Welcome to another round of SEO Weekly Recap in which we give you best and worst blogs articles from the world of SEO/Internet Marketing.

First off….Sorry this week’s Weekly Recap is coming in Sooooo late.  Late Thursday night I was having massive stomach problems

How Google is Changing Long Tail Search with Efforts like Hummingbird

Well enough time has passed since Google announced Hummingbird that people can start objectively looking at how to adjust their strategies moving forward, and stop saying, “SEO IS DEAD.”  So you would think the world-renowned Rand Fish would have some great advice after playing with Hummingbird for a few weeks.  Unfortunately that isn’t the case with this week’s Whiteboard Friday.    To sum it up: Better Content > More Content, or in other words Content is King.  Have you heard that before?  If you have you can skip this.  Actually I take that back……check it out just to see the shirt Rand is wearing….Yicks!

Positives:

–          Good Algorithm Insights

–          Helpful for new SEO-ers

–          Lots of back and forth conversation in the comments

Negatives

–          Rand needs to burn his shirt immediately

–          No actionable steps

–          Nothing you haven’t heard before.

Overall: Skip it….unless you want to laugh at Rand’s shirt

 

Ultimate Guide to Google Penalty Removal

Lewis Sellers’ article on removing Google penalties is one of the “learn from my mistakes” articles.  So in short it’s a case study on why websites get hit with penalties, how to identify your penalties, and how to remove your penalties.  Articles like these scare me because the author employed a tactic that probably everyone in the world has done at least once.  The fact that they got burned and you didn’t really makes you realize that tactics that use to be Kosher are targeted for termination by Google-bot.

 

Positives:

–          Case study involving a topic/tactic many people use

–          Easy step by step instructions

–          Actionable steps

Negatives:

–          Incredibly lengthy for a blog/article

–          A tad difficult to follow at times

Overall: Bookmark for when needed

 

7 Tricks for Making Landing Pages Work for You and Your SEO Clients

Articles like these are going to become increasingly important as Google turns the vast majority of its ranking influencers to page interactions as opposed to the traditional strict off-page, on-page of the yester-years. SEOs with increased focus on decreasing bounce rates and minimizing pogo-sticking are going to be setup for long term success as it is a rather accurate measurement of content’s relevancy.  What’s Pogo-Sticking?  You know where people go from the SERPS > Homepage > SERPS > New Hompage > SERPS > Homepage, etc.  As such SEO-ers are going to need to start adopting some PPC tactics in order to remain on page one.  If you don’t know a lot about conversion optimization or pay per click you might need to know this, and if you already know it, it’s good for review.

Positives:

–          Highly relevant topic

–          Organization of article easy to follow

–          Actionable steps

Negatives:

–          Actionable steps a tad broad

–          No examples for some steps

Overall: Read it

 

 

Content Marketing and SEO: Proceed With Caution

I like reading articles that don’t always focus on the technical, especially if I feel future clients might be reading them.  Any article that tells business owners to “proceed with caution” when dealing with my industry is an automatic red flag that I usually investigate.  We SEO-ers need to be ready to answer negatively-biased questions from potential clients.  Ian does a good job of answering the question if he was talking to another SEO-er, but if you’re anything like me we need to dramatically remove the technical-lingo and length from our answers when talking to everyday folk.  So the way to use this article is to practice answering the readers question in a way that wouldn’t put her to sleep after your 5th minute of flapping your gums.

Positives:

–          Client insights of Internet Marketing industry

–          Practice answering client questions

–          Highlights multiple methods of ROI measurement in Internet Marketing

Negatives:

–          Get to the point, remove your “tech-talk”

–          No examples

–          Needs a good infographic to communicate to clients

Overall: Skim it or Skip it