Posts by Steve Erlich
Andy Simpson Featured on SEMRush Webinar – Your Brand SERP Is Your New Homepage
Our very own Senior SEO Specialist, Andy Simpson was featured this afternoon in a SEMRush webinar including some other of the industry’s finest. Andy, Jason Barnard, Claire Carlile and Greg Gifford had an outstanding discussion regarding best practices for optimizing your brand SERP, from your Google My Business listing and knowledge panel to the local/organic…
Read MoreWhy Your Law Firm’s Website Should Encrypted (HTTPS)
What is HTTPS? Most of you are probably asking, “What is HTTPS?” HTTPS stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure. HTTP/HTTPS is the protocol over which data is sent between your browser and the website you are visiting. When you visit a site over HTTP, the data being passed between your browser and the website…
Read MoreWhich Listings Should I Get? Lawyers.com? FindLaw? Avvo?
This is getting expensive! If you are an attorney reading this article, you have probably heard a proposal from one of these 3 directories (among others) regarding why you should be listed on their website. But how do you know which listings have value? Which ones offer a good return on investment? Which ones offer…
Read More2014: A Busy But Straightforward Year in Search
What a busy year in search it has been. With only about 65 days left in the year and 300 gone, it’s an appropriate time to discuss what we saw during 2014 in search. In 2014, we saw a lot of continuation of concepts that became popular in 2013. Content is still king. Quality links…
Read MorePenguin 3.0: 1% of English Queries Effected
Penguin has become Google’s most notorious update. Small business owners that rely on their web presence fear Penguin more than just about any annual or semi-annual event, and rightfully so. What makes Google’s Penguin so devastating and scary for small business owners? When you are hit by Penguin, you need to take immediate action. You…
Read MoreGoogle Kills Off Authorship
It’s official. Google has removed all authorship data from search results and Webmaster Tools. Google reports that as a whole, not enough people took advantage of the authorship markup to make it a valuable ranking factor and they saw little difference in click-through rates for sites with authorship markups versus those without. A major goal of…
Read MorePenguin 3.0 May Be On The Way – Make Sure You Are Protected!
With Matt Cutts on leave, we thought we’d potentially have some quiet months. This morning, Barry Schwartz at SERoundTable.com announced his suspicion that the stars are aligned for Google to release Penguin 3.0 today. If they don’t release it today (it’s customary for Google to release updates on Fridays), John Mueller confirmed in the latest…
Read MoreNegative SEO: Is It Real? And Should I Be Scared?
What is Negative SEO? Negative SEO is the practice of deceiving Google to believe that a domain you do not own is doing something to violate Google’s webmaster guidelines or interfering with Google’s ability to crawl a domain. This includes everything from spam link building to denial of service attacks. The goal of negative search…
Read MoreGoogle Launches New Local Search Algorithm: Pigeon
On the same day we talked about stability in the search rankings, Google took a big new blender, turned it on high power and dropped their local search results into it. What is “Pigeon” Pigeon is a new local search algorithm implemented by Google. Pigeon is the name given to the algorithm by marketers, not…
Read MoreSome Stability May Be Ahead: Google Updates; Matt Cutts Goes on Leave and More!
While there haven’t been the massive overhauls to search results we’ve seen in recent years, there has been absolutely no shortage of updates from Google in 2014. First, the world saw some huge fluctuations in the rankings in January all the way through May as Google began one by one manually penalizing websites frequented by…
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