What The Bachelor Can Teach Us About SEO
If you've been watching The Bachelor then you know last night was the final show before the final show. And the whole world watched as The Bachelor threw the biggest zinger in everyone's direction. And that got me thinking (because zingers tend to hurt when they bop your head). The Bachelor can teach us a thing or two, or three or four, about search engine optimization. Here are ten things I learned just by getting bopped: Don't pop the question too soon - You know at some point you'll have to have a call to action, but if you get there too soon you might end up with untargeted traffic while your true love goes walking off into the wind. Don't fall in love with two end CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Does Outlinking Kill Your PageRank?
Rand Fishkin is at it again. He wrote a great blog post on the value of linking out versus linking in. One of the reasons that many search engine marketers refuse to link out on their web properties is because they are afraid that they'll pass valuable link juice to their competitors that could go to their internal pages instead. Here's what Rand has to say about that: As for costing PageRank - yes, it's true. Technically, the original PR formula (described in great detail here by my grandfather, Si) dictates that any link equity spent on external pages is lost opportunity that could have been spent on internal pages. HOWEVER, I (and many other notable SEO experts) have seen very compelling evidence to CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
How Google Kills The Uninitiated
SEOBook has an awesome post this morning discussing how Google is propping up name brands in its search engine rankings. The first thought for some small business people might be, "Hey, that's not fair!" But before you go that route, keep in mind that Google has said all along that its first and primary goal is to provide the best information for searchers. If listing name brands for core keywords does that then Google is doing its job. The real question for small marketers and small business persons who seek to compete with name brands is this: "How do I enter the Top 10 Club?" While reading the post from SEOBook, I found several gems buried there that many readers likely won't find because CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Canonical Link Tag Wins The Day
The latest and greatest from the search engines - besides the fact that they've all put their heads together and agreed on one common tactic - is that canonical link tags are a necessity and they've settled on one protocol to help "clean up the Web." Matt Cutts explains it here. In a nutshell, you can now add the following syntax to your meta tags: link rel="canonical" href="http://www.exampleurl.com/yepthisistheone.html" What that will do is notify the search engines that a particular link URL is the correct URL to index and the tag comes in really handy when you have more than one page URL with the same content. The search engines will index the URL that you want indexed and it's a way that CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Is Optimization On Large Sites Different Than SEO For Small Sites?
Large websites and smaller websites differ in a number of ways, not just in quantity of content. To be sure, quality of content, regardless of your site's size, is the most important thing. But is it any different optimizing a large site than optimizing a smaller site? I think so. One of the most important differences between large sites and small sites is infrastructure. Your internal linking strategy will be different and evolve as you grow from a small site to a large site. If you only have five web pages to index and rank then that is much less to manage than 1,000 pages. Each page may link to every other page on your website and that will help you. Having 999 inbound links from CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Is Keyword Density Really Nonsense?
If you want a really good read, try The Keyword Density of Non-Sense by by DR. E. Garcia. Warning: Be sure to brush up on your college higher math - geometry, calculus, or whatever it is. Nevertheless, it's a very interesting (and enlightening) read. Of course, we all know that too many search engine optimization and SEM consultants today, in 2009, still refer to keyword density, speaking of it as if it is the latest information direct from the search engines. Newsflash: It isn't. Keyword density at one time made sense. I'm guessing that was around 1975...or 2005. But today keyword density is nothing short of hogwash. Actually, hogwash might even make more sense. Boiled down to the basics, keyword density is the art and CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Boston SEO Meetup’s Speaker takes on Affiliate Marketing
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The Cambridge Search Engine Optimization Meetup Group!
By Brian Hawkins Affiliate Marketing Manager for www.Pingo.com & Ast. Organizer for BostonSEO.org
Boston SEO networking group held its monthly meeting with a packed room of event attendees. The room was filled with regulars that see the benefit in coming each month to network and gain a dozen solid tips to apply to there websites. Mark from AmericanRamp.com said that he was able to get his website to rank for a dozen targeted keyword phrases, simply by applying the tips that he learned from attending the seo meetups. Now I’ll try to remember all that was discussed for this review of the event.
Guest Speaker: Nick a Super CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
How Google And YouTube Can Improve Your SEO
One recent bit of news from Google is that they are phasing out Google Video. Surprised? I'm not. Why else would the search engine have purchased YouTube? There is no doubt, online video will affect the future of the Web. You don't need a crystal ball to see that. And both Google and YouTube will play a part in that. Besides the obvious links from YouTube to your website for videos that you upload, there are other ways that you can use video to better your site's long term search engine optimization efforts. Even if you don't upload videos yourself. The first way to improve your search engine optimization through video is to include a video sitemap that is separate from the HTML and CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Is SEO Dying?
Here's another article in the old SEO is dying debate. Like Peter Da Vanzo, I'm a little bit tired of the stale arguments that say search engine optimization is going to die. I also agree with De Vanzo that SEO will continue to change, but its death is nowhere near. Here's a great snippet from the article: I've written a lot about the importance of holistic strategy. Your aim should be to sell something to people - be it an opinion, a product, a service. All your endeavors should support this goal, and most of the time, that means doing the basics well - make your site crawlable, well linked, and solve a genuine problem for people. I think this is the part that a CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Should You Use Dynamic URLs?
On this blog we've recommended in the past that webmasters seek to use static URLs instead of dynamic URLs on their websites. But in a blog post in September last year Google appears to be saying (if you're not careful in the interpretation) that this advice is wrong. Specifically, here's what the Google Webmaster Central Blog had to say about the subject: It's quite hard to correctly create and maintain rewrites that change dynamic URLs to static-looking URLs. It's much safer to serve us the original dynamic URL and let us handle the problem of detecting and avoiding problematic parameters. If you want to rewrite your URL, please remove unnecessary parameters while maintaining a dynamic-looking URL. If you want to serve a static URL instead CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Brick Marketing – Search Engine Marketing Company Video
As most of you (our loyal readers) know, I don’t post self promotional blog posts that often as I really feel the Search Engine Optimization Journal should remain a free resource of great information, without fluff, clutter or self promotion. However, from time to time (less than .05% of the time!) I feel the need to promote some aspect about my search engine marketing company, Brick Marketing. The following is a very cool self promotional video that we have created for Brick Marketing, I hope you enjoy CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
President Obama And The Era Of Responsibility
President Barack Obama has been sworn in and the era of responsibility has begun. Does that include responsible search engine optimization? We hope so. While Obama may not himself be overly concerned with SEO, I think that he appreciates the power of the Internet as a whole. After all, he used it successfully to reach a part of his support base in both the general election and for his bid as Democratic nominee. This clearly was the year for political Internet marketing and that includes search engine optimization. His insistence that we have entered into an era of responsibility does beg the question, what about SEO? So I'll ask: What about responsible SEM? What is that exactly? Responsible SEO is first and foremost an ethical and honest optimization. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
External Files Can Make Your Site Load Faster
Load time is a significant measure for webmasters. You don't want your visitors showing up to your site and waiting as it loads. Most visitors won't stick around long enough to see how long it takes. You we essentially have about 5 to 7 seconds to get their attention. If that time is spent loading your website then you lose that visitor. Also, website load time can play a role as part of your long term search engine optimization effort as well. There several ways to increase your load time. Making your images smaller will help. Decreasing the number of images you have on your web pages will help. But one very important way to increase your website's load time is to put extensive code CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
3 Types of SEO And When To Employ Them
Search engine optimization comes in different flavors. Which type to use for your website depends on what your goals and aims for your site are. Here are three different types of SEO and when you should use them: Reputation Management - Reputation management is optimization that is identity focused. You want to protect a name or a brand so the keywords that you target are related to the brand name, corporate name, or personal name whose reputation you are managing. It should start the moment you realize you have a brand or a name to protect and is ongoing. Keyword-Targeted SEO - This is traditional SEO. You want to build a website that attracts targeted traffic through the search engines and social circles that your target audience CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Permalink Structure: Is There An Optimal Way?
If you are struggling with developing a protocol for your permalinks structure, whether you have a blog or a static website, then maybe I can help. There really is no right way or wrong way, but there are a few effective ways to structure your long URLs, or permalinks for search engine optimization. What I would not do is allow my CMS or other system to do it for me. I'd take the initiative and be proactive, making those permalinks search engine optimization friendly. The worst kind of permalink are dynamic URLs. That's where you have a ? and other special characters in your URL, rendering it uncrawlable by the search engines. Anything that acts as a stumbling block to search engine spiders needs to be CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
SEO Journal is Written by
Brick Marketing Founder,
Nick Stamoulis:
Nick Stamoulis - SEO Bio.
Tel. - 877-295-0620
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