Get the answers to these questions and others here in more of the best blog posts and articles about SEO from the last year.
As It Turns Out, Content Is King by Court's Internet Marketing School
Correcting an earlier post entitled "Content Has Never Been The King," the author notes that "If your site doesn't have quality content, a Google search engineer can crush it with a simple push of a button. On the other hand, if your site's content is of stellar quality, a Google engineer who came across it would love it. This doesn't mean they will give you a manual boostâ€"Google doesn't work that way. It does mean that you are protected because of the quality of your site. Google isn't going to smack the legitimate, solid sites." This post also inspired an amazing 172 comments; suffice it to say, opinions on this topic aren't exactly universally in sync.
Deadly SEO mistakes that even an expert may make by Newbornbusiness
Even SEO tactics that are common knowledge can cause problems if poorly applied. With that in mind, this post warns against potential SEO errors like crafting less-than-optimal page titles, writing too much for search engines (and not enough for human readers), and building links from low-value sites or bad neighborhoods.
Google Refuses to Penalize Me for Keyword Stuffing by SEOmoz
The exceedingly modest Darren Slatten demonstrates in very entertaining fashion that keyword stuffing doesn't always harm your search positionâ€"even if you want it to. Okay, so it's not the most useful SEO post of last year, but c'mon, how often do you read a post about search that's actually kinda funny?
Top 10 Resources for Search Engine Optimizers by ClickZ
Julie Batten helps SEO novices short-circuit the typical, excruciatingly painful SEO learning curve with 10 resources that provide a solid foundation for further exploration and education.
Joomla SEO Solutions for 5 Common Issues by Internet Marketing Blog
Frank Levert offers some crucial SEO tips to anyone tasked with building a site on open-source CMS tool Joomla, including instructions for changing the ugly (and SEO-unfriendly) default URLs Joomla creates, fixing title tags, and avoiding duplicate meta tag issues.
Top 5 Reasons Your Search Engine Rankings Dropped by Duct Tape Marketing
If you've ever experienced a sudden, gut-wrenching drop in your site's search engine position, Karen Scharf presents five possible reasons. SEO efforts themselves (making too many content changes or adding too many new links in a short time period) can even sometimes trigger a drop, though this is generally a temporary situation.
7 Ways to Get Your Website to Page 1 Organically - Day 2 SES San Jose by Top Dealer SEO
This dispatch from last August's Search Engine Strategies event details a presentation from Shawn Moore of Think Profits on tactics for getting a site to the first page of Google. Among Shawn's tips: write a blog, make sure your database is crawlable by search engine spiders, and create optimized press releases.
The future of search by The Official Google Blog
Writing that the ideal engine would be "Your best friend with instant access to all the world's facts and a photographic memory of everything you've seen and know," Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience at Google reveals several attributes of the future direction of search at Google, which will incorporate new modes (e.g. voice, natural language, images, audio), a wider variety of media, personalization, and machine language translation.
Get Indexed and Ranked in Google News by Search Engine Journal
Noting that "Google News can bring tons of traffic and boost your site performance, " the brilliant Ann Smarty explains the technical requirements for inclusion as well as recommendations (i..e use properly labeled images and video, mobile-friendly design, update frequency of at least three times per day) for high ranking.
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