INBOUND ACCELERATOR

For all the talk that has circulated about search engine optimization over the last 20 years, I was surprised to read a statistic included in a recent survey of more than 3,400 marketers around the world by our partners at HubSpot.

PDF documents are a frequently used file type for all kinds of marketing content, from restaurant menus to case studies, whitepapers, reports and instruction manuals. In some cases, businesses have relied on them as a quick and easy way of placing formatted content on their websites. But with the rise of mobile devices as the public’s primary means of accessing the internet, PDFs may not be the best choice.

When it comes to SEO there are so many different things to remember, it helps to have it all in front of you to see what you might be forgetting. This handy infographic from Leapfroggr provides a great visual reminder and checklist for your search engine optimization efforts.

We’ve all run into it at some point: a broken link. Maybe you were following a trail of backlinks to try to get the origin of some statistic (I’ve traced many back trying to find out just how outdated a social media or digital marketing stat might be — you’d be amazed at how long some things continue to circulate!). Or maybe you discovered an error on your own website that explained why some pages weren’t getting the traffic you thought they should.

Either way, a 404 error is more than just irritating. For your website, it could mean serious damage to your reputation and performance, as Spiralytics oulines in this infographic.

It’s easy when thinking about SEO to focus on the text — putting keywords into headlines, writing copy that lends itself to rich snippets and featured answers at the top of the search engine results page. And the infrastructure-minded members of your team — web designers and app-builders — have page loading speed, 404 errors and mobile compatibility at the top of their priority lists.

It can be easy to overlook the role of images in SEO, but 10.1 of all Google traffic is for images.google.com. (Source)

Inbound marketing involves many different marketing tasks and elements, and sometimes it can seem overwhelming for someone new to the practice — or even veterans looking at starting a whole new program. Creating an inbound marketing program from scratch is a lot of work.

We know. We’ve done it. We’ve also developed tools along the way that we can use over and over, so we don’t feel like every new project requires recreating the wheel.

From Google Assistant and Siri on the mobile phones in everyone’s pocket, to Amazon’s Alexa in several rooms of the most-connected homes, or the less-used Bixby and Microsoft Cortana platforms, voice search is rapidly growing, as Top Shelf Media outlines in the infographic below.

There was a time when every conversation around search engine optimization focused on one specific topic: keywords. How to choose keywords (such as selecting keywords that have a high search rating, but are ones that allow you to be competitive). Where to place keywords in the structure of your website (also called on-page SEO). How to work keywords into your content.

You’ve seen the SEO “do” lists:

DO use keywords in headings.

DO use long tail phrases.

DO include complete meta data and mark up your pages with schema to improve how results are rendered. (Get the non-tech person’s cheat sheet to meta data here.)

Between the growth of hands-free use of mobile devices and the explosion home “digital assistants” like the Amazon Echo, voice searches are rapidly becoming the norm rather than the exception.

But these types of searches require web pros and marketers to take a new approach to optimizing their pages, though some of the tips included in this infographic from Headway Capital apply equally to all types of search, including search engines’ preference for pages with fast loading time and searchers’ preference for results that provide easy-to-read information.