SEO Salman's Blog

Posted by BritneyMuller It's a brand-new decade, rich with all the promise of a fresh start and new beginnings. But does that mean you should be doing anything different with regards to your SEO? In this Whiteboard Friday, our Senior SEO Scientist Britney Muller offers a seventeen-point checklist of things you ought to keep in mind for executing on modern, effective SEO. You'll encounter both old favorites (optimizing title tags, anyone?) and cutting-edge ideas to power your search strategy from this year on into the future. Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab! Video Transcription Hey, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we are talking about SEO in 2020. What does that look like? How have things changed? Do we need to be optimizing for favicons and BERT ? We definitely don't. But here are some of the things that I feel we should be keeping an eye on.  ☑ Cover your bases with foundati

Posted by Dr-Pete On January 13th, MozCast measured significant algorithm flux lasting about three days (the dotted line shows the 30-day average prior to the 13th, which is consistent with historical averages) ... That same day, Google announced the release of a core update dubbed the January 2020 Core Update (in line with their recent naming conventions) ... On January 16th, Google announced the update was "mostly done," aligning fairly well with the measured temperatures in the graph above. Temperatures settled down after the three-day spike ... It appears that the dust has mostly settled on the January 2020 Core Update. Interpreting core updates can be challenging, but are there any takeaways we can gather from the data? How does it compare to other updates? How did the January 2020 Core Update stack up against recent core updates? The chart below shows the previous four named core updates, back to August 2018 (AKA "Medic") ... While the January 202

Posted by brodieclarkconsulting I recently finished a project where I was tasked to investigate why a site (that receives over one million organic visits per month) does not rank for any featured snippets. This is obviously an alarming situation, since ~15% of all result pages, according to the MozCast , have a featured snippet as a SERP feature. The project was passed on to me by an industry friend. I’ve done a lot of research on featured snippets in the past. I rarely do once-off projects, but this one really caught my attention. I was determined to figure out what issue was impacting the site. In this post, I detail my methodology for the project that I delivered, along with key takeaways for my client and others who might be faced with a similar situation. But before I dive deep into my analysis: this post does NOT have a fairy-tale ending. I wasn’t able to unclog a drain that resulted in thousands of new visitors. I did, however, deliver massive amounts of closure for my clie

Posted by Matthew_Edgar When it comes to the forms your site visitors are using, you need to go beyond completions — it's important to understand how people are interacting with them, where the strengths lie and what errors might be complicating the experience. In this edition of Whiteboard Friday, Matthew Edgar takes you through in-depth form tracking in Google Analytics.  Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab! Video Transcription Howdy, Moz fans. My name is Matthew Edgar. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I am an analytics consultant at Elementive , and in this Whiteboard Friday what I want to talk to you about are new ways that we can really start tracking how people are interacting with our forms. I'm going to assume that all of you who have a form on your website are already tracking it in some way. You're looking at goal completions on the form, you're measuring how many people arrived on th

Posted by JotFormmarketing In the fall of 2018 our CEO had a simple yet head-exploding request of the JotForm marketing and growth teams: Produce 100,000 words of high-quality written content in a single month. All types of content would count toward the goal, including posts on our own blog, help guides, template descriptions, and guest posts and sponsored articles on other sites. In case you don’t think that sounds like a lot, 100,000 words is the length of a 400-page book. Produced in a single month. By a group of JotFormers who then numbered fewer than eight. Why would on Earth would he want us to do all that? My colleague and I trying to calculate how many blog posts it would take to reach 100,000 words. It’s important to understand intent here. Our CEO, Aytekin, isn’t a crazy man. He didn’t send us on a mission just to keep us busy. You see, for many months we’d dabbled with content, and it was working. Aytekin’s contributed posts in Entrepreneur magazine and on Medium

Posted by KristinTynski I’m often asked about what results are earned through content marketing and digital PR. So I decided to take a data-driven approach to quantifying the value of links from top-tier press mentions by looking at the aggregate improvements seen by a group of domains that have enjoyed substantial press attention in the last few months. Then I examined which publishers can have the biggest impact on rankings. My goal was to answer this question: What sort of median bump can be expected when your brand secures media coverage? And how can you potentially get the biggest organic lift? First off: Top-tier links matter a great deal This chart represents the correlation between the number of times a site was linked to from within the article text of publishers and its rankings and traffic. Considering the sheer number of possible variables that contribute to rankings changes (on-site factors, amount and quality of on-site content, penalties, etc.) seeing R-values (wh

Posted by DanielRussell For marketers, Reddit is more than a tool to while away your lunch break. It's a huge, thriving forum with subreddits devoted to almost any topic you can imagine — and exciting new content ideas lurk within threads, just waiting to be discovered. In this edition of Whiteboard Friday, Daniel Russell takes you through five simple steps to mine Reddit for content ideas bolstered by your target audience's interest. Video Transcription Howdy, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Daniel Russell. I'm from an agency called Go Fish Digital . Today we're going to be talking about mining Reddit for content ideas. Reddit, you've probably heard of it, but in case you haven't, it's one of the largest websites on the internet. It gets billions of views and clicks per year. People go there because it is a great source of content. It's really entertaining. But it also means that it's a great source

Posted by Alan_Coleman Hello Moz readers, We’re proud to bring some insights from the Wolfgang E-Commerce KPI Study 2020 . The annual study provides KPI benchmark data which allow digital marketers analyze their 2019 performance and plan their 2020. The most popular section in the report amongst Moz readers has always been the conversion correlation , where we crunch the numbers to see what sets the high-performing websites apart. We're privileged to count a number of particularly high-performance websites among our dataset participants. There have been over twenty international digital marketing awards won by a spread of participant websites in the last three years. In these findings, you're getting insights from the global top tier of campaigns. If we take a five-year look-back, we can see the conversion correlation section acts as an accurate predictor of upcoming trends in digital marketing. In our 2016 study , the two stand-out correlations with conversion rate were:

Posted by Jeff_Baker Why is everyone and their grandparents writing about content re-optimization? I can’t speak for the people writing endless streams of blogs on the subject, but in Brafton’s case, it’s been the fastest technique for improving rankings and driving more traffic. As a matter of fact, in this previous Moz post , we showed that rankings can improve in a matter of minutes after re-indexing. But why does it work? It’s probably a combination of factors (our favorite SEO copout!), which may include: Age value: In a previous study we observed a clear relationship between time indexed and keyword/URL performance, absent of links: More comprehensive content: Presumably, when re-optimizing content you are adding contextual depth to existing topics and breadth to related topics. It’s pretty clear at this point that Google understands when content has fully nailed a topic cluster. It’s a known quantity: You’re only going to be re-optimizing content that has a hig