Author name: 417 Marketing

UPDATE: Google Authorship is no longer supported in web search. The program ended in August 2014. Since Google Authorship was introduced a few years ago, many people have applauded the program. With just a few easy steps, writers are able to establish their authorship of a webpage. When Google chooses to use that authorship markup

Today, I had a developer contact me with a problem. His client was saying that Google was not crawling the website he had built for him. This developer was concerned and wanted to know if I could help. At this point, I thought it might be helpful to explain how to tell if Google is

We discussed Hummingbird, the most recent update to Google’s algorithm, back when it arrived on the scene in October. A month later, we delved into its misconceptions and truths, concluding that the flighty little bird really hadn’t changed the tried-and-true rules of SEO. Quality content and relevant, authoritative links are still essential to SEO efforts,

Before you start digging a grave for Google PageRank (which we reported as being on its death bed just two months ago), you should know that Google updated the Toolbar PageRank values about two weeks ago, on the morning of December 6. This was a shocking turn of events not only because many SEOs predicted

Last Updated: May 21, 2021 Just about anyone can create and write a WordPress blog – your eleven-year-old cousin, your elderly neighbor, your doctor, your grocer, you! – but very few know how to optimize a WordPress blog post properly. It’s a simple process that too many bloggers overlook or ignore, but if you want

As an SEO, I sometimes throw out complex SEO terminology in the middle of a conversation with a client. While I am cognizant of the reality that most people don’t understand these terms, my irrational human tendencies cause me to sometimes use them (without an explanation) anyway. Fortunately, I’ve gotten pretty good at recognizing the

When you eat rice, are you able to tell who grew it by the taste? Of course not! Unless you are given more information, it’s impossible to say. Rice is rice. It’s a commodity. Like wheat and oil and copper, rice doesn’t change based on who produced it, and because of this, its price is

Each time Google releases a new animal from its zoo, some SEOs take the change in stride and others panic, fearing the worst. It happened with Panda and Penguin, and (not unexpectedly) it happened again in late September when the Google Hummingbird update was released. Considering how shy Google has been about Hummingbird, SEOs’ overreactions

When you break it all down, the Internet is essentially a retriever. You tell it what you want and it blindly brings it to you, if it can. However, that may soon be changing with the introduction of the Semantic Web. Instead of just copying and mimicking our words, the Internet will understand what we’re