

Prospecting for Links Like a Pro

Finding valuable link opportunities can be a difficult process with a lot of gray area. Some sites are easily identifiable as amazing, while others may look like junk, but still have value (and most may just be junk). Before learning my prospecting process, let's take a look at what is... Continue reading
Graphing

Finding Link Opportunities Through Backlink Analysis

Finding linking opportunities through backlink analysis requires you to have some common sense, basic knowledge of your competitors, an idea of what good links are, and you'll also need access to a quality backlink analysis tool like SEOmoz's Open Site Explorer. I'm a huge fan of Open Site Explorer, but... Continue reading
Library

Why Google Modifies Your Title Tags

Google Webmaster Central describes the site title, or title tag, as a quick representation of the content of a result and its relevance to a specific query. Sounds basic right? However, one thing you may not know, or dealt with, is the fact that Google reserves the right to alter... Continue reading