Why do we use a site map? A site map (or sitemap) is the list of pages of a web site that are accessible to web crawlers or customers. Typically organized in hierarchical fashion, the site map defines the importance of key pages so Google knows how often to crawl them. For example, if you have...

Tips from Google Can you show me some previous work and results? This is the first question you should ask when interviewing potential SEOs. Have they had success in the past? What types of challenges have they overcome? Ask for concrete examples and you will save a lot of time later on when you find...

Social signals are contextual to the time frame when the content was shared, the medium used (i.e, Tweeted content, Google Plus shares, embedded content, social share plugins) and the share momentum (how many people tweeted the content from the time it was posted) adding up to a complicated mess of social noise. How relevant and useful...

Modern Search Knowledge Graph is the product of modern search engines (or at least the leading search engine, Google) moving away from keywords and strongly towards semantic search. The more users search on Google, the better the algorithm will get at aligning search queries with user intent. Traditional keyword research should no longer be the...

The term Branded Search is used in search engine marketing to describe a type of search query related to your business. In most cases, you should always rank #1 for your branded search queries, including any long tail variations such as brand + location, brand + reviews, or brand + product name. After a website is...

A Google Penalty (or manual review) is the negative impact on search rankings and can range anywhere from a noticeable decrease in visibility to having pages deindexed temporarily until the issue is resolved. These drops in rankings can occur on a specific page, a sub domain, or an entire web property. Sometimes they are based on...