Now that 2012 is behind us, it’s the perfect time to take a look back at our blog posts over the past year and repost the most popular ones (based on organic search engine traffic). It’s also a great time to caught up on those that you missed or reread ones your favourites. Without further ado, here they are – eh!
1. SEO & Google’s Exact Match Domain Algorithm Update: Google recently rolled out yet another algorithm update aimed at providing users with better search results and user experience. It comes on the heels of Google’s major algorithm updates dubbed Penguin and Panda. This newest update is focused on “exact match” domains or EMD (also known as keyword rich domains). The EMD update targets spammy or low quality domains that are simply chosen to get high rankings in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) – related to keywords. This SEO tactic has become increasing popular in Canada over the past number of years. Unfortunately, it has been implemented by many SEOs and agencies driven by ranking results. In case you are wondering, WebFuel has never done this on behalf of any of our clients. Read more
2. Canadian SEO Horror Stories 2012 Edition: In the spirit of Halloween, we thought why not share several horror stories of our own? This is not our first blog post on this topic. A very popular post from last year was SEO Horror Stories: From a Canadian Perspective as well as SEO Myths and Scams (most still exist). This post, however, is what we as a SEO agency have witnessed during the past year. This has been, without a doubt, the scariest year ever! As the Search Strategist for WebFuel, more and more of my SEO work has involved resolving Serious Search issues on behalf of newly acquired clients. Most of the time, what has been done from a SEO perspective (previous to hiring us) is a mystery.
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3. When is the Best Time to Create a Mobile Website?: A rhetorical question to be sure! It’s 2012, every website should be mobile-enabled. We have addressed this issue for both our clients & ourselves. There are a number of factors at play when deciding whether / when to set your website up to be viewed on mobile devices.
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4. Good SEO is a Marathon Not a Sprint: After the recent Summer Olympics, I started drawing parallels between the miracles I had witnessed on the Internet versus the industry I am so deeply immersed in….. SEO. Let me elaborate. During the Olympics we saw the likes of Usain Bolt win the Gold Medal in the Men’s 100 Meter race in just 9.63 seconds – a fraction of a second ahead of the Silver Medal winner. Pop! In Under 10 seconds it was done. “I came. I saw. I conquered!”.
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5. Google Plus Local Pages has Replaced Google Places Pages: The title of this Blog post pretty much sums things up. In their effort to garnish more market share and to consolidate things in a more logical manner, Google has again tweaked their business model by replacing their much-maligned Google Places Pages offering with Google Plus Local Pages. This effectively tightens things up for Google and (intentionally?) forces business owners to focus in on, and utilize Google+ (Plus).
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6. Do Rankings Really Matter?: At WebFuel, we like to celebrate milestones. And… here is a BIG one! This is our 200th blog post. Our official blog launch was on November 26, 2007 and our first post was titled: Blogging, Eh?. We actually got a chuckle out of reading it again (you might also). What was really interesting to us was at that time, SEO was all about rankings – and how high you ranked on various keywords in the Search Engines. This was how we, as Search Engine Optimizers, were measured in terms of success. We would have never, ever guessed that one day we would be blogging about whether rankings still matter. The short answer is “yes”, but not in the same way.
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7. SEO, PPC and Google Sitelinks: Google Sitelinks are not new. The Search Engine began experimenting with them back in 2005 – and started rolling out organic sitelinks officially the following year. Sitelinks are an option in paid search as well. Google AdWords sitelinks follow the same basic format. And… all the sitelinks, of course, appear in a Google search result page (SERP).
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We invite you to get engaged and comment on your favourite posts, share them with your network, and to let us know what topics you would like to see more of in 2013.