Search engine optimization is incredibly important for marketers. When you optimize your web pages — including your blog posts — you’re making your website more visible to people who are looking for keywords associated with your brand, product, or service via search engines like Google.
But it can be a pretty tricky tactic to master with Google’s copious algorithm updates.
Setting up proper SEO for your website is no easy feat — especially when you’re dealing with constantly changing algorithms. However, as search engines continue to evolve, it’s becoming more and more important for marketers to keep their content fresh and properly optimized.
Indexing as many pages on your website as possible can be very tempting for marketers who are trying to boost their search engine authority.
But, while it’s true that publishing more pages that are relevant for a particular keyword (assuming they’re also high quality) will improve your ranking for that keyword, sometimes there’s actually more value in keeping certain pages on your website out of a search engine’s index.
SEO can sometimes feel like it stands for “Something Extremely Obscure.”
As marketers, we’re responsible for staying on top of what can feel like endless Google algorithm updates. And if we fail to do so, we run the risk of not showing up in search for important target keywords.
Before we publish anything on the HubSpot blog, we always take a minute to optimize its URL for both our readers and search engines. It’s an SEO best practice that’s withstood Google’s many algorithm changes over the years.
While your URL structure isn’t the be-all-end-all of your SEO efforts, using SEO-friendly URLs on your site can give you an edge over your competitors in search.
![How to Optimize Your Existing Blog Content for Traffic & Conversions [Live Google Hangout]](http://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/53/Uberflip_Blog_Traffic_and_Conversions.jpg)
Every marketer knows that a successful inbound marketing strategy includes a blog. But not just any blog — a blog that boasts relevant, consistent content that’s optimized for both the target audience and search engines. That’s the kind of blog that drives results.
Trouble is, finding time to balance quality and quantity is tricky.
Ever feel like your business is too “niche” to benefit from blogging?
Then consider this: 16% to 20% of searches people ask in Google have never been searched for before. No matter how unique your niche is, it’s likely that people are searching for the content you’ll create.
Let’s get right down to it: The key to successful SEO is concentrating on long-tail keywords.
Although these keywords get less traffic than more generic terms, they’re associated with more qualified traffic and users that are typically further down their path of intent.
In business, getting ahead often hinges on our ability to get noticed. We need people to pay attention to our brand if we want them to listen, complete an action, change a behavior, and so on.
Trouble is, there are two types of attention: good and bad. And the brands below know a thing or two about both. Remember the dress that broke the internet?
Meta descriptions. Blegh; sounds complicated, right? Two years ago if someone would have asked me about a meta description I would have assumed they were trying to talk nerdy to me. It sounds like code, and something that is way over my head.
Google has been known to change their logo in fun, surprising ways for their Google Doodles, but major changes to the actual search engine results page (SERP) occur far less often. That’s why their recent decision to remove ads from the right-hand side of their desktop SERPs is making big news.
What exactly did they change?
In the past few years Google have been refining the way that it displays results to users. In particular, Google has been increasing the number of Featured Snippets that it displays for queries.
What’s a Featured Snippet? And more importantly, what do you have to do to appear there? Well, that’s what I set out to explore.
We’ve got a confession to make: We’ve been making a few rookie SEO mistakes within our own website.
As marketers, we’ve gotten quite good at evolving our playbooks when it comes to SEO. But the changes we’ve seen to this point are nothing compared to what’s coming next.
We are in the early stages of a new era of search — an era tied closely to more sophisticated patterns such as mobile, social, and voice search, among other things. And for the first time this isn’t just a matter of adding a new chapter to our SEO strategy, it’s a matter of creating entire new playbooks.
