Why name algorithms after birds? Google has an affinity for naming their algorithm updates (that often cause chaos and stress for business owners) after cute, fuzzy animals. Hummingbird is no different. Introduced in the fall of 2013, the Google Hummingbird algorithm has been used to improve search queries, specifically personal search results that are catered for...

What is Cost-per-click (CPC) and what does it mean in AdWords reports? The easiest way to define CPC is the number that represents the cost for the advertiser every time someone or something clicks on the ad. Typically any Paid Search Strategy will have a target CPC in mind before a new campaign starts to...

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...