Live Lab SEO

When you're doing Local SEO, columnist Greg Gifford reminds us, you must take a step back and look at the big picture if you want to be successful. Local SEO is getting more and more complicated, and as we roll into the new year, I want to share my biggest, most important tip: STOP Using Your Microscope In Local Search! What do I mean by that? Put simply: A microscope is a great research tool, but it’s a flat-out awful marketing tool. It seems like we’re hearing more and more of the same kind of question over the past few months: “I’ve done X on my site, why isn’t it working?” or “I read your post about Y, does it make sense for me to drop everything and go do it?” Local SEO is not, nor has it ever been, based upon a single tactic. Recently, it seems like many business owners will read a post or watch a video, realize that they’re not utilizing the tactic mentioned, and immediately drop everything and concentrate on the shiny new object. Local SEO is not just

Marketing your website properly is just as important (if not more important) as having a properly designed and developed website. In today’s digital world, having a website that works to increase revenue and sales is crucial, especially in a time where a nonexistent (or outdated) website could cost your company hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of dollars in lost sales. It’s a necessity to have a marketing strategy in line with the goals of your company or organization, and in order to increase traffic and revenue at your website, it will take a heavy dose of effort to get your website where you want it. Use these tips below, and continue to research the world of internet marketing , there’s much left to be learned! Without further ado, here’s 10 quick tips for marketing your website effectively… 1.) Make a BIG deal out of the launch of your website! You should be proud of your new site, and use this as a tool to contact your customers to let them know things are chang

Responsive designs fluidly expand, where as adaptive designs hitch as you expand a browser or viewport. Positioning your designs elements using pixels as X,Y coordinates can cause a site designed for one screen to look weird on another. Use relative units, like percent of the screen, instead of static units like pixels. Positioning your designs elements using pixels as X,Y coordinates can cause a site designed for one screen to look weird on another. Use relative units, like percent of the screen, instead of static units like pixels. Breakpoints allow the layout to change at predefined points, i.e. having three columns on a desktop, but only one column on a mobile device." As screen sizes become smaller, content starts to take up more vertical space and anything below will be pushed down, it's called the flow." Having a lot of elements depending on each other would be difficult to control, therefore wrapping elements in a container keeps it way m

Google says the Thanksgiving ranking shuffle is related to the Penguin 3.0 release from six weeks ago. Google has confirmed with us that the shifts and changes reported throughout the industry on Thanksgiving day were a result of the Penguin 3.0 refresh that first began rolling out 6-weeks ago. Google told us in response to what we saw on Thanksgiving day, “the Penguin rollout is ongoing, and this is just the effect of that.” The interesting part was that Google began the rollout of Penguin 3.0 on October 17, 2014, which was 45 days ago, or over six-weeks ago. For this to still be rolling out is unusual, I would think. In addition, many sites that reported changes on that Thanksgiving, only saw recoveries. Meaning, it looked like somewhat of a reversal of the Penguin 3.0 rollout that happened in October. But the results from what happened over Thanksgiving is still unclear. The Penguin 3.0 rollout initially impacted about 1% of queries, with this Thanksgiving occurrence, I

Get More Eyes on your Posts Here are the best times to post in order to increase the amount of people who see them on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Tumblr and Google+.   Share as Image - Blog   About the author: Lauren Rotman 

Ranking First Is Good, But First With Prerender Is Better... How do you know when you've got a strong hold on the #1 ranking? Contributor Gene McKenna shows how Google Chrome may provide a clue. So you thought ranking #1 for a search was as good as you could get, right? How about ranking #1 with a strong indicator that your position there is pretty solid? A new browser optimization in search results might be giving us that clue. Starting around August 26th, our in-house analytics system at Groupon started reporting a big increase in homepage views. It’s rare for a search marketing team to complain about too much traffic, but all this new traffic was coming only from the Chrome browser, arriving only at our homepage, and much of it was bouncing, it was killing our revenue-per-session metrics, and all of it was from SEO (Organic Search). And this “Chrome Home” traffic, as we called it, kept growing and growing — until, by September 25th, we had tens of thousands of add