Others were punished severely in the SERPs for grey and black hat tactics. January-February 2011: Google Punishes JC Penney and Overstock.com for Shady Link Practices. In the beginning of the year, JC Penney and Overstock saw dramatic falls from page one of the SERPs when Google punished them for getting links to product pages from irrelevant sites. If you don't know where to start, the best way to make social media work for you is to start by distributing your content there. Connect with HubSpot We all learned a lot after this year's Google Panda updates. MORE >>

SEOmoz CEO Rand Fishkin and HubSpot Co-Founder Dharmesh Shah held a captive audience (and cracked a few jokes) talking about the SEO industry in 2012 -- and boy has it come a long way. Google is using it to help surface content from great authors in the SERPs. They know that the best content comes from awesome authors, and Google obviously wants to return the highest quality content possible in their search results. Follow the guidance from Google Webmaster Tools for additional best practices. 1) If I'm just getting started in SEO, where do I begin? MORE >>

Employ your best copywriter for these 10 areas where you simply can't afford to have mediocre marketing copy. Use actionable words at the beginning of your meta description, like "Read," "Discover," and "Learn," and explain what's in it for the reader if they click on your piece of content to help improve conversion rates in the SERPs and social media. It's what readers will see in the SERPs, social media, and their inboxes. Here, look at the ads that pop up in the SERPs for the search term "PPC Agencies." Hey, those blog posts aren't going to write themselves! MORE >>

But in the world of search engine marketing (SEM), using paid search (PPC) to rank on a search engine results page (SERP) for a given term comes pretty close. That’s why PPC is such good business for Google, which still generates 96% of its revenue through advertising -- because marketers know when they invest in PPC properly, they can get pretty close to guaranteed placement in the SERPs and help you generate leads. As you can see, your template reflects these best practices, providing space for several different campaigns, AdGroups, and ad variations within those AdGroups. MORE >>

has also come under fire over the past four years for some slightly shady practices, like incentivizing businesses to advertise with them in exchange for gaming the search results for their business ("pay us money and we'll push bad reviews down!"), so savvier consumers have learned to look at Yelp! They've been at it since 2004, so they've amassed millions of viewers over the years -- plus their results get indexed in the SERPs. Another nonprofit site, the BBB evaluates all types of businesses against a set of best practices for how businesses should treat the public. MORE >>