The Northcutt SEO Blog

Broken backlink building is an old strategy, but it can still be a very useful one. Sites linking to missing resources don’t want a broken link on their site and might want to link to a new resource in its place. But old broken backlink building strategies don’t center the needs of sites with broken…

Truly successful SEO demands involvement from management and various teams and stakeholders. This can include an investment of resources as well as work hours and collaborative strategizing. This can only happen if you are skilled at earning buy-in from contacts throughout the business. Here’s how to get buy-in. Benchmarking Search Performance The first step to…

Digital PR is a vital component of modern business. Let’s talk about what it’s about and answer your questions. What Is Digital PR? Digital PR is, of course, public relations in the digital age. It is contrasted with traditional PR which is built around traditional media outlets like magazines, newspapers, and television. Digital PR is…

Structured data (schema) is used by Google and other search engines to better understand the content on your site by labeling it with tags. This information can be used to modify your snippets in the search results so that they include images, prices, and other rich results that stand out and draw attention. These recommendations…

Search engines use meta descriptions to create snippets for users to read about the page before they visit it. While Google and other search engines typically generate automatic snippets if there is no meta description, you can use the meta description to have more control over what users see and entice them to click. Let’s…

Header tags are used to give a page or a section of a page a heading. They are used for headlines and subtitles. They shouldn’t be confused for title tags, which are for browser tabs and search results. Headers are displayed in the content of the page itself. Follow these best practices to get the…

Everyone in the SEO industry knows links are an incredibly important ranking signal, but internal links are often neglected. In this post, let’s talk about best practices for internal links. What Is An Internal Link? Hyperlinks are clickable text pointing to a specific URL with html markup that tells browsers to navigate the user to…

Images play an important part in the modern online user experience, and most users expect most online experiences to be at least somewhat visual. Most marketers understand this well, but when it comes to search engine optimization, a lot can get neglected. Google rarely has any ability to interpret an image on its own, and…

URLs are at the very core of the world wide web, yet many webmasters and even some SEOs neglect them. While webpages can still perform well in search engines if the URLs aren’t optimized, optimized URLs help users and search engines understand your site better and can give you a boost over competitors. Let’s talk…

Updated August 25, 2020. When this post was first published in August of 2014, I couldn’t find any evidence of outright lies from Google, at least not within the context of search engine optimization (SEO), but I concluded that there were several cases where Google had still been deceitful. A lot has changed since then,…