Author name: 417 Marketing

We all know how much Google loves its zoo of algorithm updates—Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird—so when the search engine decided to leave its latest update nameless, the folks at Search Engine Land stepped in and christened the update Pigeon. With so many interesting animals to choose from (the lemur, the mongoose, the alpaca . . .), […]

Earlier this summer, on June 11, 2014, the king of search engines launched its latest project: Google My Business. My Business, a much-needed upgrade to Google Places and Google Plus, helps address the needs of small businesses online. Merging Places and Plus, My Business is a unified portal and a strong foundation for future developments.

Humans tend to trust other humans. Not all the time, of course, but when given a choice between a human-backed product and an anonymous product, most people will choose the former. This concept came in handy with Google authorship photos, which placed a profile picture of the author beside the search result. Seeing a photo

Extra, extra! Read all about it! Panda update 2014 is here! That’s right, folks—Google has officially updated its Panda algorithm. For about a year now Google hasn’t been announcing their Panda updates because the changes have been relatively minor and the updates are performed monthly. So for Matt Cutts (head of Google’s web spam team)

Should I worry about negative SEO? When you first learned about search engine optimization, you probably never expected this question to arise. “What does negative SEO even mean?” you might have wondered. “Why would someone negatively influence a site through SEO?” Unfortunately, it is a real issue, born out of competition, desperation, and bad sportsmanship.

Some businesses are inherently more interesting than others. Wild animal reserve = interesting. Paper company = not so much (just ask Jim Halpert). If the product or service your company sells is dull, dry, and/or monotonous, you’ll need to get creative with your blog. You don’t have the flair of a film production company or

When it comes to ranking a page for a particular keyword, it’s a generally accepted principle that building backlinks to that page (with at least some of them containing the keyword in the anchor text) is important. But I’d like to show you that that is not necessarily the case. In this post, I’m going

So. Google Hummingbird. If you haven’t heard of this punk, let me fill you in. Google Hummingbird flitted onto the scene last year and dropped a bomb onto our cozy SEO bubble. For years, we’ve polished and perfected our keyword strategies, but Hummingbird threw all of that careful consideration to the wind. Or so they

As the President of 417 Marketing, I wear many hats. As the company grows and evolves, my role changes. When I founded the company in 2010, I basically wore all of the hats. Today, my primary functions are to find and acquire talent, oversee our development team, lead our SEO team, and strategically grow the