Top 10 SEO Articles of 2015

There have been thousands of articles published on SEO over the past 12 months. Many I’ve read, some I’ve written and a few I’ve bookmarked for safekeeping. Here is a list of my 10 favourites from 2015:

1. 5 SEO Myths to Forget in 2015

All the way back in January 2015, Kristine Schachinger wrote an article on Search Engine Watch to put an end to six myths that some junior or less-informed SEOs may have believed were true.

In her article, Kristine gave an idea of the cost of SEO, the importance of our Google ranking and put to bed any claims that SEO is dead, among other topics.

2. Improve your local SEO with these citation essentials

Back in February, Darren Shaw wrote a detailed article for Wordtracker on improving your local SEO to help potential customers find you or your client’s business in the local neighbourhood.

Darren goes on to explain the importance of listing all of your current contact information, phone numbers and locations to help Google better understand where the business is located. As well as this, the blog post has lots of information on local citations.

3. 4 Technical SEO Issues That Often Go Unnoticed

Daniel Bianchini published this insightful piece on State of Digital back in May, going into some less-discussed aspects of SEO.

In his post, Daniel goes into good detail about Redirect Chains, Layered Navigation, Robots.txt and Schema Mark-Up and their importance to your website.

4. Announcing the Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet 3.0

Cyrus Shepard’s SEO cheat sheet also published in May remains printed and pinned to my note board for being such a simple but genius piece of work.

The information is short and sweet, making it easy to digest. This cheat sheet serves as a great checklist when you take a new SEO client on board.

5. The Periodic Table Of SEO Success Factors: 2015 Edition

Danny Sullivan’s periodic table of SEO from June makes it into my list for being an awesome piece of linkbait as much as anything else. It’s a pretty clever adaptation of the original periodic table, don’t you think?

The article on Search Engine Land explains that it was published to help “focus on the fundamentals needed to achieve success with search engine optimisation” and that “the table is designed to broadly guide those new to or experienced with SEO into general areas of importance.”

6. The Top 5 Ranking Factors for 2015: How Strong is Your Hand?

Marcus Tober published the exciting Searchmetrics Ranking Factors study back in July this year. With the mass data they have to analyse I recommend you download the Whitepaper from their website to give you a greater understanding of what the important ranking factors in Google.

The top five are:
1. Relevant, holistic content is more important than ever
2. User experience – beyond the desktop
3. Keywords are becoming increasingly obsolete
4. Backlinks – correlations are decreasing
5. Social signals – a bonus for organic rankings

Data is from the US and as they often get Google updates before the United Kingdom and Europe, it’s an opportunity to get ahead of the game.

7. 11 Factors That Could Be Killing Your Rankings

Time for a bit of self-promotion. Back in August I published an article explaining lots of things you may be doing to your website that are potentially killing your Google rankings that you may not be aware of.

This has been the most shared article on Receptional.com in 2015, so I like to think my name was worthy of being included in this list.

8. Top 5 Google SEO Performance Indicators

SEMRush have a wealth of great content on their blog and my favourite SEO-related post from 2015 came from Fili Wiese in September.

Fili went into great detail about page download speed, indexed pages and structured data among other information to help Google better understand your website.

9. International SEO: How to Fix & Prevent Duplicate Content Issues

In November, Shane Barker published a guide on Search Engine People to help fix and prevent any duplicate issues SEOs may have when it comes to international SEO.

Aside from an issue with the language barrier which could cause duplicate content issues in Google, Shane produced an in-depth guide to help with managing multilingual versions of your website and targeting specific countries and more.

10. SEO Campaign Case Study: 1,117 Social Shares and 15% More Organic Traffic

Brian Dean updated his SEO campaign case study recently so I couldn’t resist included it in this piece.

All of Backlinko’s blog posts are flagship content and must read pieces but this one falls into the SEO category. Brian’s case study goes into detail about how he helped increase one client’s traffic by 15% in only two weeks, explained in a way you can recreate for yourself or your clients.

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