It's nearly the end of the summer already! Which means it's nearly time for conferences, with actual real life humans!
Assuming it goes ahead, we'll be at BrightonSEO in September. If you're going to be there too, you better believe we are expecting to share plenty of fists-bumps, hugs, coffees and beers (all in a covid-safe manner, of course).
Here are some words you might like to read:
Recent Tech SEO Stuff We Love
Passage indexing is likely more important than you think
via @dawnieando
I'd wager Dawn knows more about information retrieval than most SEOs on the planet, most probably including you. This is a beast of a slide deck (250 slides, strap in) and Dawn does a great job explaining how machine learning, AI and NLP advances have improved the complex tasks of informational retrieval and result ranking, and in particular where passage indexing fits into it.
IMHO a 'must read' for anyone involved in technical SEO.
Myths and facts about crawling (QUIZ)
via @googlesearchc
A recent addition to Google's docs about crawl budget, this quiz allows you to test your knowledge on how Google crawls and indexes websites. It was notable as much for how some of the answers annoyed various SEOs, who were no doubt missing the 'it depends' option. Made me chuckle at least.
The New Moz SEO Q&A: 100K URL Migration Case Study
via @CyrusShepard
Who doesn't love a migration case study? That's proper technical SEO from the good old days. This one has added interest since it concerns a brand and forum many of us have come across and used over the years.
Why lab and field data can be different (and what to do about it)
via @philwalton
I've written my own take on the differences between lab and field data when measuring Web Vitals, and this guide from Google goes one step further in the depth of explanation of the differences between the data; and in particular, the explanations regarding data differences for the specific metrics themselves.
Other Cool Stuff You Should Check Out
- 500+ unsolicited SEO tips
This is a series of SEO tips from Mark Williams-Cook, that began on LinkedIn, but soon took on a life of it's own and grew too big for the LinkedIn article system! Collated now in post format, it is up to over 500 individual tips. Sitebulb gets included in the tips a lot, which is a clear indicator of quality(!)
- UTM Tagging for Google My Business
A very cool and super-useful Whiteboard Friday from Claire Carlile, who explains how you can use UTM tagging to help understand and demonstrate the value of Google My Business traffic.
- HTTP/3 From A To Z: Core Concepts
Honestly, I did not know that HTTP/3 was nearing release. This is a super informative post about what it is, and ironically why we should not get over-excited about it's imminent arrival.
- Finding Zero Search Volume "ZSV" Keywords
A really interesting exploration into the world of keywords that have no search volume (yet) - but still drive plenty of traffic - and how you can start thinking about targeting these sort of keywords.
What We've Been Up To
- Yesterday we were joined by the awesome Kristina Azarenko for an excellent webinar on CMS migrations on our YouTube channel. The webinar content was excellent and thoroughly entertaining, and the recording is now live and available on our website here.
- We were joined on the blog by guest author Crystal Ortiz, who introduced us to 'SEO Testing, An Argument for Using Data in SEO' - which was extremely well received by the search community.
- Natalie Arney followed up her webinar on auditing links with an excellent write-up on our site: 'Internal Link Audits for SEO', definitely check this out if you have not already.
- We released Sitebulb v5.2, which seems to have finally cleared off the inevitable bugs we managed to introduce in v5, and it also contained some pretty chunky structured data updates. If you have held off updating, stop holding off, go get the latest version now.
We have plenty more webinar and video content planned for the coming months, so please subscribe to our channel, to get notified when we add new stuff :)
