Renegade Search

Since joining the team at Digital Third Coast six months ago, I have learned a lot about search engine marketing, specifically Paid Search advertising. When I tell people about my job I am almost always asked, "How did you get into that line of work?" Good question.

Characteristics of Musicians

As I mention in my bio, I have degrees in music; a Bachelor of Music (BM) and a Master of Music (MM) in clarinet performance. I've had plenty of experience in other fields because, let's face it, unless you hit it big as a musician, you have to supplement your income. In my opinion, training to be a professional musician requires a lot of independence and an ability to identify problems and figure them out on your own.

CONTINUE READING »

On May 22nd, 2013, Google released what they call "Penguin 2.0", which in their own words is an algorithmic change targeting "link schemes".  For months, Penguin 2.0 was hyped up like it was going to be earth-shattering. Google's head of web spam, Matt Cutts, spoke out publicly about how the update was going to be "jarring and jolting". It turned out to be more of a blip on the radar.

Don't get me wrong, there were a lot of sites hit with ranking losses but it doesn't look like it was for anything new in particular.  From what we can tell here at DTC, this latest update was a further devaluation of spammy directory links, article distribution networks, blog comments and link networks.  These were all tactics that were phased out a long time ago but a lot of sites had links that still remained in the closet so to speak.

CONTINUE READING »

The purpose of this post is not to ask for your vote in the nationwide The Business Journals #SocialMadness campaign that kicked off today (although that would be icing on the cake!) It is, however, to highlight how participating in media, awards, and contest-like campaigns can help your business. Check it out:

CONTINUE READING »

Now that I’ve covered why we need to monitor and remove bad links, let’s talk about actionable ways to remove bad links. The first step is to get an accurate representation of your backlink profile.  There are several popular backlink audit tools you can use to do this:

CONTINUE READING »

Spring is here and for most people that means annual spring cleaning chores.  Spring cleaning can also be applied to anyone who owns or operates a website.  Most webmasters dread backlink removal and maintenance because it is tedious, time consuming, and does not always provide value.  Backlinks are like votes to your site that Google and other search engines use to determine how you rank in the search engines for certain terms. 

CONTINUE READING »