The Great Chinese E-Commerce Gold Rush

With China’s recent announcement that it will allow fully foreign-owned e-commerce businesses to operate within its borders, the floodgates are open for direct access to one of the world’s great retail markets.

SEO is perfectly placed to be the cost-effective channel for testing the waters in this new China. Will we see the Western world impose its retail brands on a domestic market with decidedly different buying habits, or will we in the West need to get ready to adapt to the big-name Chinese success stories?

The Growth Of Mobile: Do We Need Some Perspective?

The recent news that mobile searches have surpassed desktop searches on Googlewas considered monumental.

There is no arguing that mobile is not tremendously important. Even for those who did not previously think much about mobile, there was no way to miss Google’s announced “Mobilegeddon” — it was the SEO’s Y2K. Any business in today’s market that ignores its mobile presence does so at their own peril.

This emphasis on mobile might be a story of its own making, however. To be sure, mobile has come a long way since just a few years ago. Yet this new focus on “everything mobile” and “mobile first” might be misplaced if it is to the exclusion of your multi-device users.

What if “mobile first” is not everything it’s hyped to be? What if you are sacrificing real users and real money on the altar of “mobileness”?

Google Now Indexing 466% More Tweets, Still Favoring Higher Authority Users [Study]

Earlier this year, Google gained access to Twitter data thanks to a new deal between the two digital giants. However, initial findings showed that Tweets were being indexed at a very low rate, with just 0.6% of Tweets indexed in February. As the Twitter deal has begun to roll out, Google has begun to index far more Tweets according to a report from Stone Temple Consulting.

From February to June, Stone Temple found a 466% increase in Tweets indexed within the first seven days. In February, just 0.6% of Tweets were indexed and last month that number shot to 3.4%. While these increases are promising, there is still more than 96% of Tweets that aren’t indexed.

Be Aware! SEO Might Help You Land Your Next Job (Or It May Hinder You)

When should you create your online portfolio in preparation for your dream career?

The best time is as soon as you enter college or decide you’re going to start hunting for a job. The next best time? Today!

We traditionally think about SEO as bringing more traffic to a website, generating leads and making sales, or earning a business more money. But search also plays an important role in recruiting and hiring employees. Job seekers can seize this opportunity to advance their career.

App Indexing & The New Frontier of SEO: Apple Search + iOS App Indexing

Every year in June, Apple and Google hold conferences to announce their latest technology. With each announcement, both companies seem to be reaffirming their larger company goals and values — Apple asserting its commitment to designing and selling quality products, and Google bolstering its mission to collect and organize the world’s data with the ultimate intent of monetizing the results with advertising.

These goals resurface through many of the company’s business decisions, most recently through the divergent app indexing frameworks promoted by the two companies. For a long time, deep app content has been locked in app code, largely un-indexed and inaccessible to search engine crawlers. The only content that crawlers could get was app titles and descriptions from the various app stores, and from company websites.

Now that both Apple and Google have announced methods for indexing deep content within apps, the situation has dramatically and irreversibly changed. For those interested in the most cutting-edge digital marketing strategies, the concept of SEO will have to expand to include optimization of deep app content for inclusion in the Apple and Google indexes.

How To Cement Your Local SEO Footprint In Google: 4 Easy Steps

Local search visibility grows increasingly important as “near me” searches on Google continue to rise. Your future customers may be looking for you at home on their desktops, or they may be using a mobile device on the go, such as a cell phone or a tablet. In fact, Google confirmed earlier this year that mobile searches have officially overtaken desktop on its search engine.

In other words, people who use the number one search engine are looking for your business, often while mobile. Is your site number one, or is a competitor’s? Do you even show up?

The Case For Niche SEO Specialists

Search engine optimization (SEO) is comprised of dozens of separate, interlocking, smaller strategies. Google’s search ranking algorithm has evolved to a point where it incorporates millions of data points from all over the web to calculate the rank of each indexed website.

In the search engine’s infancy, SEO was a relatively simple, straightforward matter, and a handful of structural changes could easily get you on page one. Today, you’ll have to carefully navigate multiple landscapes in a consistent, organized way if you want to get the most out of your search visibility.

Bing Ads Releases Demographics & Reach Data Visualization

Want to know how many searchers Bing Ads reach in your vertical? Or understand the demographic make-up of searchers on Bing and Yahoo search sites?  Bing Ads built a new data visualization for advertisers and marketers looking for reach and demographic data from the network.

Found at BingAds.com/Audience, the data is pulled from various comScore studies and can be broken out by vertical: automotive, education, financial, health, retail, technology, telecom and travel.

Google: It’s Unnatural To Even Ask For Links To Your Site

Google’s latest blog post on the Portuguese webmaster blog has been drawing a lot of attention from the SEO community. It specifically said that webmasters should not even ask for links. 

The line was even bolded by the author, Google’s Diogo Botelho, who wrote, “não compre, venda, troque ou peça links,” which translates to “do not buy, sell, exchange or ask for links.”

This Is How We Do