In February, the Federal Communications Commission voted to create new guidelines to limit the ability of Internet Service Providers to manage Internet traffic speeds. In doing so, the FCC sided with Internet advocates and politicians — including President Barack Obama — pushing for “Net Neutrality” and against major ISPs looking to have more over how their Internet speeds are given to customers.

Net Neutrality is the concept that all people should have equal access to traffic on their Internet network. This means that their speeds should be the same as anyone else’s on the same network, regardless of how much high-speed bandwidth they use or which sites they are using. Net Neutrality would ban ISPs from slowing user’s Internet speeds — this includes blocking or slowing access to certain sites to favor their services versus their competitors.

ISPs argued that media sites such as Netflix and YouTube — along with BitTorrent sites — were clogging Internet bandwidth on their networks. They believe that these media sites should have to pay extra in order to provide their customers with unlimited Internet speeds in order to cover the costs of maintaining and growing high-speed broadband connections on the networks.

A U.S. appeals court ruling in 2014 struck down rules prohibiting ISPs from blocking Internet traffic. The FCC responded by creating new regulations that initially would have created a path for ISPs to create “commercially reasonable” pay-for-priority deals with media companies. However, this move was widely criticized by Internet advocates. Even President Obama intervened and called on the FCC to reverse the planned law to be more restrictive of Internet service blocking.

The FCC relented in February and changed course. They used the earlier appeals court ruling to expand their control over deals between content companies and ISPs along with reclassifying broadband to prevent ISPs from blocking their services. ISPs contend that these new rules will stifle innovation and investment in the existing network infrastructure by limited potential revenue streams.

With so much information out there about SEO, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. In fact, sometimes a little bit of knowledge can be dangerous, as people can wind up falling prey to some common misconceptions about SEO. eVisible would like to clear up some of the myths that we see many website owners have that can cause major problems with their online marketing strategies:

Myth: Link Building is Dead. Many people have become confused because Google has recently penalized websites that attempt to buy their way to a high volume of links. This is different than organic link building, which is what happens when links come to a site in a “natural” matter. This type of link building is still very valid and can have a very positive impact on your SEO. There’s a great value in working with a company such as eVisible that can create an organic link building campaign that stays within Google’s parameters.

Myth: Social Media Has Replaced Link Building. With the exception of Google+, the opposite is true. Because social networks such as Facebook and Twitter don’t share information with Google, Google doesn’t factor social links into their SERP.

Myth: Search Result Positions Don’t Matter. It’s true that it’s harder than ever to determine a true search engine “ranking” because factors such as geolocation and personalization mean that people’s search results are different. But there’s still a major difference between being first on a page or tenth. And there’s a huge gap between being on the first page of results or not.

Myth: Google Is Spying On You. Google isn’t the government. While they use Google Analytics to determine if you are doing something against their “rules” (such as creating multiple domains for links), they don’t use Analytics as part of their site rankings.

Myth: All You Need for a High Ranking Site Is Content. The message that “content is king” has been twisted by some people who now believe that you don’t need to do SEO work in order to rank highly. The reality is that without the proper SEO features, your great content will just sit there unread.

So what are the things that you need to pay attention to in order for your SEO campaign to work today? In many ways, some of the same things that have always worked:

Authorship: Make sure that your blog posts, articles and other content are linked to your Google+ profile. You also want to make sure that your business information is featured every time you post content.

Content: Don’t post thin content or content that strays from specific topics. Anything that comes off as too “salesy” might get punished by Google.

Alt Tags: Use alt tags for your images and other places in your content.

Robots.txt: If your robots.txt file is blocking Google from crawling your site, you simply won’t rank.

Page Speed: Faster page speeds matter to Google and to your customers, especially if they are viewing your site on a mobile device.

URLs: Having site URLs be relative in your code doesn’t help you. Instead, make them absolute along with being short and free of multiple query parameters.

Penalties: If you are penalized by Google, you need professional help to determine the problems and the solutions to get you out of “Google jail.”

Creating a powerful headline is important — maybe even more important than you think. According to recent research, 80 percent of people will read a headline on a website, but only 20 percent of these people will actually read the article. The quality of the headline can make a big difference between the articles that are read versus the ones that aren’t.

So what makes a compelling headline? The team behind eVisible content writing services knows that there’s no “magic bullet” to assure that headlines will grab your readers’ attention. You’ll need quite a bit of trial and error to discover the type of headlines that will resonate with your target audience but doing it properly can pay significant dividends.

Don’t Be Afraid to Get Creative: A boring headline — even if factually accurate — isn’t going to drive people to your content. Any fears about using clever or “cute” headlines to draw in readers have been proven to be outdated with the rise of viral sites that get huge click-through and page view numbers with creative and witty headlines.

Consider Your Target Audience: It’s important to think about who you want to read your stories and what you want them to do when crafting a headline. If you are looking at closing sales, you need a headline that calls the reader to action. If you are simply looking to increase page views, you need to focus on grabbing their attention with the promise of something unique in the story text.

The Medium Matters as Well: You need to consider who your readers will engage with the headline when creating it. Sites such as Facebook allow you to use an image and, possibly, some additional “teaser” text as a sub-headline to attract a potential reader’s attention. Make sure you take advantage of these opportunities when you can.

Remember That People Are Curious By Nature: There are several types of headlines that have become popular in recent years:

• Lists
• Questions
• How-Tos
• Directly Addressing the Reader

But one of the most popular recent trends has been in headlines that use shocking language, over-the-top statements or emotional responses to get readers hooked. This is particularly true of viral news sites, which often use headlines such as “This Picture Shows Why Our Education System is Doomed” or “You Won’t Believe Why This Woman Was Sent to Prison for 20 Years.” They present bits of information that connect with people’s emotions and lead them on to want — and almost need — to click through to find out more. It’s powerful, effective and is a method that can make your articles go viral.

While many things have changed in the SEO world in recent years, one thing that hasn’t is the predominant position of Google in the search engine world. It’s maintained its hold on roughly two-thirds of the search engine market share, while Bing continues to make incremental progress but lags far behind.  Because of this, it’s natural that Google is the primary focus of almost all SEO activities.

But will this always be the case? It’s easy to forget that it was fairly recently that Google was the upstart in the search engine field, going up against established rivals such as AOL and Lycos. With Google recently choosing to keep its keyword data private to the public but share it with advertisers, some experts are wondering if Google is primed to lose some of its market share to Bing.

One thing is clear: Google and Bing approach search in different ways. Google is clearly focused on attempting to decipher what users really want to find and predicting this before a search is made. Bing takes the opposite approach and uses data from its deep ties with social media sites to determine what is most important to web users.

Mobile searches continue to gain in popularity as more people are using their smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices as primary means of surfing the Internet. Microsoft has already invested heavily in mobile; in addition, their connections with social sites such as Facebook mesh with the habits of users to use their mobile devices to check their social media profiles.

Google has been taking big chances recently by beginning to completely rethink how it handles search results. This includes implementing its Knowledge Graph in 2012. While Google hopes that this will eventually revolutionize the way that people search for information online, it also might provide competitors like Bing with a chance to capitalize and gain additional market share. Google is going to be the main search engine for the foreseeable future, but other search engines like Bing are likely to continue to gain market share in the months and years to come.

Anyone with a basic understanding of search engine optimization knows that meta data such as meta descriptions, image alt text and title tags is critical to proper SEO success. But there’s one element that many people forget that can cause SEO campaigns to fail. Not properly implementing a Robots.txt file can make the difference between seeing your search engine rankings soar or sink.

Defining a Robots.txt File

Simply put, a Robots.txt file can help you tell search engines which directories on your site you don’t want them to index. The reasons for this are varied. You might want to make sure to keep sensitive information such as customer banking information on your eCommerce site secure. Or you might have proprietary information posted on certain sections of your website that you want to keep private. Having a Robots.txt file will tell Google, Bing and other legitimate search engines to not index these pages.

Robots.txt Keys for Implementation

Disable access to sensitive directories. This can potentially include directories such as: /cgi-bin/, /wp-admin/, /cart/ and /scripts/.

Remove all barriers to main content. This includes making sure that there are no “no follow” tags that will block searches.

Don’t let search engines index “duplicate” pages on your website. This can include sections of your website that are designed for regular viewing and printing, or content that is designed specifically for mobile sites. It’s better to only have them index the main content page in these cases.

Things to Avoid

Putting comments on your Robots.txt file

Listing all files in your Robots.txt. This actually makes it easier to find files you want to keep hidden.

Don’t use a /allow tag. This doesn’t exist in the Robots.txt file.

Google has recently updated its newest algorithm. This has left many SEO companies and online marketers scrambling to determine how to best comply with Google Penguin requirements. However, attempting to pin down specifics about a Penguin update and craft content to fit might be missing the bigger point of effective search engine optimization: it’s about proper on-site SEO practices along with content.

So what are some of the steps that you can take to assure that your on-site SEO meets the best practices for Google?

Check for malware: You don’t engage in black-hat SEO, but if you have malware or someone running a rogue site through your site, the damage could be just as severe for your SEO reputation with Google.

Write short titles and description: Don’t have them go on too long or repeat information. Keep them short and don’t over-optimize tags.

Check your anchor text: Much like with title tags and descriptions, you want to avoid overusing your keywords or optimizing them too often.

Axe spammy user content: Comments on blogs posts are a good thing for organic search engine optimization; however, Google is now punishing sites that allow spam postings on sections of their site such as blog comment sections.

Increase page speed: A fast-loading site makes Google work faster; therefore, page speed optimization makes Google happy and it appears to improve a website’s SEO.

Cut useless optimization: Don’t bother over-optimization sections like headers and footers with the hope that “more is merrier.” It won’t help your ranking and in fact will likely lead to penalties.

Review your links: Penguin 2.0 has reduced the threshold of what they consider too many “spammy” inbound links on a site from 80 percent to 50 percent.

Check internal cross links: It’s easy to have links on one of your sites go to another site you own or partner with; check your links so you don’t get punished by Google.

Be smart with your alt image attributes: Put more of your content marketing services into alt image attributes than you are now: Google can give it as much weight as actual text.

Don’t overload ads: Having too many ads on your site – especially high – is frowned on by Google.

Add 301 redirects: Links that lead to dead ends tell Google that your site is not properly maintained.

Review crawl rates: Make sure that Google spiders are able to follow your site correctly.