Gene Marks, BusinessWeek Columnist, Says SEO Not Important
I've never heard of anyone saying SEO wasn't important. I've met people who had no interest or made no pretensions about understanding it. But I've never met anyone who said it wasn't necessary. Until now. Gene Marks, SEO Genius Of BusinessWeek Gene Marks is a columnist for BusinessWeek so even when he's wrong people listen. And he's all kinds of wrong in this January 4 article in BusinessWeek. Besides being wrong about SEO, Gene Marks is also wrong about a lot of other things in this article. But I'm going to focus on SEO. Here's a snippet of genius from Gene Marks' brilliance in BW: You mean for $5,000 I can get my company's name on the very top of Google's search CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Web Design Issues That Affect SEO
Dave Davies wrote an excellent piece in WebProNews about choosing a designer to work with your SEO. I found this gem inside: But there's a big upside and that comes when you have the opportunity to work with web designers who know how important SEO is (as an SEO who knows how important a good design is). Working to balance the two can be a daunting task and having the skills of the SEO matched with the skills of the web designer can be a true blessing. For example, I may have a great idea to make a site more easily navigated by search engines but an ugly solution to implement it whereas the designer may have a more attractive solution in CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Search Engine Optimization Journal’s Top 20 SEO Blog List
We have researched and compiled our first annual list of some of the most useful Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing Blogs…other than the Search Engine Optimization Journal! Please feel free to visit these blogs as they provide excellent information! Please let us know if we missed any blogs off of this list. 1. Matt Cutts: Google, Gadgets and SEO Blog URL: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ SEO news and tips coming straight from a Google employee who is recognizably one of the biggest names in the SEO industry. 2. Search Engine Watch Blog: Search Marketing News Blog URL: http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/ Not only does SearchEngineWatch.com give you everything you need to know as a whole about SEM, but this blog is definitely a great addition to CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Universal Search and SEO
There was a time when all one had to worry about for optimizing their site was the text. There was also a time when websites were indexed manually. How times have changed. These days, text is still king of SEO, but integration of other technologies is becoming more important. Photo and to a greater extent video now has a part to play. Yahoo! has featured universal search for a while now, but you might be surprised to know that they were beta testing it long before that. Universal search is the new standard and as Internet speeds increase, video will become the new web medium. YouTube is largely to thank for that, but do not be mistaken into thinking that CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Quick Tips for Photo Optimization
If you want to have photos on your website then make sure you read these quick tips about photo optimization. They are simple tips, but many people do not consider the benefits of photo optimization. There are a ton of indexed articles out there, most people skimp on image optimization, so it is possible to pick up image search traffic. Optimize your photos, you might be sorry if you don't. It's all in the tags – An untagged photo is a waste of space. Search engines see text not images. Make sure that the ALT text is there and give it a decent description. Use lots of keywords in the description, but be sparing in the title. Don't forget the pixel CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
SEO As A Branding Tool
Typically, when you hear marketers talking about SEO and branding, they're not connected. Sure, you can brand yourself online. You also need to SEO your website. But did you know that you can use your SEO as a branding tool? It's true. The most effective elements for using SEO as a branding tool include: Your domain name Anchor text Alt tags H2 and H3 tags Trademarked keyword terms I've talked about each one of these before, except for the last one. Just to review, a keyword-rich domain name can brand you. It also gives you a tiny edge over the competition. Of course, anchor text is always useful for SEO, but for branding? If your brand is keyword-rich to begin with, yes. H2 and H3 tags with keyword terms in them make CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Is The Keywords Meta Tag Really Necessary?
In September this year, Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land wrote a long post on the use of the keywords meta tag on web pages. It's the only article you ever need to read on keywords meta tags. I'm just going to mention three specific things that I found helpful in the article, namely: Which search engines support them (and which ones don't) Whether to use commas or spaces Are they really necessary? Is The Keywords Meta Tag Necessary? I'll deal with this question first. The bottom line on the keywords meta tag is no, it's not necessary. Yes, it is helpful sometimes. Do it right and it'll give you a slight edge. Do it wrong and it'll be a big, ugly, painful CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Helpful Robot Tags You Might Use
The natural protocol for search engine robots when they crawl your pages is to index the page and follow all links. All major search engines will follow this protocol unless you tell them not to. Here are some helpful robot meta tags that you might use in order to give specific instructions to the search engines crawling your pages: meta name="robots" content=" ..." - This meta tag is addressed to all search engines and whatever instructions you give will be followed by all the search engines. meta name="googlebot" content=" ..." - Only Google will pay attention to this tag. meta name="msnbot" content=" ..." - Specifies instructions intended only for MSN Live and not other search engines. meta name="yahoobot" content=" ..." - Instructions specific to Yahoo! Inside the content=" ..." attribute CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Use Separate Optimized Landing Pages
If you are selling products that might appeal to more than one target market you can build a landing page for each target market and optimize each landing page around a specific keyword. For instance, let's suppose you are a work-at-home mom who knits bobby socks by hand and sells them on her website - bobbysocks dot com. Perhaps you want to bring back the bobby sock as a fashion trend and you make bobby socks for different markets. Here are your identified target markets for your hand-knitted bobby socks: Young girls who like to look cute (we're talking kiddie age here) Teen age girls who like to feel "classic" Grandmothers who wore bobby socks "back in the day" And the mothers to the teens and daughters to the GMs CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Create Your Own 404 Not Found Page
Does your 404 Not Found page help your visitors or irritate them? You will undoubtedly come across unhappy visitors to your website from time to time. It's a part of business. And 404 Not Found pages are supposed to help visitors who couldn't find the web page that they were hoping to find. You don't want your 404 Not Found page just being a blank page or some useless error message that will send your visitors elsewhere cussing and spittering and sputtering like a rusty wheel. If your website sits on an Apache web server then you can simply update your .htaccess file and customize your 404 Not Found page. Open you .htaccess file and add this phrase to the file: ErrorDocument 404 /notfound.html This creates your 404 CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
The Future Of SEO: Will Search Engines Be Necessary?
I was reading a post on the blog of a popular SEO website from 2004. A reader sent a question to the blogger asking about the future of SEO. I found it interesting that the question centered primarily on organic SEO vs. PPC. In 2004, pay per click advertising was still relatively new and organic SEO was quite a bit different than it is today. But the question asked by the reader was, "My concern is that with everyone seemingly wanting to fatten their wallets with paid inclusion and PPC, that the search engines will drop the regular spidering and go with advertising. Will the Internet community "allow" for this to happen and just go along with it?" I like the answer that was given CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
SEO Is More About Traffic And Money Than Rankings
I found this article online about 10 SEO tips. I found the tips themselves a bit overdone, though useful. So I won't belabor them. But I did particularly like one thing the author said: I have had some of them write to me criticizing my ‘crap’ HTML and also my ‘useless’ linking strategies. My site has ‘only a Page Rank of 3’. So what? It is sitting at between #1 on #5 on Google from day to day, at # 1 to #4 on Yahoo from day to day and at #1 on MSN. This quote strikes at the heart of what a lot of people online are misinformed about. PageRank is simply a measure of a website's trust. It isn't an indication of how successful CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
SEO And Its Many Applications
One can get wrapped up into definitions real easily. There is a tendency to think about SEO only in terms of search engine benefits, but that's not always the case. Certainly, search engine positioning is the primary benefit to be gained from your SEO efforts. But don't get locked into thinking that SEO is all about where you stand with Google. There are other ways to measure your SEO success. For instance, did you know that many smaller search engines and directories get their information from Google, Yahoo!, and the bigger search engines? It's true. You don't even have to submit your website to some of these search engines, aggregators, and directories. They will find you. Dogpile.com may not be your No. 1 source of traffic, CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Will Google Tag Photos As Duplicate Content?
Currently, photos and images are not crawlable. What that means is this: Search engines will never index images on the basis of the images alone. In order to get your photos indexed in the search engines you'll have to include alt tags for them. An alt tag is a text equivalent of a photo that tells search engine crawlers what the photo is about. But what about duplicate photo content? You know that if you have two websites with similar content then at least one of them will show up as duplicate content and you'll get a penalty. Will that happen with photos as well? Answer: It will if your alt tags are the same. Therefore, if you want to by pass the duplicate content penalty for CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
The One Page Wonders Of SEO
I had an argument with an acquaintance of mine about one-page websites. Her take was that they don't do well overall because of the link factor. Since Google, and now all search engines, value links, especially internal links and inbound links, then it seems to reason that one-page websites shouldn't do well. They would have to build a huge volume of inbound links in order to make any waves at all, she said. A second reason my acquaintance discounted one-page websites was because of the search engine saturation factor. Her take was that search engines like big websites, therefore smaller websites don't do as good overall. The Disappointing News About Pages, Links And SES Well, I hate to the one to disappoint, but that's not true at all. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
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