Is Blackhat SEO Unethical?
Is it becoming increasingly more common for people to refer to blackhat SEO as unethical. In fact, some people actually will come out and tell you that it is unethical. But is it? It depends on how you define unethical. Traditionally, unethical is a word that refers to an act that is immoral or that breaks trust with other members of a profession. Dishonesty, fraud, misrepresentation, these are things that are unethical no matter what kind of business you are in. But does that describe blackhat SEO? ` Blackhat SEO or search engine optimization is a term used to describe the practice of using techniques to rank pages that are not approved by the search engines. It is most often used to describe behavior that is not approved CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Can Literary Sites Be Optimized?
A friend of mine likes to frequent poetry and literature websites. Lately, he's been sharing a few with me. As I browsed through some of the sites that he likes to read I began to notice that many of them weren't very well optimized. The literature may have been good, but the pages were not optimized hardly at all. So I began to ask myself if it was even possible. If you have a page of poems, each one on a different topic, and other pages on the same site containing poems, fiction stories, and nonfiction pieces, each about as optimized as the first and each about its own unique topic, how do you optimize for that? Well, it got me thinking. Here are some notes that CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Developing Your Site With SEO In Mind
I don't want to knock developers because we need them. There are some things that search engine optimization experts just aren't qualified to handle. A good developer is a huge asset to any company, large or small. But I have noticed that many developers do not give a moment's thought to SEO. And for the most part it is due to the way they are trained. That's why I was intrigued by reading about a web developer who discovered the world of SEO. I found the story to be quite riveting, actually. And it's the perfect testimony for the importance of optimization in your website development. If you have a developer who doesn't understand SEO or care to understand SEO then you might want to CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Can DMOZ Editor Abuse Affect SEO?
The Open Directory Project included a blog post a couple of days ago discussing editor abuse and what they do about it. It's a good read even if you haven't been a big fan of the ODP. But I wanted to address the search engine optimization effects of editor abuse at DMOZ. Of course, the blog post went to great pains to define abuse. Not every instance of inappropriate editing is considered abuse. Like most forms of human behavior, there are a lot of gray areas. Abuse need not be but often does manifest as intentional behavior. Therefore, if an editor makes an honest mistake, that's not abuse. On the other hand, if an editor makes the same mistake over and over again after CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Brick Marketing and Constant Contact Boston Workshop Announcement
Brick Marketing is proud to announce the newest SEO and internet marketing workshop partnered with Constant Contact scheduled for September 9, 2009. We have had such great success with past workshops with Constant Contact that due to popular demand we have decided to offer the business community a new workshop teaching and educating just how vital email marketing and search engine optimization efforts really are. This is a full day workshop hosted by Brick Marketing president, Nick Stamoulis right alongside with Constant Contact, a global leader in email marketing efforts. Search engine optimization has become a very powerful and significant component for any business looking to take their online exposure to a whole new level. With recent economic conditions more businesses large and small CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Password Protected Pages and On Site SEO
This may seem like a no-brainer to some of you, but people do ask. If you are planning to include password-protected pages on your website, pages that users cannot access unless they are privileged and know the secret password, then you need not worry about the on site search engine optimization those pages. Pages that are password protected won't be crawled or indexed by the search engines because search robots can't fill out the password data to get in. But there are a few things that you do need to consider when creating password-protected pages. First, to create the password protected pages you need two things: an .htaccess file and an .htpasswd file. Your .htpasswd file needs to be located outside of your websites main root on the CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
How Long Does It Take To Hit Page 1?
Inevitably, people will often ask how long it takes to reach page 1 for their important keywords. I'll have to defer to the now cliche, "It depends". There is no definitive answer to this question. I've seen websites rank for their important keywords within a couple of weeks and I've seen it take up to a couple of years. There are several factors that influence whether a website reaches significant rankings for its keywords, among them: Are you using a static website or a blog? How aggressive is your link building? How many keywords are you targeting at one time? How embedded is the competition at the top of the ranking chart? How much competition do you have to content with? How well is the competition staying on top of its own CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
How Many Keyword Variations Can You Have?
When performing the on site search engine optimization of a web page, it's best to use more than one keyword. Many webmaster use two or three - a primary, a secondary, and a tertiary. But is that the limit? Technically, there's no limit to how many keywords you can have on a page, but realistically, there are limits. The first limitation has to do with the human mind. How many can you manage at one time? Keep a spreadsheet, run an algorithm, or whatever. You can pile up keyword after keyword, but if you have too many keywords on one page then you'll eventually reach a point of diminishing returns. Whether anyone has ever found that point or not is anyone's guess. I'd caution you against trying CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Will Google Wave Provide an SEO Benefit?
Everyone is going gaga over Google's latest innovation, Google Wave. What they're excited about mostly is its presumed impact upon e-mail and the social communication aspect of the service. I agree that both of these facets of Google Wave are exciting and revolutionary. However, no one seems to be talking about the implications of search engine optimization in using the service. Before I get into the SEO possibilities of Google Wave, let me run down the list of its most important features. If you have time, you can watch the video above or read the Mashable post. According to Mashable, Google Wave will be able to provide the following: Real-time communication between users Wave embeddability Applications and extensions Wiki functionality Open source code Wave playback Natural language CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Is SEO Getting Harder?
I think we may be at a crossroads where search engine optimization is concerned. There is a growing interest in social media, and more and more social media marketing is becoming as great a necessity as good old-fashioned SEO, and there are some companies and consultants who are calling for regulation of the industry. In the early days of search engine marketing industry, if you could add a handful of keywords onto your web pages and stuff your meta tags with keywords then you'd be almost guaranteed a high ranking in the leading search engines of the time. Penalties for violating search engine guidelines were almost unheard of. Now, they seem common place. But is all of that an indication that SEO is getting harder? It seems CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
It Only Takes One Poorly Designed Element
Search engine optimization is a sum of many processes. Get one even a little wrong and it can undo all your hard work. Take a site that has plenty of well written content, has developed a steady stream of links and engaged article and directory submissions in a well thought out program. There is a good chance they will rank quite highly in the search results. The problem is, you can rank number one for the best keyword for your niche and still not see a significant rise in your traffic. One cause for this problem is a poorly written title. If your pages are ranking well yet there is no increase in traffic, do a search and check the snippet that appears with the search CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Should You Embed Content Elements In I-Frames?
I saw the darnedest thing yesterday while browsing a few sites for research. I came across a website that wasn't designed too terribly badly, but it had a forum that was embedded into a page using an iframe. My initial reaction was, Why? And I'm still asking that question nearly 24 hours later. If you must understand anything about iframes, the one thing you should know is that they can't be crawled. If you have content in an iframe, search engines won't see them. That's a big negative. But it's even worse when you have one of your most important content elements in an iframe and when that element is on a page all by itself. I just don't know why anyone would do that. A forum is CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
How Latency May Affect Your Web Rankings
Bill Slawski often has unique insights into search engine ranking behavior based on patent filings. I enjoy reading his blog often. Yesterday he wrote about page load time and a Yahoo! patent filing. It's a very interesting read. I've known for some time that search engines, particularly Google, have looked at page load time when determining where a page should rank in the index. But it's not as simple as slow load-rank low, fast load-rank high. There are other factors to consider. For instance, if page load time is the only negative that a website registers and it gets high marks or very high marks in everything else then it could still conceivably rank very high for its search terms, even No. 1. Nevertheless, the CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Are You an SEO Spammer?
Search engine optimization has a bad rep. Tell a group of people at a party what you do and one of them will no doubt accuse you of being a spammer. But there is a distinct difference between search engine optimization and spam. If the critics are correct then all of us are spammers. But I'm not willing to concede that just because you want your website to rank well in the search engines that you must be a spammer. Rather, I think smart business people, whether they are entrepreneurs looking for search engine optimization services or search engine optimization specialists trying to rank their empire of websites, will do everything they can to rank their websites well for the keywords they are targeting. It's just CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Why SEO Will Pretty Much Always Be The Same
Yesterday we discussed Rand Fishkin's video about the future of search engine optimization and made some notes on it ourselves. But the big question - and the big comment made by Rand - was this: Search at its core won't change. But why? I think there are some fundamental reasons why we can expect search to remain pretty constant for a number of years ahead. The first reason being who built the Web the way it is right now. Yes, that's right. Google. I'm not going to say that Google is perfect. I will say that before they came along, no one dominated search. No one. And it was pretty much a given at that point that you couldn't do the kinds of things in search that CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
SEO Journal is Written by
Brick Marketing Founder,
Nick Stamoulis:
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