We talk about backlinks a lot. The content-is-king mantra, too, is omnipresent in the SEO context. No doubt those are very important aspects of SEO, but there's one thing we tend to forget about. SEO isn't either off- or on-page. The technical part of the process is just as important; in fact, if you don't get the technical foundation right, your other SEO efforts might bring no results at all.

Ah, link building… It has undoubtedly become the most time-consuming and frustrating SEO job lately. How do you build backlinks? How do you do that effectively and safely? And is link building even worth your effort after all? The SEO PowerSuite team asked SEOs to join forces in an industry survey to try to figure out what's truly working in modern link building.
We asked 628 SEOs about link building. Here's what we learned.

Single-page websites are getting increasingly popular. They look cool, are easy and cheap to create, and seem to work great for so many businesses. But can you get to the top of Google with a one-pager? Well... it depends. In today's guide to SEO for one-page websites, I'm sharing the pros and cons of single-page sites in terms of search engine optimization, along with actionable tips on making a one-pager rank for your keywords.

Search engine crawling is one of those SEO factors that are paid surprisingly little attention. From over 10 years in SEO, I can tell you one thing for sure: in any industry, crawl budget is something we can — and should — optimize for SEO success. In this guide, I'm going to walk you through the basic crawling-related concepts, the mechanics behind how search engines assign crawl budgets to websites, and tips to help you make the best use of your crawl budget.

If your site's internal linking structure resembles a bowl of spaghetti, and it takes you 10 clicks to navigate to a blog post that you published just a week ago — you are doing it wrong. Poor internal linking doesn't just have a negative impact on user experience; it hinders ranking growth. Luckily, internal linking is one of the SEO factors that are 100% under your control. And in most cases, you don't need any technical skills to fix it.

Mastering SEO is a tough job, and if you are new to SEO, most likely you feel lost in countless optimization tips and techniques. Well, SEO is much like a puzzle. You need to collect all its multiple pieces (content, backlinks, etc.) in order for them to start working together. However, your SEO efforts are lost in vain unless you build your pages in the right, SEO-friendly manner. But how do you do that?..

Ah, competitors. Consistently stealing your traffic, rankings and customers, when they seem like they are hardly even thinking about SEO. It's almost like Google just fancies them for no apparent reason. But more often than not, the reasons your competitors rank better than you are more than detectable. This post will tell you exactly where to dig, and how to put the insights you learn into action.

Content quality comes up more and more in the SEO context. Getting it right can help you outrank well-established competitors, while low value content is one of the major causes of manual and algorithmic Google penalties, notably Panda. But what is "content quality", exactly? How do you improve it, grow rankings, and keep Panda away? Here are the 6 essential steps to a content quality audit.

Paid link building isn't something a lot of SEOs are willing to openly talk about — not if they do it, anyway. Perhaps that's what makes it a tactic that's mysteriously attractive and so freakin' dangerous at the same time. For this post, I spoke to 10 professional SEOs, asking them for their honest (and anonymous) opinion on paid link building.

Today's an exciting day! Today background tasks are out in Rank Tracker, letting you work with your data, switch between projects and modules, and get more SEO done while your checks are running in the background.

When you prepare to launch a website, it's so easy to forget something in a rush. To make sure nothing is missed, I've prepared this website launch checklist for you with step-by-step instructions.

There's a lot of talk about semantic search in the SEO space. But is Google really giving up on keywords, and should SEOs do the same? What exactly does "optimizing for relevance" mean, how do you do it, and can you rely on it alone? How, after all, does semantic search work, and where do you get started? This article is an attempt to answer these questions.

TF-IDF (short for "term frequency-inverse document frequency") has long been used by Google to figure out the relevance of pages in its index to a given query. Then there was Hummingbird, and then RankBrain. The TF-IDF tool, out today in WebSite Auditor, is an attempt to bring those 3 concepts together to give you data-backed optimization advice in the age of semantic search.

Google rolls out algorithm updates once or twice every month (and that's just the ones we know about!), but not all of them have an equally strong impact on the SERPs. To help you make sense of Google's major algo changes in the past years, I've put up an up-to-date cheat sheet with the most important updates and penalties rolled out in the recent years.

I know, SEO's never been quick or easy. But the entire thing can seem particularly daunting as the search industry evolves. Which of the once effective tactics no longer work? Which of the less popular ones are actually worth it? And what is the best SEO advice for the newbies? For today's post, I asked Bill Slawski, Barry Schwartz, Eric Enge, and other SEO experts these questions.

As you might have noticed, over a month ago Link-Assistant.Com's website has migrated from HTTP to HTTPS. The migration was no piece of cake, but all the effort has truly paid off — we went through the process with no harm to our rankings and organic traffic. And now, as all the dust has settled after the migration, I decided to sum up our experience in this case study, full of practical tips and advice.

I'm about to do a terrible thing. I'm about to ask you to imagine you woke up one morning, looked at your ranking report, and found out that your site's hard-earned rankings are completely gone. You've disappeared from Google's top 100, not a trace left. Nada, nichts, nothingness. I bet it's not the best feeling in the universe.

If you have an HTTPS site (or are about to switch), you know what a pain mixed content is. It's the most common HTTPS-related issue, which occurs when HTTP resources are used on a secure page, and makes browsers display a nasty "insecure content" error to visitors. Mixed Content Checker, out today in WebSite Auditor, finally makes finding and fixing this issue easy.

Negative SEO is a controversial topic in the SEO space. You hear about it a lot, but does it happen a lot? How easy is it to ruin a competitor's rankings, really? Should you be worried? How do you know if someone is trying to knock you out of SERPs with negative SEO? Is there anything you can do to stay safe?

When SEOs talk about the mechanics of Google search, they focus on the ranking signals a lot. The query itself, and how Google modifies it behind the scenes, is usually undeservedly, and entirely, left out. But in reality, search queries go through a series of transformations that affect which results Google will display for them. In today's post, I'll discuss the 7 ways Google refines search queries, how these refinements may work, and what they mean for SEO.