The phrase “content marketing” seems to be the latest buzzword in online marketing circles. Every SEO consultant and agency is talking about it and writing about it. The SMX West Conference being held this week in San Jose even has a whole day devoted to learning about content marketing. While it’s new to many, content [...]
Jill Whalen has been an SEO Consultant and the CEO of High Rankings, a Boston area SEO Company since 1995. Follow her on Twitter @JillWhalen If you learned from this article, be sure to sign up for the High Rankings Advisor SEO Newsletter so you can be the first to receive similar articles in the future!
Last week my engaged daughter Corie, who lives in Houston, came home for a visit. She had various reasons for leaving warm and sunny Texas to arrive in snowy New England, one of which was to do some wedding dress shopping with me and a few of her bridesmaids-to-be. This was my first experience shopping [...]
With the introduction of the Panda filter by Google (originally dubbed “Farmer”) in February 2011, one commonality of sites that were hit was what I called merry-go-round sites. Here’s how I described it at the time: You get to a page that uses the keywords you typed into Google, only to find that you [...]
Dear Jill, Our site has been affected by Google’s Penguin update. Our website traffic and search queries are down almost 80%. We have reviewed our website and removed all the bad links that might affect our site. For the past 3 months we started getting high-authority links. We updated content for all the pages, and [...]
In my “18 SEO Killers” article from the end of last year, I mentioned footer links as a potential SEO problem. I know this confused many people because I didn’t explain what I meant by them. I didn’t mean that it’s bad to have any links in the footer of your website. But there are [...]
As part of my SEO for 2013 and beyond series, I promised to provide more in-depth information about the “SEO killers” I mentioned last time. Today I’m delving into duplicate content as it relates to SEO. My SEO audits of sites that lost traffic over the past year and a half showed that duplicate content [...]
There’s a lot of talk lately of Google having finally killed SEO through their Panda and Penguin algorithms, which continue to ensnare more and more websites with every new update. So is SEO really (finally) dead? When you look at some of the Google organic traffic losses that companies have faced since the very first [...]
Dear Jill, Our price comparison website has been around since 2001 and although we have made updates to the site, most of them have been behind-the-scenes coding changes. We’ve managed to grow the website traffic with minimal time over the last 5 to 7 years, but were deeply affected by the Panda and maybe Penguin [...]
In my article “Getting Ahead in Google,” I mentioned finding and using less competitive keyword phrases that still bring targeted traffic as an SEO strategy. Well, one of my Twitter followers asked me what they were supposed to do if there weren’t any long-tail keywords for their niche. He told me that his site focuses [...]
I recently did a site audit for a client who was wondering why they were having a hard time showing up in Google. When I read through the information they sent me and took a quick look at their website, it was obvious to me what the problem was: They simply didn’t deserve to be [...]
Dear Jill, Keywords Unavailable (Not Provided) jumped from 12% to 22% in March. What does Google want us to do? Two sites I manage jumped from an average of 12% keywords not reported (January and February) to 20% and 26%, respectively, in March. Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) queries reports only 40% of all of the [...]
You’re likely sick of hearing about the importance of having great blog post content. But you know you need it in order to have something to promote via social media. And you know that great blog posts can bring in lots of long-tail search engine visitors. What you may have trouble with is what to write [...]
The keywords and phrases you use in your Meta description tag may not affect your page’s ranking in the search engines, but this tag can still come in handy in your overall SEO and social media marketing campaigns. What Is the Meta Description Tag? It’s a snippet of HTML code that belongs inside the <Head> [...]









