To start, I’ve got a couple of holistic articles – high-level consideration pieces that may be of interest if you feel your search marketing is stagnating (or, if not, to keep for when that feeling arises in the future).

Firstly, there’s an alarm call from Jayson DeMers, identifying three key signs that your SEO campaign is weakening – and what sort of actions you should take if you spot them. More of quick dig in the ribs, rather than a sober, detailed fireside conversation but no worse for that.

Secondly, a piece from Smart Insights that gives perspective to the potentially fraught exercise of SEO-orientated copywriting. Giving the lie to some old-fashioned thinking (that I’m sure you’ve consigned to the scrap heap years ago), it shows how far the industry has come – for the better.

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As the previous piece alludes to, no area of SEO has seen more change over the last five years than content development strategy.  The need to manipulate content to provide both user-friendly, authoritative content AND search engine information (primarily through the judicious insertion of relevant keywords and synonyms) has been tempered by Google’s ever-developing capacity to correctly interpret meaning from websites.

There is one area, however, where the conflict is still noticeable and that is where content is restricted, such as with title tags and article headlines.  Not only is ceaseless invention de rigueur from headline writers when it comes to attracting a clicker’s interest, it’s also vital that these snippets are concise and informative – both to a human and a algorithmic reader – as they form the stated definition of a page’s intent.

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Sitemaps are such an old topic that I hesitated to bring this up here – nevertheless, it’s such an old topic that it’s possible some people don’t even give it due consideration.  And if that’s the case, those people are wrong – and need my help.  Consider it given, freely…

XML sitemaps are as important now as ever – indeed, this article suggests that, given the centrality of content strength (with concomitant technical issues of visibility, duplication and caching cycles), it’s more important than ever to keep it updated and accurate.

A simple enough job but one that, perhaps, you’ve been overlooking for a while?

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Finally, we’re one week closer to April 21st (and Mobile-Friendly Ground Zero) and, whilst there’s not been a lot of additional information of the subject, there has been a very strong reiteration of how important it is – Google representatives at SMX Munich have been quoted as saying this algorithm update will be bigger than Panda and Penguin in regards to its impact.

Now if that doesn’t get you sweating, nothing will.