Technical SEO

2015 Jan 28

Responsive Design Is A No-Brainer For 2015

By Christopher 0 Comments Responsive Design

(originally posted on Bring Your Own Design)

If you ask most C-level executives, they assume because they can get to their company site from their tablet, that they’ve got a “mobile site”.

However, having a site that merely loads on a mobile device isn’t enough nowadays. Users expect a different, tailored experience when they visit a site from a mobile device. Tiny text and hard-to-activate menus are simply unacceptable byproducts of relying on desktop layouts to work on mobile.

2014 Sep 04

Adding Wistia as an oEmbed Provider in WordPress 4.0 & WordPress 4.1

By Christopher 7 Comments Code Snippets, WordPress

(originally posted on Bring Your Own Design)

With today’s WordPress 4.0 sendout, embedding content from other sites just got way easier. While there is a pretty large list of oEmbed providers, a very important one for us SEOs was left out: Wistia. Don’t worry, though. There is a way to make Wistia videos work the same was with a simple paste of the video URL, much like a YouTube video works.

In your theme’s functions.php, paste the following code:

wp_oembed_add_provider( '/https?://(.+)?(wistia.com|wi.st)/.*/', 'https://fast.wistia.com/oembed', true );

2013 Feb 25

Google Rewrites Page Titles To Push Brand Over Keywords

By Christopher 0 Comments Google, SEO, SERPs

The Google+ expert, Mark Traphagen tweeted a link to an article that talked about how Google seemed to be testing yet another method of rewriting the page title, or that somehow, colons in the title could be a new ranking factor. Other Twitter people reported seeing it as early as Friday.

2013 Feb 18

90% of Webmaster Tools Alerts Are Black Hat Related

By Christopher 0 Comments Google, Google Search Console, SEO, Spam

(originally posted on DesignBigger)

In the thousands of Google Webmaster Tools alerts and messages that are sent each month, about 90% of those are estimated to be black hat related. Another stat that’s interesting is about 3% are notifications of a hacked site; chances are, you’ve seen pharma spam in the SERP results that lead to a normal-looking page. That same 3% covers malware-infected sites, too. Check out the video for Matt Cutts’ take on these alerts.

What we’re interested in knowing is what percent of notifications are for non-spam/non-black hat issues? Does this mean that webmasters are doing better at keeping a solid, optimized site? Is the popularity of good CMS software helping site owners adhere to standards easier?

2013 Jan 08

7 Steps to Google Places Phone Verification

By Christopher 11 Comments Google, Local SEO, SEO

This article has since been outdated by changes to Google Places, but left for “historical value”.

(originally posted on DesignBigger)

Stop the presses, and get ready to clean up your business listings in Google Places! It appears that a new year has brought a few new things along with it, and one of those is phone support for local verification issues in Google Places. If you are like me then you probably have a few local listings that are still pending verification, and you have probably sent out those pesky postcards at least 3 or 4 times with no success. Maybe it’s Google’s fault or maybe it’s just the postman’s fault, but one things for sure, they aren’t making it to their destination!

2013 Jan 08

Analog Keyword Research

By Christopher 0 Comments Keyword Research, SEO

When it comes to keyword research, I'm guilty of doing the same old thing; I open up the AdWords Keyword Tool and start pecking away, hoping to take a few general head keywords and turn it into something workable. I'm pretty sure every other SEO on the planet starts out keyword research pretty similarly, if not the exact same way.

Most of our customers are traditionally paper and pen kind of businesses; the digital landscape is pretty new to them, and subsequently, they may not really have many online assets (service manuals, documentation, whitepapers, etc.). It kind of struck me today that while getting these things online and working in our benefit might be extremely costly, we can still take advantage of them for the initial brainstorming phase (not to mention content fodder down the road).

2012 Dec 26

Four Ways That Search Marketing Costs May Rise In 2013

By Christopher 1 Comment Marketing

(originally posted on DesignBigger)

In successful SEO campaigns, long-term return on investment tends to be better than in a PPC campaign. It’s almost like renting versus buying; even though you might have spend more upfront, you’re building equity that can be “cashed in” later in the form of organic rankings, citations/backlinks, and search engine results page domination.

That being said, a well-run SEO campaign will likely become more costly in the new year; more work and time has to be devoted to keep an acceptable level of success. Let’s look at a few ways that costs might rise in 2013.

2012 Dec 17

Yahoo Testing Cost Per Lead Search Ads

By Christopher 0 Comments Bing, Marketing, PPC, Yahoo

Since the Bing/Yahoo merger, Yahoo's ad system has been in a serious state of turbulance. While it's never been on par with AdWords, there was some value to be had in certain verticals. In what we'd call a bold move, Marissa Mayer and company have launched Cost Per Lead ads, in a bid to earn some income in advertising apart from the Microsoft deal on normal PPC ads.

This is a blog about technical SEO.