The SEO Blog from cognitiveSEO

In our recent posts we've tackled topics of content, natural growth and Start-up Strategies and focused less on link building. Well, in this article we'll talk about just that, a way to build new & relevant links to your site, after reading and understanding an in-depth competitive analysis. We'll present the link intersection technique, a way to go even more in-depth with the competitive analysis and link commonalities study. We've always advocated natural link building and this techniqu [...]

They say that good artists borrow and great artists steal. Whilst I would never advocate ripping off your competition, they can definitely be a source of inspiration and a jump off point for your own ideas.   Plus, it is never a bad thing to see what your competitors are up to. Performing “competitive research”, is something that most sectors do and social media is no different.   If your competitors have tested various ideas, it makes sense to research and analyse the [...]

This is a TRUE & SUCCESSFUL story from Jonathan Verrall - Senior SEO Manager at Jellyfish and one of our long time customers. “ Negative SEO attacks can come in many shapes. Given the latest Google Updates, black hats had to up their game, resorting to all kind of elaborated SEO attacks. In this context, keeping an eye on your backlinks is mandatory, as well as maintaining a healthy link profile. Below, there is a great, in-depth story about a recovery from a negative SEO attack fro [...]

I'm sure most of you are familiar with Buffer, the tweet scheduling app that evolved into a social media scheduling app. Now the tool is viewed as a necessity, not only for startups, but for every business which aspires to do great content marketing and build a tribe for itself. With a yearly income of nearly $4 million, Buffer managed to become one of the best platforms to schedule, analyze and create social media strategies on all social media websites including Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus [...]

Having a comprehensive keyword list is crucial for SEO and will help you rank for keywords that your competition may have missed. Therefore it is very important to use every method available to find those keywords that are useful, but your competition missed.     Unless you have a very narrow niche you will never run out of keyword suggestions, the language people use to describe and label things within a niche is constantly evolving and growing. And other keywords may be fading o [...]

This is a TRUE & SUCCESSFUL story from Bryan Stenslokken, SEO Manager at St. Louis-based internet marketing company Clix. “Below you will see presented another interesting recovery story from one of our great customers. Even with a sitewide link penalty reduced to a partial one, the site recovered its rankings. After nine months and another disavow the Partial penalty was removed also, leading to an even bigger ranking boost. It's a great story about organization, analysis and patien [...]

Building links to a website is one of the most crucial aspects of online marketing, because building links means you rank higher in Googles’ search engine, and Google still uses links as its main factor for ranking a website. The problem with link building is that it is more a problem of human persuasion than anything related to a mechanical algorithm. The process of link building causes us to naturally forget that websites don’t actually give the link. It’s people who link to websit [...]

Site hacking poses a constant threat for webmasters and online business owners. Whether you're just interested about how to deal with hacking, or unfortunately you've received a "Notice of suspected hacking" message in Google webmaster tool, in this article I`ll try to give you some tips on how to deal with it and how to even prevent it in the future. Even though Google does what it can to stop spam and SERP Hijacking, black hatters still use this shady tactic to rank up various sites. The ha [...]

As we think you already got used to, we at cognitiveSEO are ceaselessly working on improving our existing features or adding new ones in order to offer the best business solutions for our Cognitives, meaning our great customers. You might be already familiar with our fully customizable  SEO Dashboard  that we've launched around half a year ago and as we believe that  innovation is the key to success, we've included some new features to it.  We added more widgets to our already famous SEO [...]

The use of a robots.txt file has long been debated among webmasters as it can prove to be a strong tool when it is well written or one can shoot oneself in the foot with it. Unlike other SEO concepts that could be considered more abstract and for which we don’t have clear guidelines, the robots.txt file is completely documented by Google and other search engines.   You need a robots.txt file only if you have certain portions of your website that you don't want to be indexed and/or y [...]