Does SEO Have A Future?
Interesting video from Rand Fishkin for this week's Whiteboard Friday. He asks "What is the future of search engine optimization?" I agree with his early assessment that organic "accessible" search engine optimization and content search engine optimization aren't likely to change. But then he discusses the social graph and asks whether the social graph will replace the link graph. His opinion is that is won't. I think it may. Here's why: Social media is a little more difficult to manipulate than links. With links you can buy your way to the top despite Google's insistence that link buying is unethical and will be punished. Buying links under the radar happens and many of the top sites you see in the SERPs got there by getting their links CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Why Secondary Keywords Are Important
How do the search engines decide what snippets to include in the search engine results pages? Is there one method or is there one method per search engine? No, I think not. Google, for instance, will sometimes take your meta description and make that your SERP snippet. Other times, they will borrow the description from DMOZ. And quite often the search engine will pull text off a particular page to use as the SERP snippet. In fact, you can conduct one search and get one snippet then conduct a related but different search and get a different snippet for the same page. It happens all the time. For example, if I search for "Dave Matthews Band" I get the following for a snippet in the Google SERP: DMB CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
3 Important On Site SEO Areas
When you are ready to optimize your website - I mean, after you've rewritten your content 45 times and re-optimized it twice for each of those keywords (sense the sarcasm?) - here are three really quick and easy ways to add some high value on site optimization to each of your pages. Each is one line of code, but that one line of code can make a world of difference on every page. One thing to note, is these are 3 of the top areas besides your content, there are many other areas as well but that is for another post. Title Tag - Almost everyone who understands SEO agrees that the Title Tag is one of the most important elements on any web CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
The First Step To A Good SEO Campaign
The best place - and many SEOs would say the only place - to start your SEO campaign is with a comprehensive keyword research plan. Your SEO campaign can only be as successful as your keyword research in identifying the best keywords for your goals. When you start your keyword research you should begin with a brainstorm. Write down as many keywords as you think are applicable to your idea. They may not all be. Or they may not be as valuable as you think they will be. Write them down anyway. Next, you'll want to use a keyword research tool to help you find related keywords. When you are done with your keyword research you should end up with at least 1,000 keywords - for most CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Three Low Cost SEO Strategies That Work
Undertaking a long term search engine optimization program can be an expensive process depending on the size of your website and what you are trying to achieve. For smaller businesses that have trouble justifying the costs, there are strategies that can be put in place that are effective and low cost. The basics are covered in depth in a lot of our previous posts. Having a website that is well structured is the first step in the right direction. Having the right set of keywords and optimizing your site to those keywords is the second step. But where to from there? Social marketing goes hand in hand with search engine optimization and that too has been covered in previous posts. Thinking outside the square is where you CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Are You Leaking Through Your Footers?
Have you got wet feet? If you're using a shared web or blog template, and that includes most of the inexpensive templates as well, then the chances are you are leaking link juice straight out throught the bottom of your site - throught the footers that is. Free or cheap templates are not really free or cheap. Sure, they don't cost you in dollar terms and if they do, they don't cost a lot. However, look at some of the download statistics and do some maths. I have seen one template with 100,000 downloads. If just 10% of those who downloaded use that template, that is 10,000 sites. With at least one, often two, links back to their own sites sitting in the footer - that CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Three Link Attributes You Might Find Useful
I'm not one for advocating the use of frivolous tags and attributes at every turn. Many tags that I still see in the source code of websites just aren't necessary. Meta author, for instance, copyright dates, and such. I mean, why? How about putting such information on your web pages for human visitors to see? But there are a few tags and attributes, though not necessary, that can be helpful. Here are three attributes that you can append to your links to give them a little boost or to aid you in your on site optimization efforts: The first and most basic attribute is the title attribute. Just as it sounds, you give your link a title. It looks like this < a href="domain name" title="keyword phrase">text CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
What To Do If Your Website Loses Rankings
It's only natural that search engine rankings fluctuate. They do it all the time. Sites go up then go down. Go up again. Then down. And up. And down again. Usually, such fluctuations are only one or two rankings at a time. But you'll also often see a site drop a page or two then go back up again. These sort of fluctuations are only normal. They are caused by a few things: The search engines could be updating their algorithms or ranking factors Your competition has improved their search performance Some well-written blog posts have jumped high up in the rankings, pushing everyone else down, but they usually fall just as quickly as they rise Some social media viral marketing content has risen, but it too will fall There was CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Keyword Variation Within Your Content
One of the most important principles behind on site optimization of a website is to maintain a good balance between search engine optimization techniques and valuable content for your readers. To be sure, valuable content should take precedence, but if you focus only on making sure your content is readable and likable and you spend no time on SEO then you are likely to produce a site that is not optimized properly. And what will that get you? Many site owners and webmasters focus so hard on the SEO, however, that they forget about what their readers are interested in. Others don't focus on it enough and don't have a quality, optimized website. So where's the balance? One of the easiest things to do, and most practical, CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
4 Ways A Blog Can Be Used For SEO Purposes
Blog SEO can be a little confusing if you aren't used to things changing real fast. Its' a really interesting hybrid search engine marketing strategy - blogging, I'm talking about. And there's more to it than mere SEO, but search engine optimization is a big part of it. Here are four ways that a blog can be used for SEO: Quick, Up and Down - Every blog post has the potential to achieve a ranking. Blog posts usually, however, go up quickly and come down quickly. Since search engine results are dynamic and always moving, any search result can appear in any position on any given day for different reasons. Blog posts are one reason why the search results fluctuate so much. They go up and CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
How’s Your H1 Tag Hanging?
Mike McDonald at WebProNews wrote a great article on SEO ranking factors and which ones are most important right now. Of course, it's not all encompassing. It only touches on a few of them. But one thing I noted was that Mike and Rand Fishkin agree that H1 tags are not that important for ranking. Here's what he says about the subject: H1 Tags - A couple of years ago, making use of H1 and H2 tags on selected areas of your HTML code kind of came into vogue. The rationale was the search engine spiders interpreted H1 tags as a signal that ‘hey, this text is important because it’s bigger’. Of course the proliferation of .css meant that you could throw CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
3 Prongs To Your SEO Tuning Fork
When it comes to search engine optimization, it used to be about 2 things: Keywords and Links. Well, there's really a lot more to it today than there used to be, but in some fashion SEO can be boiled down - as can Internet marketing - to 3 things. We can call them the 3 prongs to your SEO tuning fork. What are those prongs? Glad you asked. Keywords Links Traffic Keywords are the basic currency of search engine marketing. You don't have to count out strict density patterns. But how you manage your keywords - placement, quantity, the specific phrase you choose, etc. - determines how well you have optimized your on-page content and even, to some degree, your off-page content. If keywords are the currency of search engine marketing, CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Get The Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide From Google
Google have announced that its search engine optimization starter guide is available to 98% of the world population through various languages. I would highly encourage webmasters, both new and veteran, to download the starter guide and read through it. I doubt that you'll find any sweeping surprises and there's no better place to learn how to optimize your web pages than from the world's leading search engine. Google has always done well with its webmaster guidelines. The intent is to help webmasters and site owners to make the most of the tools available to them to rank better in Google. By encouraging legitimate SEO practices, Google can encourage friendly competition and establishes fair practices in search. It's also important to note that the guide won't CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
The Difficulty In Ranking Well
There are few guarantees in life. Search engine optimization is one of them. Try as you might, you'll hardly find any consistency in the way the search engines rank web pages. That makes it rather difficult to predict how they will react to yours. But what makes it so difficult? A number of factors, actually. For starters, every search engine have their own ranking criteria. Some place undue importance on meta tags while others don't consider them at all. Some consider keyword placement in the URL while others don't. Some are based largely on link relevance and quality while others emphasize on-page optimization methods more. It's a mixed bag of nuts. To top it off, each search engine consider a large bevy of ranking factors for every CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
SEO Racetrack: How To Slingshot Your Way Around Your Competition
In auto racing there is a concept called slingshotting where you follow the lead driver until you are ready to make your pass. If you watch NASCAR or Formula 1 racing, you'll see this happen often. The following auto "hides" behind the lead vehicle just close enough to catch the pocket of air created by the wind sheer factor. The lead vehicle catches the wind and therefore has the most resistance. But when its time to make a pass, the following automobile can swish into its follow lane, accelerate and use the leverage created from the lead vehicle's wind resistance to propel itself forward. Crafty auto racers can pull out last minute victories in a heartbeat. So how does this apply to search engine optimization? You CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
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