The SEO Blog from cognitiveSEO

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 [...]

Having a large and active following on social media should be viewed as an essential asset to your marketing strategy. These tips will give you the ability to employ a very powerful strategy. As social media has only grown in influence and attracted more users over the past few years. If you have a website and an online brand, you need to get people to be exposed to it.   Creating content is only one part of the content marketing plan, promoting the content is the other essential p [...]

I'm sure most of you are familiar with Buffer. What started as a simple, lean utility for scheduling tweets has evolved into a comprehensive, indispensable social media management ecosystem. 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.   While its early growth milestones originally turned heads in the SaaS world, Buffer has scaled aggressively beyond those initial benchmarks, [...]

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 [...]

This is a TRUE & SUCCESSFUL story from Dale Gillespie, one of our customers. “Below you will see presented an interesting recovery story from one of our great customers, Mr. Dale Gillespie. Happily, he chose to share with us his experience regarding a Google Penguin Recovery and a successful implementation of a 301 redirect strategy mixed with 404 on pages affected by unnatural links. It's a great story about perseverance, patience and thinking ahead!"   I'd like to share with [...]

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 [...]

Google wants us to use the disavow tool when we get a notice from them telling us we have websites pointing dodgy links at us. Although this would seem like a straight forward task, there are some myths and elements of confusion that have built up around using the disavow tool.As there are numerous people who are far more experienced and expert on this subject, I decided to ask a few. Here is what they said. I asked:What do you think the myths of using the Disavow tool are and what is the thing [...]