Written by Jen Holzman
Follow Jen Holzman on G+

Blogging is something everyone on the internet has thought about doing at least once or twice. If you are a business owner, maybe you’ve thought about blogging about your business to keep customers informed about new offerings, or to get in front of new customers, but did you know that blogging is
essential to your search engine optimization efforts? By publishing and maintaining blogs you are showing search engines that you are an authority in your area of business. Search engines love blogs because they are the source of up-to-date information from authors who want to share with others. Blogs are also great for search engines because the content they provide is keyword rich, and able to better answer the questions of searchers (this is especially important for voice search and the Google Hummingbird update). Creating a well written, up to date external (separate from your website) blog will affect your SEO efforts in a beneficial way, so let’s get started.

One of the main reasons businesses and individuals have not published an external blog is that people are unsure of how and where to begin. There are many different ways to start your first blog, signing up for a WordPress, Blogger or Weebly account are a few great ways to begin, but if you want to customize your blog and add to the credibility of the source, it is best to start a blog with one of the most common URL suffixes “.com” “.org”, or “.net.” Blogs with these suffixes give readers a sense of professionalism and can help to enhance branding efforts.
The first step in setting up your own blog is to decide on a domain name. The domain name is the address that people will type into their browser in order to view your site. A domain looks like this: www.exampledomain.com. There are endless pieces of advice concerning choosing domain names for blogs and websites, but some of the most important factors are branding, and relevance to the topic. Your domain name should represent the topic you will blog about, so when brainstorming domain names it can be helpful to come up with a list of the types of words and phrases your blog will focus on. For example if you are starting a blog for your Denver plumbing company, your list may look something like:

Read more: How to Create a WordPress Blog With Free Hosting

Written by Jen Holzman
Follow Jen Holzman on G+

With over 25 million unique monthly users, Pinterest is not to be ignored! This is not just another social network - Pinterest is driving more referral traffic than LinkedIn, Youtube and Google+ combined!  Printerest can help your SEO projects gain exposure to a huge audience.

Using Pinterest for your SEO Campaign

Pinterest is an image sharing site that allows users to pin and repin their favorite images from the Internet or their computer. The images on Pinterest are viewed and shared thousands of times offering benefits for any business or blog with images linked to their web pages. Businesses with Pinterest profiles can create high quality image content accompanied by keyword rich descriptions to help define their brand, gain exposure, and increase traffic to their sites. 

Read more: Pin Your Way to the Top of Google [INFOGRAPHIC]

This research was done by Matt McGee, the Editor-In-Chief of Search Engine Land.  Matt works with some of the largest web companies as a consultant and offers training on SEO, social media and local search.

Search continues to shift away from the desktop toward mobile devices.

That’s one of the conclusions of the just-released Neustar Localeze/15miles/comScore Local Search Study, which is now in its sixth year. This year’s study involves a sample of more than 3,000 U.S. adults that say they use the Internet to search for local businesses. Results aren’t available online yet, but we’ll add a link here when they are.

The total number of U.S. searchers using mobile phones grew 26 percent between March 2012 and December 2012, from 90.1 million to 113.1 million searchers. Search on tablets was up 19 percent between April 2012 and December 2012. (Tablets are commonly counted as “mobile,” though I’d argue that’s often a misnomer; think of the consumer sitting in front of a TV using his/her iPad — not very mobile.)

[ Read Entire Research Article ]

This article comes to us from the wonderful 'Search Engine Land' and talks about very common link structure problems many company websites face.  Julie Joyce does a great job here talking about 404 pages, 301 redirects and linking from your home page.

While I hesitate to define anything link-related as being easy, there are definitely a few things that can be easily fixed, things that can make a sometimes small and sometimes major difference in how your site performs online.

Link builders are certainly not miracle workers, but much of the time, links are still seen as being the way to the top of the SERPs. It’s extremely common for people to say “I know I just need links. Everything else is fine.” Well guess what? It’s not always fine, and many times, there are issues that need to be fixed on-site, ones that can make link building work so much better.

Now, let’s just dive in to three common site issues that matter for link building and see what you can check, why it matters, and which free (yes free!) tool you can use for this purpose.  [ READ ENTIRE ARTICLE ]