The SEO Blog from cognitiveSEO

* "Content is king" is one of the widest spread Internet memes. Whether you agree or not you will see the phrase referenced all over the place. For several years Google was one of the most ardent supporters of the "content is king" philosophy. Why does Google want you to "create great content" and lots of it? In order to explain why I wanted to track the first mention of "content is king" just to find out that Bill Gates declared in January of 1996. Also Sumner Redstone of Viacom said it [...]

* This is the second post of our weekly column - link building technique 2: go where the attention is Bloggers in most cases do not break news. Unless your plane has crashed and you have survived to make the first photo of the aftermath you won't have the opportunity to be the first person to report something very often. The few big press agencies in most cases decide what's "news": Reuters, AP or DPA. Some stuff that gets reported is actually not really news at all, the latest Apple pr [...]

* SEO has been pronounced dead ever since inception, in recent years the number of people claiming that SEO is dead for one or another reason has grown significantly though. One explanation for this trend is that publishers want to gain attention by badmouthing a whole industry, especially as it works really well with SEO practicioners and their enemies. Both cried foul each and every time like some dog which barks once you cross a line entering its territory. The second major explanation [...]

* Social sites come and go. I've been active on social media from around 2007. This was already the second or third wave of social media services. At first sites like Delicious Slashdot Friendster were all the rage. They were already almost forgotten by the time I started connecting with people on social media. Digg has replaced Slashdot and MySpace was already more popular than Friendster. I've been mostly participating on StumbleUpon and later joined Twitter to move most of my ac [...]

* Somewhere around 2005 SEO practicioners have started to hail social media sites like Digg as the new holy grail of link building. Others even started to use a new acronym for this new way of getting numerous links and high website traffic fast: Social Media Optimization or SMO. Today everybody does SMO in some sense but almost nobody uses the term anymore. Social Media Marketing or SMM seems to be a bit more popular by now but similar to the SEO/SEM differentiation it reflects paid advert [...]

* This post has actually two headlines but Wordpress allows just one. The other headline is "Link Building Technique 1: Return for More". From now on we will cover one link building technique or tactic each week. Today I want to talk about one of my favorite topics, link love. As the second part of the term implies link love is about long term relationships. In contrast many traditional SEO practicioners and link builders act as if link building is a one night one stand. It isn't. I don' [...]

This is our second infographic from our "cognitiveSEO Infographic Series". We will tell you the long story short about Blekko, one of the new comers in the Super-Competitive Search Engine space. If you already know Blekko then the infographic will give you a clearer overview about it & clarify most of your doubts. If you don't know Blekko, then surely this graphic will give you the best possible insight about the new search engine. Subscribe to our blog or follow us on twitter, [...]

Infographics are one of the easiest ways of digesting complex data and concepts. Below,  is the first infographic of our "cognitiveSEO Infographic Series". We hope the infographic below will help you better understand the Google "Panda" Effect that happened earlier this year. Share this infographic by embedding it on your site <div style="width:604px;"><div><a target="_blank" href="http://cognitiveseo.com/infographics/google-panda-update.jpg" [...]

Many people don't know Blekko yet but already feel the influence of the search engine start up that offers customizable search results for advanced users. Blekko is actually the driving force behind much of innovation in the search industry right now. Blekko bragged to be spam-free by removing so called content farms that were flooding Google with low quality pay by the dozen content created solely for the purpose of getting search traffic. While Google claimed to have worked on [...]

* Like most average people out there Google hasn't yet let me test the new social network Google+. Only tech pundits, influencers, social media mavens and other early adopters have been allowed to use G+ at the beginning. Thus I have to trust their reviews of the Google+ service. Google's tactic of allowing only cheerleaders in has seemingly paid off. Most reviews are positive. Why? There are different reasons. Let me cite some of them. Gina Trapani of SmarterWare what I a [...]