General SEO

Whether you’re a beginner or an expert, general SEO can help you improve your website’s ranking and reach. Discover the best practices, tools, and strategies from the leading SEO experts.

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General SEO4 min read

6 WordPress Plugins To Personalize Your Website's User Experience

User experience is a big deal, but the problem is that most sites provide a related posts widget that shows mostly irrelevant content. And that’s about as far as they go — everything is top-level and aimed at the average user. Wouldn’t it be great if we could shift to personalizing the user experience on our own website’s to ensure that our visitors find exactly what they need, when they need it?

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General SEO6 min read

Baidu 101: An Overview of Baidu Webmaster Tools

Companies with global aspirations need to address China and her biggest search engine. Baidu‘s increasingly varied and sophisticated offerings allow us to gain a glimpse into the priorities and thought processes around search in China. Through an in-depth look at Baidu‘s Webmaster Tools, we‘ll learn what we can about SEO for Baidu at a strategic level, whether it is an emphasis on user trust, content freshness or any other myriad factors.

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General SEO4 min read

Did You Configure Your Site for the International Googlebot?

Once every so often, the SEO world is subject to a major shift that shakes its virtual tectonic plates to the core. In January this year, the tremor of this impending quake went unnoticed. This was characterized by a change in the foundational basis of SEO best practices internationally. In January, Google enhanced its Googlebot’s ability to evaluate the way content changes according to a user’s location — denoted by IP address — and the preferred language settings, — through the Accept-LanguageHTTP header. Today, more and more businesses have restructured their websites to be able to serve up content dynamically according to a user’s language or country.

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General SEO3 min read

Dips and Spikes in Traffic: Using the Position Changes Report in Semrush

As a former customer support specialist, I understand the most commonly asked questions by customers. One of these repeated questions was about the traffic graph. “Where did this huge dip/spike come from?” You would constantly monitor the traffic for a particular domain and out of nowhere this huge dip occurs in the graph. You prepare for the worst. You expect your boss or client going to freak out when they see this data and have your head — but before going this route, you will first want to make sure you are properly reading this information.

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General SEO6 min read

Parallax Web Design vs. SEO: What You Need To Know

As search engine marketers, we know that the best time for us to be involved with a web design or redesign project is right at the beginning, so that SEO can be ‘baked in‘ to the process right from the start. However, sometimes a website will be built and SEO will be a later consideration (usually if it‘s because it doesn‘t rank)! A few times recently, people have come to me with a website designed in the parallax format and asked me if I can do anything to help with its SEO — which is a heck of a problem, because while parallax websites often look pretty darn slick, they come with some major technical SEO issues. In this post I‘ll talk about the perils of parallax web design: its effect on SEO, why it‘s SEO-unfriendly, and if there are any workarounds to see if you can have your parallax cake and eat it too.

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