How Do You Develop Authority?
You hear this word "Authority" thrown around these days. People use it for all kinds of reasons. In one sense, authority is a word that describes the depth of a person's knowledge. On another level, it simply means the power to which an individual has been elevated over others. Either way, people respect it. Authority can be abused. It can be acquired in less than honorable ways. But when legitimate, authority is a powerful force and when used for good it's even more powerful. And that's why you want to focus your efforts on becoming an authority in your niche. A strongly search engine optimized website is good, but it will only take you so far. Authority, however, will take you to the ends of the earth and back again. And when you've achieved a certain level of authority, about the only thing that can take you down is your own stupidity, a big mistake, an ethical blunder, or a crime. Otherwise, if you are considered an authority by a large mass of people then you can ride a long way on the tallest waves just on that alone. The problem with authority is that it takes a long time to build. It 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...
How To Move A Subdomain To A Stand Alone Domain
There's nothing wrong with turning a subdomain into a stand alone domain. You want to capitalize on the success of the subdomain by expanding your options. I highly recommend that. But there are pitfalls. The following list should be your checklist to make sure your transition from subdomain to full stand alone domain goes smoothly: Don't simply copy/paste the page from the subdomain to the new domain. Rewrite the content with the idea of improving it. You may want to run an A/B test on your content before you build the new domain. If the new content doesn't beat the old then rewrite. Tweak the rewritten pages until they outperforms your subdomain then upload it to your new domain. Don't take the subdomain down. Redirect it instead. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
How Many Keyword Tools Do You Need?
Titus Hoskins has been around a long time. He wrote this article that tells about all the keywords tools he uses. Some of them are direct competitors against each other. Actually, all of them are competitors, but a few of them are free. My question is, are all of these tools necessary? Certainly, keyword research is a necessity for online marketing and the more information you have on your own sites and your competitors' sites, the more successful you can hope to become. But do you really need to go out and buy 10 different keyword research tools? If you are a new Internet marketer or a small business person going online for the first time, I'd say just start with one free tool. Google 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...
A Simple Way To Increase Page Views
I'm going to share a very basic, simple way to increase page views. It doesn't involve adding new pages to your website or rewriting content. All you really need to do is add one element on each of your web pages that will get people to click over more and visit your other pages. You can hard code this element in HTML or provide a widget. Either way and you can increase your page views. There are two ways that are very effective in doing this and which one you use depends on what you want to accomplish, but here they are: Popular pages method - With the popular pages method you highlight your most popular content on each page of your website. A version of this 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...
Is Citysearch Making a Big Mistake?
For years, the popular local search website Citysearch has offered free business listings to anyone with a business who wants to get more local exposure. Now, Matt McGee of Small Business Search Marketing has written a blog post suggesting that Citysearch has done away with free business listings. If so, is that a mistake? I understand the desire for businesses to want to make more money. Don't we all? But any business that acts as a directory or resource for others must understand two things about site visitor behavior: Users won't necessarily pay for something unless they can get a good feeling about you and learn to trust you Just because you exist doesn't mean they will visit you Citysearch has a solid reputation in the local CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Yahoo!, Microsoft and AOL: What’s Up With The Future?
The current news, the top news that everyone is talking about is two-fold. Yahoo! and Microsoft are close to a deal And Google sold its AOL shares You can see the news for yourself. But these two little tidbits beg the question, what's up with the future? Specifically, here's what mean. No. 1 first: Yahoo! and Microsoft If Yahoo! and Microsoft team up against Google, will it be a rival worth our attention? Google, of course, will still dominate, but Yahoo! and Microsoft together on the same team may actually create a more competitive atmosphere, which I think most of us would welcome. Would that mean more market share for the the underdogs. Will that mean less share for Google? So far, not many people have left Google for Bing, CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Can Natural Link Building Really Happen?
Darren Rowse of Problogger fame sent out this tweet this morning: for the record - I don't exchange links with anyone. I link to sites I think are useful to my readers and let link building look after itself That might work well for Darren, but what about the rest of us? Can we rely on link building to take care of itself? Naturally, natural link building for search engine optimization is preferable to trying to force a square peg into a round hole, but is it feasible to expect that thousands of other bloggers and website owners will link to you if you don't have a name brand like Problogger? Sure, name brands are cool and if you've got one that is popular then 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...
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...
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