Terri Stevens loves to travel, especially aboard cruise ships (floating casinos!), and spends free time with family and enjoying the outdoors.
Keeping up with SEO news and tips posted on the web could easily turn into a full-time job, leaving you little time for your own work. Yet, if your work involves search engine optimization, you know how important it is to stay updated on what’s happening within the industry.
You need to know when search engines make algorithm updates and how those updates could affect your campaigns. If a new tool comes out that might be helpful in your work, or one of your peers blogs about interesting test results or a tip you haven’t thought of, you want to read it.
Through blogs, forums, social media and more you can stay up-to-date in the search industry, but doing so really eats up your time. There are simply not enough hours in the day to read it all, and you need to spend your time strategizing and executing. So, while going through the news and tips I thought we’d share a few things you might have missed as you poured yourself into the work.
SEO News & Tips You Might Have Missed in June
- David Mihm releases the 2012 Local Search Ranking Factors, an annual survey in which participants rank positive and negative factors for ranking in Google’s local search results. In addition to results from the survey, Mihm provides an overview of changes in local search over the last year.
- Google announces recommendations for mobile SEO. The search giant supports three different configurations: responsive web design (which Google recommends), device-specific HTML, and separate sites for desktop and mobile users.
- The same day Bing announces its Phoenix Update to Webmaster Tools with new features and tools to check out.
- Near the end of the month, Bing also announced a new feature in Webmaster Tools that enables you to disavow links you don’t trust, a feature some SEOs have asked for from Google.
- Experian Hitwise announces new stats: searchers are using shorter one to four word queries; one-word searches increased 19% in the last year; and although its year-over-year percentage dropped a little, Google is still top dog among search engines.
- Google releases Panda Update Version 3.7 June 8 and Panda Update Version 3.8, June 25. If your site was previously hit by Panda and you recently noticed a shuffling of rankings that might be why.
- Through his blog, Understanding Google Maps & Local Search, Mike Blumenthal reports issues with the transition from Google Places to Google + Local. He also provides tips to help survive it and the merger of Google + Local with Google + Business pages. Lots to read.
These represent just a few of the SEO news updates and tips we saw in June. Now that we’re in July, you can bet we will see more to come.
