Google has been making a lot of changes lately when it comes to News Search. For those that rely heavily on traffic from Google News, you know that a change in algorithm or glitch with indexation can make or break your month. Some recent updates however, may give you a one up on the competition .

In need of some easy tips to better optimize your site? Look no further for some quick ways to identify potentially significant SEO issues. Home page canonical issues - the easiest and probably most common source of duplicate content. Check variations of your home page as these are still considered "separate" pages. By implementing a 301 redirect from the other variations to the main domain, inbound links will be aggregated and duplicate content resolved.

Back in June, Bing made some important changes to their Webmaster Tools platform. They finally caught up to Google in terms of providing a comprehensive resource for developers and search marketers to utilize. Given that these changes have been out for over a month now, this is old news. However, Bing is often overlooked or at the bottom of the priority list for many site owners and SEMs. Time and time again I've heard 'focus on Google and the rest will follow'.

With all the drama surrounding the "Panda" algorithm update , a lot of big sites were hit hard. Mainly, large content producers that had the resources to generate massive amounts of content - and quickly. In terms of obtaining often stellar organic rankings, this approach was effective for quite some time, despite the fact that the quality of content often suffered. But all good things must come to an end,

Looking to partake in the latest infographic craze? Look no further as you've come to the right place. In case you were counting on the rapture and were hiding under a rock for the past, oh two years or so, infographics are simply visual representations of information, data, or knowledge . Infographics have turned into a widely popular and viral format of link bait because, since no one on the internet reads or has any sort of attention span,

Last week, I wrote about how to better take advantage of Google Analytics internal site search reports and types of information about site behavior that can be gleaned from them. This week, I'd like to expand on that post to discuss the next steps - what to actually DO with that information. Let's dive in. Optimize for internal search .

Internal site search tracking - set it up and use the data to see what your visitors are looking for. Done and done right? Actually, not the case. If you haven't been digging into your Google Analytics internal site search reports as of late, start now. Why? Internal site search data will enable you to better understand your customer's intent, to use the data to improve the user experience,

With the release of Google's new +1 feature , it is clear that Google is working hard to oust Facebook from their social throne. As a search marketer, I think the new feature is pretty great. Eventually AdWords advertisers will be able to get statistics on what ads have the most +1's and Google Webmaster Central will report +1 stats for organic listings. In addition,

Let's be real, standard ranking reports for targeted keywords are dead. With the latest changes in local search, personalization, etc. simply tracking search engine rankings do not tell the whole story. In addition to the challenges of tracking rankings for a set of targeted keywords,

On Wednesday, the 5th annual search marketing conference, Searchfest took place in my humble town of Portland Oregon. This is always a great conference with amazing speakers and really smart people asking really smart questions. I attended the advanced track sessions and thought I'd share my favorite takeaways from the day.

The other day I was reading the latest Mother Jones and came across an interesting note from the editor . They talked about the importance and difficulty of choosing a magazine cover and that despite the fact that they are a non-profit, they still rely heavily on reader support through sales. So when the time came to decide between the crisis in Haiti and Weedmart as the cover - they chose both. How?

It's no secret that I love Google Webmaster Tools. Back in 2009 I wrote about my favorite features but also what I wished for improvement. Since then they've added most of the features I was longing for and much more. Most recently , the Top Pages report has been added to the "search queries" section of GWT. A couple fantastic uses for this report: Meta Description Testing : track and trend CTR of pages once as they relate to changes in Meta descriptions.

Obviously the newspaper industry is struggling. Industry analysts, journalists and online marketers are frantically scrambling to come up with a smart solution to monetize content and compete with quick and agile bloggers. But while the ship is sinking, social media can act as a great short term solution to keep things afloat. While the newspaper industry certainly will need a strategy in order to survive in the long run,

On this Election Day, I'd like to discuss what I believe to be one of the most critical topics in search today: structured data. As millions of new pieces of content are added to the web each day, all in different types of formats and each with their own purpose, search engines need ways to effectively parse out this data based on user intent.

Indexation. Ensuring that all your site's important pages are indexed is absolutely at the root of a sound SEO strategy. More often than not, websites with thousands of pages run the risk of not being able to get all their pages indexed. What's more is that if this is you, you might not even know it. Why? If you've got a huge site, chances are that traffic levels are decent, thus making it difficult to identify such an issue. Simply put,

In the SEM world, "link bait" is a common tactic designed to capture a large audience in the hopes that a given piece of content will become "viral" and in turn, acquire a significant amount of links. Link bait has been around for years and although tactics and forms have changed, the fundamental concept has remained the same.

Hire an agency? Take it in-house? What's the best way to ensure a successful approach to improve the online presence of your company? These decisions can be tough, and there isn't just one right answer. Of course, coming from an agency myself, I would love to be able to say that agency relationships are always successful. Unfortunately they aren't. Unsuccessful engagements can happen for a number of reasons,