<p>Let's be real, this is Google outsourcing their machine learning algo work to the dev community (for free).</p>

<p>Having SEOs learn code and having programmers learn SEO will change the game for any company. Think of all the emails and meetings saved!</p>

<p>Emojis in the subject line is our favorite tip, thanks Shannon!</p>

<p>Social meta tags are the most slept on meta tags. Most people just let the default info populate them, however if you have Yoast SEO in WordPress, you can select the descriptions and images for each platform!</p>

<p>A hypothetical therapist client:</p> <p>"This change will allow you to gain 5 more clients per month" vs "This change will allow you to help 5 more families per month", which will be received better? Try to find a way to tie the data (projected data) back to emotion, that's what really drives peoples' decisions.</p>

<p>It's amazing how much of the general princibles of the seo steps you metnioned is still relevant today. At least for websites it got a bit easier, just do WordPress haha.</p>

<p>Will 2016 be the year Yelp finally gets sued and penalized over reviews?<br /></p>

<p>What a fun post! Reminds me of those books that let you choose where the story goes. So much great info here about how to find and fix any potential SEO issues, thanks Isla!</p>

<p>Let's do this again!</p>

<p>Hummingbird is great news for us white-hat optimizers. This allows us to show clients that creating frankenstein or keyword stuffed pages are a thing of the past and user intent is the most important factor.</p>

<p>With the expansion of local SEO I think us SEO's can make up some of this ground.</p>

<p>Some great advice here but I think an update would go along way in today's SEO/PPC market. Come on back Tom!</p>

<p>Now that Google is indexing Twitter again, we've been using it to expand our keyword profile when sharing links.</p>

<p>We've come across so many so called "social media experts" that all they do is spam your profile with unnecessary and horrible postings as well as friend/follow a ton of profiles that don't generate engagement. All their focused on is growing your like/follower count. Remember to always select "experts" that go for qualilty over quantity when it comes to growing your communities online.</p>

<p>While reaching out via social media can be great for getting links, good old fashion relationship building and email tend to have the highest conversion rates. Even give them a call sometimes too!</p>

<p>Starting a local Meetup group also helps tremendously getting new links and drive traffic to your events.</p>

<p>A lot of great information here, great job Casey! We've also found that improving traditional seo signals help boost their ranking in the local pack results, as well as being mobile-friendly.</p>

<p>Time to bundle up and watch he bundle! Moz always delivers when it comes to their video series.</p>

<p>Adding a link to the source article on there helps Google as well.</p>

<p>There's those that make the rules, then those that follow them haha.</p>

<p>RankBrain or SkyNet?</p>

<p>Just another way of turning the dirty into whitehat, great job and great tips Russ!</p>

<p>I smell a WordPress plugin coming soon.</p>

<p>Wow, very impressive. This needs to be bookmarked in additoin to shared!</p>

<p>Amazing points Ruth! I think graphic design and how your brand is presented is one of the most overlooked aspects of SEO. It helps out in all other aspects.<br /></p>

<p>So what's the status of PageRank ever being updated again?</p>

<p>Awesome post Mary! The Net Promoter Score and Fruition's Check Your RepTool are fantastic resources.</p>

<p>Great ideas Ryan. Google Plus groups were great but have taken a huge hit in engagement.</p>

<p>Wow Twitter is getting hit hard in the rankings and on the NYSE.</p>

<p>#3 is great advice, thanks Rand, definitely recommend it when pitching local SEO clients as well.</p>

<p>Having to develop for IE in the past has been the scourge of the web dev industry. The fact that there phasing it out is fantastic!</p>

<p>Look at that fantastic lineup! See everyone there in 2016.</p>

<p>Even with the new TLDs coming out, I don't see .org's losing their non-profit dominance. Great post Eli!</p>

<p>I love the new TLDs, some are a bit spammy sounding if abused but overall I've seen some good implementations. Such as some art galleries utilizing .gallery, etc.</p>

<p>Amazing how much of this is still valid today, Danny is a legend!</p>

<p>Wow that PDF canonical section should be a post of its own. Thanks Tom!</p>

<p>Truly a great tutorial for people getting started with WordPress. One thing to add, for those looking for automatic meta descriptions for pages and posts, and who use Yoast, add %%excerprt%% to the meta description section.</p>

<p>Amazing guide Sam! Thanks for explaining the htaccess tricks, we're going to play around with those.</p>

<p>HTTPS, mobile friendly, in-depth original content, rich media, schema, social media = still need links.</p>

<p>This post needs to be sent to every troll on the planet.<br /></p>

<p>Great post Casey! I love how you utilized those advanced searching features in Google search.</p>

<p>Instant classic! But I agree with Ed, let's shoot for 100 next time ;)</p>

<p>Your new city-located searches have been fantastic for our local seo clients. Great work!</p>

<p>Terrific list Miriam! I think in addition to lawyers, healthcare providers need to watch out for duplicate NAPs as well. It seems in some instances Google likes to create a separate business page for each doctor, in addition to the main practice profile. They have the same address but change the name. You know, fun stuff like that.</p>

<p>Mobile only is lazy, just make the sites looks great for all three, desktop, tablet and phone.</p>

<p>Just like when working out, once you hit your plateau, it's time to hit different muscles. Great post!</p>

<p>Great post and topic Ryan! I think this post can serve as inspiration to other SEO's out there who contemplate taking on clients who want to rank for keyword x, y, z but whose company is sub-par.</p>

<p>Very thorough and fantastic examples Rand! While we're on the topic of rebranding, your transition from seomoz to moz was a great case study for this post.</p>

<p>Very powerful post Gianluca, it's usually the brands that don't accurately portray their archetypes correctly that struggle to gain any traction in their niche.</p>

<p>All you really have to do is type in any letter of the alphabet into the Google search bar and see if branding is a ranking (search engine) factor.</p>

<p>Wow music is a very mature and interesting niche for seo, and especially rich snippets. Crazy how almost all of the content above the fold on your laptop was either rich snippets or ads. Great post Dan.</p>

<p>Conference and local event marketing has been paying us back in dividends for us.</p>

<p>Some great visuals here, definitely a good beginners guide. However, we usually like to use the Analytics verification method as you need to connect the two accounts anyway. Saves the extra step of uploading a new file.</p>

<p>Every reputation managment person out there better be sharing this!</p>

<p>Fantastic test! I've wondered about that myself. I would love to know if adding/using the updated post option in addition to the published date would help just as much. Or if the published date overrides no matter what.</p>

<p>Had no idea CloudFare had a free option, that's fantastic. Especially for people who are hesitant to move to https due to needing a CDN service as well.</p>

<p>Completely agree, but for a lot of sites going through a http to https conversion they are praying for relative urls.</p>

<p>Wow this is great. Normally I would say good luck getting the developer community to comply but I feel algo updates like panda and penguin have really woken them up to how they code sites for search engines.</p>

<p>We use https for our site and many of our clients and never saw a boost. However, we do expect future bumps down the road as they start to implement and adjust the algorithm.</p>

<p>I think this about covers it! Never heard of Zoompf before, their tool is pretty cool.<br /></p>

<p>Would blocking sites in the htaccess file just register them as a different type of visit?</p>

<p>Great post Carlos, we're up to 3 filters now on average combating spam sites. Wish they would get rid of the 250 character limit..</p>

<p>These word clouds by categories are really telling! I smell many blog posts coming.</p>

<p>Now you can 'link build' by embedding tweets. Amazing how it's grown over the last 3 years.</p>

<p>The Washing Post GIF truly is a stroke of genius.</p>

<p>This is a great guide Mackenzie! For local businesses it also helps to promote other local organizations on your social accounts (retweet, favorite, like, etc.). Sometimes this can start a storm of reciprication. </p>

<p>Who needs student loans when you have SEOs? We're changing how kids go to college ;)<br /></p>

<p>The new HTML5 tags for divs and specific types of content (article, aside, footer, etc.) I'm sure really help Google determine where exactly the links are located within the page.</p>

<p>Ah Penguin, always throwing a wrench into the first editions haha. There are some fabulous link building tips here, thanks!</p>

<p>This "noob" guide is nothing short of amazing! I think even seasoned seos need to read this, if anything to rewire how a lot of people approach link building.</p>

<p>Where is Screaming Frog in all this? Great post though Russ.</p>

<p>Wow congrats on your blog, this is defnitely an amazing blueprint.</p>

<p>Great tips Tanner! Quora is a great source for blog post ideas too.</p>

<p>Thank you Aleyda for the amazing vizual aid! This can almost double as an audit guide as well.</p>

<p>In addition to adding a Privacy Policy page would you include having it be accurate? Such as following Google/s privacy policy guidelines when using services such as Analytics.</p>

<p>Wow some really great tips here, when some content is 'boring' we also rely heavily on images and/or video to make things interesting.</p>

<p>Great stuff Andrea! On top of marketing we also have to consider designing for different generations as well.</p>

<p>I am so thankful for the point #1 in your summary. We constantly get clients wanting to create 'Franken-pages' to rank for so many different (but essentially the same) keywords. Now we can just focus on the core purpose of the page and let Google figure out the small keywords differences, because the user is essentially searching the same thing. <br /></p>

<p>Really hope HTTPS and Mobile pickup soon. We've had a lot of clients spend tremendous amounts of money making the change only to find little to no impact at all in rankings. I think if Google is going to 'coerce' SMBs to spend thousands of dollars on changing their sites to accommodate their algorithms they could show some love back. IMO all they're doing is crying wolf too many times, so the next big changes they recommend SMBs undertake, they will be less hesitant to jump. </p>

<p>From 7 to 3 seems to be a little too much, would have preferred to settle for 5.</p>

<p>Hear, hear Bill! Having technical knowledge of websites and how they are developed has dramatically decreased the amount of 'seo training' we need to give new hires. Usually the "SEO's" we run into who don't have development knowledge tend to lean towards the spammy side of SEO knowledge. Seems to be their go to methods.</p>

<p>Love it! Most of our clients are local so we are constantly monitoring mobile rankings. Now we don't have to do it manually!</p>

<p>Which is surprising because wouldn't moz pro be 'cheaper' in europe?</p>

<p>Wow very interesting. We've had some of our content go 'viral' and our traffic curve looks just like that.</p>

<p>While it may seem like an integration it's more of a utilization. There will always be distinct differences.</p>

<p>I think we should add (and help rid the world of spam) to the title of this post, terriffic job! Everyone doing outreach needs to read this first.<br /></p>

<p>2015 = 98%</p>

<p>You can tell you have a design background with this post. These types of design vs seo issues will only diminish as Google and other search engines get more sophisticated with their javascript crawling and indexing.</p>

<p>Ben the Bodyguard is awesome! Years ahead of its time as far as paralax design is concerned.</p>

<p>The responsive web has solidified its place in the market place. It's great that nowadays ads have caught up.</p>

<p>If done right, GIF infographics can be a link builders dream.</p>

<p>Y!SE was a tool that will get prominent placement in the SEO Hall of Fame.</p>

<p>I can't imagine how complex version 5.0 will look like. For those of us on WordPress, Yoast SEO Plugin takes care of most of these (if not all by now).</p>

<p>People have attempted to end the URL debate before, but you sir, have just done it.</p>

<p>Don't you love it when you actually achieve #5 that they want you to magically switch to a complete different keyword and then rank #1 for both?</p>

<p>Great tips Casey! I think SEOs are solving the student loan bubble with all of these scholarships ;)</p>

<p>This is great news! We get tons of requests for local seo in South America, that is whole other conversation..</p>

<p>Wow, amazing story Mike. I would say learning to 'fire' clients is one of the best lessons to learn.</p>

<p>That Nielson zip code tool is great, thanks for the tip!</p>

<p>Wow love seeing throwback videos like this! Reminds me of the good ol' days of local seo.</p>