We all know that links are an important part of SEO. They help users and bots navigate a site and give search engines information about its quality and authority. With links confirmed as one of Google’s top three ranking factors, we’ve all been reminded of the importance of quality, relevant backlinks. In order to get those backlinks, we have to put a good amount of effort into link building, and that often proves to be a big challenge. There are scaling issues. There are research and outreach management challenges.

Each year I lead an intro to SEO session for the brilliant students of Drexel University in Philadelphia in their New Media Marketing class. These are their questions and my answers.

There’s tons of value in Meetup.com groups. If you’ve never taken part, they’re organized get-togethers that can resemble little mini-conferences, meet & greets, networking events, game nights, and basically any idea that can bring together a group of like-minded people. That’s right – a bunch of people, united by a common interest in something, all under one roof and talking about that something.

Over the last few years, SEOs have been talking about relationship building as a concept. We’re often reminded how link building is becoming digital PR. And with that, I’ve been pitched more and more by big brands looking for a collaboration of sorts, using a different spin. Note: This is not new by any stretch, but I’m writing about it because it seems to be a current trend.

These days, most clients and prospects I talk to believe they’ve run out of things to write about. One ceaseless option is to update (and improve upon) their existing assets and stale “evergreen” pieces. Yes—evergreen pieces do go stale. But this post is about new ideas in a modern age. The days of “one landing page per keyword” is SEO history. The emerging best practices for SEO content—in text form—is (again) long form, holistic copy. Searchmetrics has told us this for years. It’s not a 1:1—it’s not because Google inherently thinks long copy is better for them to serve. The correlation is likely related to Hummingbird, Google’s improvement in comprehension, and good old fashioned keywords and synonyms. Or maybe it has to do with the content’s improved power to convert (and lower the bounce). At the end of the day in 2014, the bigger net you cast, the more likely to capture Google’s attention and trust. At SMX East, Search Metrics’ Marcus Tober gave a great presentation providing more context. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t really need a study. I’ve been seeing it myself.

Necessity is the mother of invention. Many years ago, one of our clients bought a popular, content-rich website and redirected it to their current domain. SEO (and retaining the backlinks) were not on their radar at that time. Upon learning about the migration, we asked if they had redirected the site at a page-level or just redirected the site to their own homepage. The client had no idea how the redirection was done and they didn’t have a redirect list (list of the old, legacy URLs) to work from. We needed to invent a plan to gather up the data.