A few months ago one of my clients has changed platforms. The new platform changed almost everything we’ve optimized on-site for years. It even messed up the obvious SEO basics like title tags and we’re struggling with them to this day as the platform maker insisted that title tags “get assigned automatically” in their system.

While title tag optimization is the daily bread of every SEO, for many people, like

1. software vendors
2. content creators
3. business leaders

title tags appear to be completely random and negligible. They assume that

title tags won’t get even really seen by the average user so why bother with them at all?

They forget that title tags get displayed in search results on Google and elsewhere and that it’s still one of the most important ranking factors for Google.
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This is a guest post from Rob Hillyard at Return on Digital.

1. Create a brand new campaign for Remarketing. This will enable you to monitor how everything is doing much easier than running it within an existing campaign.
2. You need at least 500 people in your target list before Google will start to show your ads. Depending on how much traffic your site gets and who you are targeting, it could take a couple of days before you see any traffic.
3. Image ads work best. Make sure you include all the possible image sizes to allow your ads to receive the largest amount of impressions possible.
4. Use a different message than your standard ads to bring the users back to your site. This is your second chance to convert the visitor into a customer. Special offers / discounts work well.

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Three of the most trusted SEO and social media experts, Rhea Drysdale, Tamar Weinberg and Lee Odden. Photo by toprankonlinemarketing.

Interviews are often overlooked pieces of distilled wisdom. They aren’t very popular on social media but they definitely should be! In interviews experts often provide the most valuable nuggets of their knowledge in a very concise form. You need to study dozens of other blog posts to learn as much.

Moreover experts often tend to focus on one aspect a time when they write something themselves, even when compiling a list like this. On the other hand interviews focus on several key questions an expert wouldn’t even attempt to cover in one blog post or seminar. These facts combined result in in a very condensed piece of advice.

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So China just renewed Google’s license to operate there. Google has tried to “abide by Chinese law” as they prefer to put it. Chinese law says: The communist party decides what’s the truth and what not. What’s not true shall neither be published nor searched for.

Are multinational corporations like Google good law abiding citizens? Rarely. Is Google abiding by the laws elsewhere? Well, just look at the other news today.

May I cite:

from BBC: “Google’s Street View ‘snoops’ on Congress members” (my emphasis):

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In recent months I have been reading all kind of material on Facebook, search and SEO. I’m not here to predict the future or to hype Facebook as the new better search. Instead I’d like to analyze the clues we already have.

Others have done great work on Facebook SEO by now.

Moreover I’d like to combine these clues with the statistics suggesting that people trust their friends when it comes to products, services and other recommendations while at the same they by now distrust social media in general.

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Welcome back to the infamous “Twitter Weekly” attack where I dissect the hype around Twitter like a mad dog on crack. This week I will ridicule the baseless but nevertheless highly popular gossip about Google aiming to buy Twitter.
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Image by spaceamoeba.

Many people in the SEO industry write list posts about SEO myths. The authors always want to debunk myths but why repeat the myths over and over in the first place?

Why not just speak out the brutal truth instead? Is it because people love myths? Is it because people love to believe in the myths they are taught?

Several recent posts by Aaron Wall, David Harry and others have inspired me to write down the things that bug me. Thus I compiled this list of 25 brutal truths about SEO, Google & main stream media.
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A little more than a week ago Google introduced a new design for its search results. The often “quick to dismiss” SEO industry is watching awestruck what will happen. The first pros and cons trickle in from the forums and the blogs.

So is the new Google design actually good or bad for SEO? Both.

Some aspects of the new layout seem to have an adverse effect while others get hailed a new opportunities.
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Tonight (if you didn’t know already) is UK election night. So it’s not too difficult to predict that the most popular queries in Google UK right now are likely to be surrounding the three parties and their leaders.

Here’s the Google Trends search volume for the last 30 days – I’d expect there may be another spike on the way:

This year, more than ever, many votes will be decided online – opinions having been flying around Twitter for weeks, Facebook fan/like votes, blog reviews, forum discussions and social media campaigns – but what about search?

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Lately we’ve witnessed a backlash in the SEO industry regarding SEO advertorials. In other words some SEO practitioners have attacked a British newspaper publisher for contacting them to sell so called “SEO advertorials”.

I was a bit surprised because I consider SEO advertorials a legitimate technique of search engine optimization. The issue here seems to be the way these SEO advertorials were devised, not SEO advertorials generally.

Thus I’d like to explain how SEO advertorials can work for both publishers and search marketers without being considered to be outside the Google webmaster guidelines.
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