Eric Enge

SEO or SEM First? Whenever we start up with a new client, one of the first questions that often comes up is whether or not we should focus on Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or Search Engine Optimization first. Lisa Barone discusses this point in her recent post about What Comes First: PPC or SEO?. As […]

Matt Cutts has just put out a posting on how search engines handle the “noindex” metatag. He makes some interesting observations about the results as follows: Google doesn’t show the page in any way Ask doesn’t show the page in any way MSN shows a URL reference and Cached link, but no snippet. Clicking the […]

Let’s talk about the cost of duplicate content. At first blush, it seems like a relatively minor issue. In principle, a search engine wants to include only one copy of a page in its index. So if you have multiple pages with the same content, the search engine picks only one. This means one copy […]

Leave it to Danny Sullivan. While the SEO world is abuzz with the news of his leaving Search Engine Watch (SEW), and Search Engine Strategies (SES) as well, Danny focuses on the issue of losing Pluto as a planet. As someone who has been at 6 or so SES shows, I can tell you that […]

Rohit Bhargava of Influential Marketing started an excellent thread of blog posts with his post titled: 5 Rules of Social Media Optimization. In it, he starts us off with a list of rules for engaging the social web community and building traffic in the process. This initial post has since been enhanced by others, resulting […]

Recently I came across a post about some of the best Directories at the AvivaDirectory web site. This posting lists directories as organized by “Page Strength”, using a tool developed for this purpose by SEOMoz. The posting also includes information on the cost for submission to the directory. Anyone familiar with Perficient Digital knows that […]

Greg Boser of Web Guerilla made an interesting post about buying older sites and domains. In his post, he shows an example of a domain amishfurniturecrafts.com that resolves to the same IP address as gokartsusa.com. The result is that the site ranks highly for keywords like “Amish furniture”, “Amish gokarts”, and “mini bike furniture”. As […]

There is a New Google Patent that has surfaced. As always, it makes for fascinating reading. It makes reference to editorial and automated detection of favored and non-favored sources and methods for ranking sites based on this. One of the key phrases in the document has Google improving search results “by providing a mechanism that […]

The social web is about relationships and trust. Hell, at this point, the entire web is about relationships and trust. Gone are the days of trickery and the day of the charlatans is fading fast. It’s so critical to your business on the web that you have the right mindset. How am I going to […]

Telling a search engine to not index a page sounds relatively easy. According to the specs, all you need to do is implement the NOINDEX parameter in your Robots Metatag. Sounds like you’re all set. But you might not be. Why? It turns out that if you have also used your Robots.txt file to tell […]

Not too long ago I was working on a site that had a pretty active affiliate program. A very strange thing happened – One of the affiliates unintentionally hijacked the search results of the source site. Let me illustrate what I mean with an example. The site used to come up very highly in Google […]

There are some SEO opportunities out there that are being missed by the general SEO population. An example of one of these is the Google Co-Op program. What if I told you that you could get a PR8 link (that does not have a Nofollow on it) from Google.com? Well, it’s true, and the SEO […]