SEO This Week EP12 – LinkBuilding, Robots, PPC, and More

1. SEO This Week EP12 – LinkBuilding, Robots, PPC, and More olympiaseo.com/seo-this-week-ep12/ 11/28/2016 Fun with robots.txt 1/5

2. Columnist Patrick Stox provides some dos and don’ts for creating your robots.txt file — along with examples of companies who have gotten creative with their files. Read More Our Insights: This really is a edu-comedy post for those of us who know (or want to know) what a robot.txt file actually does. There are some great tips at the beginning of the article that anyone can leverage right away without hurting their site. The latter half of the article is for people who just want a chuckle or maybe some ideas on getting people into your company hiring pipeline. Backlinks from Client Sites, Sites You Own, Widgets, and Embedded Content: How to Maximize Benefits & Avoid Problems – Whiteboard Friday When it comes to certain kinds of backlinks, avoiding penalties can be a real gray area. How can you earn the benefits without gaining the scrutiny of Google? In this Whiteboard Friday, Rand will teach you which rules to follow to keep you safe and on the up-and-up, all while improving your link profile. Read More Our Insights: I don’t know if you know this, but more than likely your website has a link to the people who built if for you on it. More than likely, this link is sitting in your footer right across from the Copyright notice. This is standard practice for most website builders, even we do it. However, I think there is a better way for both the agency and the clients, making a dedicated page on the site for it, then linking to that page in the footer. Rand goes over how to do that, plus some stuff on widgets if you are feeling really frisky. Link Building is (Specialized) Marketing 2/5

3. Columnist Andrew Dennis explains how link building is built on the same fundamental principles as effective marketing: thorough research, strategic promotion, carefully crafted messaging and a sustained effort. Read More Our Insights: Link building for a small business can be a tricky thing. After all, how many people want to share an article on the latest plumbing technique or dental procedure? So when I see posts about content outreach I do have to take them all with a grain of salt because unless you are the “Dentist of the Stars” nobody really cares that much. That said though, there are some outreach tools even small business owners can attempt to leverage in order to talk about community related issues. Doing that, you can establish your business both in your community and to the search engines, thus improving your rankings in both. Why SEO and PPC Are More Effective Together Well-Rounded search marketing. Here are six reasons that using pay-per-click and search engine optimization together will result in marketing that’s more effective. Read More Our Insights: Pay Per Click campaigns are part of the basic foundation of all of our marketing efforts online. They allow us to quickly identify terms that will generate business for our clients in the fastest time possible while also providing us with some great keyword research info. So much so that often times SEO campaigns won’t start until the second or third month because we want to validate the right terms for our clients and it might take extra time, but the effort is worth it. This article gives six great reasons why you should be doing it to. 3/5

4. Google On The Hunt For Spammy Exact Match Domains (EMDs) Google’s Gary Illyes said this morning that he is “hunting” for spammy EMDs, exact match domains Read More Our Insights: EMD’s (exact match domains) are a great way to gain some very quick traction in the search results for your targeted term. It works even better when that exact match term is your brand name. However, there are some considerations to look at when you are completing the rest of your SEO in hopes of avoiding penalties that come to EMD’s much quicker than generic URLs. While I don’t prescribe to Google scare tactics, I will say that if you have an EMD domain for your business, make sure you are above board when doing your SEO to keep out of the Google crosshairs, or those of your competitors who report you to Google employees because they can’t beat you any other way. Google LocalBusiness Schema Now Requires Image & priceRange Fields Google is tweaking the structured data stuff like mad, just see how many articles I’ve written about it in the past week or so. Read More Our Insights: We notified the interwebs of this change early last week (as evidenced by our tweets), we even notified one of the SEO news sites of this change, but I guess now that it is there it’s officially happening. Not to 4/5

5. have too many sour grapes the gist of this is that “image” is now required and “priceRange” is highly recommended. Note that we said recommended, contrary to the news the article it passing on, it is not required, yet. I will say that while we were looking into the types of schema that were affected we found a significant lack of use across a lot of markets. So much so that one in 10 on the first page of Google were using it which could mean that it is not being properly embraced or Google just doesn’t care, further testing is needed there. How to Increase Conversion Rates with Better Product Content If you’ve been reading our blog for awhile, you likely already know that a good product description can help sell a customer on your product or service. But too often, we put too much emphasis on the description itself while blissfully ignoring the other aspects of a product’s presentation. Read More Our Insights: All the traffic in the world does not mean a thing if you are not taking the needed steps to convert that traffic into sales. While it is important on all sites, this is especially important on e-commerce sites, where product images, reviews, and the fine print can make all the difference. We like this post because it gives some actionable tips that should be fairly easy implement in a short period of time. Images from searchengineland.com, moz.com, marketingprofs.com, seroundtable.com, kissmetrics.com Husband, father, dog owner, marketer. Clint Butler, an Army vet, founded Olympia SEO to combine his love of marketing with his desire to help small and medium sized business succeed. 5/5