SEO News

Following on from our time saving Excel shortcuts, we continue offering updated advice for the time-sensitive spreadsheet enthusiast. Back in 2013 John Gagnon wrote a very popular post about VLOOKUP basics and rookie mistakes. We thought we’d update the piece to reflect some minor changes for accessing the functionality to VLOOKUP words and values in Excel 2016. An Excel VLOOKUP can be a marketer’s best friend because it can save you hours of work. Give this formula the information you have (a name) and it looks through a long list (list of names) so it can return the information you need (phone number). The problem is we often struggle to remember how to use …

With only a couple of months to go until the inaugural ClickZ Live New York show, we catch up with one of our forthcoming keynote speakers, Andy Beal, CEO of Trackur.com, who gives us his thoughts on reputation management for marketers. Source: Search Engine Watch

The original search marketing conference is back! On July 9, Search Engine Strategies will relaunch in Atlanta. The one-day conference will cover all the critical aspects of search engine optimization (SEO) and paid search advertising (PPC). Source: Search Engine Watch

Visual search on the web has been around for some time. In 2008, TinEye became the first image search engine to use image identification technology, and in 2010, the Google Goggles app allowed users to search the physical world with their phone cameras. But in the last couple of years, visual search has come into new prominence, with companies like Pinterest and Bing developing into serious contenders in the visual search space, and search engines like Splash conceptualising new ways to search the web visually. We now have an impressive range of visual search methods available to us: we can search with images, with part of an image, with our cameras, with paint …

Users on the go looking for a business�s phone number in the search results expect to be able to access that number and call with a couple clicks. Is your brand leveraging the options for click to call in the search results like this top retailer? Source: Search Engine Watch

Bing Ads has made a change to their Keywords Tab to allow advertisers to review up to 50,000 keywords within their user interface. Previously, if you had more than 5,000 keywords, an alert would appear asking you to narrow down the keywords scope. Source: Search Engine Watch

We’ve written an awful lot about Google’s open source accelerated mobile pages project (better know as Google AMP) over that last 12 months. AMPs implications are far reaching, for marketers, for publishers (big and small) and for ecommerce. Implementing faster mobile web pages mainly benefits users, who are increasingly frustrated with slow loading times. The latest Google research shows that 53% of people will leave a site that fails to load in three seconds or less. But AMP will soon be a key battleground in search, as AMP listings are now spreading throughout organic mobile results. Publishers and organisations may find the need for AMP implementation will r…

A recent study by Covario's Marcos Richardson has found that the current way analytics software vendors are measuring bounce rate is potentially misleading. Richardson has lobbied the industry to accept his proposal for a new calculation. Source: Search Engine Watch

If you're still suffering from Google's Penguin update, it's important to realize that link removal isn't enough. It's time to focus on referral traffic, build up a following, and design SEO campaigns that are smart enough to weather any storm. Source: Search Engine Watch

While updates to the AdWords interface come out frequently, AdWords Editor continues to be left behind with the same functionality. Will Google continue to support AdWords Editor, or will it be phased out in favor of the web interface? Source: Search Engine Watch

Twitter has opened Moments to all users and is therefore taking curation to the next level. What does this mean for brands? Twitter Moments used to be a curation of the best tweets of the day; an overview of the news and the important tweets you need to check out. It may not have reached the level of adoption Twitter was hoping for, but it was still an interesting perspective on how we can consume information without leaving the platform. Now Twitter Moments is gradually expanding to all users so they can facilitate storytelling through a series of tweets. This could be Twitter’s response to Snapchat (and Instagram) Stories, but luckily it’s not directly imitati…

Does your content live and breathe? If not, your content may face a Google ranking apocalypse. Learn the symptoms of and cure for lifeless content zombies, as well as how to survive should your website become infected by contagious links. Source: Search Engine Watch

Google is changing the user-agent they use when crawling content for smartphones. Ensuring mobile searchers find relevant and usable pages is an absolute must do. If you're not already, time to start creating special mobile reports in 2014. Source: Search Engine Watch

Have you ever spent what seems like hours roaming around a large parking lot searching for your car? With the click of a button, a new Google Now update (for Android users only) can save the location of your car as a handy card. Source: Search Engine Watch

Email marketing can be overwhelming, especially if you are new. Lots of tweaking, designing and testing. These eight tools will help you manage email marketing like a champ! Some of these tools may have a lot of alternatives but I left them out to keep this list clutter-free! You can find more tools in my previous article: 10 tools for generating red hot leads. 1. Optimize your site for lead generation: Hellobar http://annsmarty.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/hellobar.png The first thing to do when you are launching a website is to create effective opt-in forms. You can experiment with designs and placements for as long as you manage your website, but there’s…

Crowdfunding campaigns with video are more likely to attract and raise funds than campaigns without video. People are conditioned to respond to television commercials and stories they can relate to emotionally and from a multimedia perspective. Source: Search Engine Watch

The new crawl error reports will make it easier for webmasters to track down crawl errors, why they are happening, and how to fix them without having to do a lot of back and forth checking with tools to determine what exactly was going on. Source: Search Engine Watch

Google has provided more examples of types of manipulative redirects they are cracking down on. This includes showing one page to desktop users but a completely different page to mobile users, and hacked sites redirecting users to other pages/sites. Source: Search Engine Watch

Creating content is easy. Creating great content? That’s much tougher. Just 10 short years ago, the barrier to entry was much lower for companies. Content marketing wasn’t even a thing. But once 2010 came around, it started exploding, as seen on Google Trends: In the past six years, the amount of content has grown exponentially. Everyone has bought into the now clichéd mantra: content is king. Yet, although brands, businesses, and publishers are cranking out more content every year, conversion rates aren’t increasing. Why? It goes back to the first sentence: creating great content is hard! Yet for all the changes we’ve seen, there are many basic things …

Facebook claims a site scraper was responsible for selling a list of 1 million user login emails, though many of the emails are unpublished on Facebook. Already, user identities are being reconstructed. Source: Search Engine Watch