SEO

There is a current thread at Webmaster World that asks the question: Is it Realistic to Base a Business Around Free SERPs?. Interesting dialogue. Of course, you can make a living pursuing organic listings. It’s a matter of approach. When you focus all of your energy on outstanding content and high-quality links, your business will […]

The news just broke that Danny Sullivan has signed on to provide a keynote speech at WebmasterWorld in Las Vegas on November 16th. You can read the announcement on Danny’s blog, or read more about it on the WebmasterWorld forums. You can get more info on attending Pubcon here. This should come as no surprise […]

In a word, yes. Since this flies in the face of conventional wisdom, let me qualify it a bit. Swapping links for the sole purpose of getting a link is a bad idea. What is a good idea, is to swap links with sites that are truly aligned with the subject matter of your site. […]

From time to time you see discussions in various forums about keywords in a URL, and whether or not this is a good idea. Like some many things in the SEO world, the answer is simple: It depends. To cite an example: cheap-viagra-cialis-levitra-hgh-sex.com is not a case where keywords in the URL will help you […]

Mapping site design to target keywords is a fine art. The goal is to create a site architecture that is mapped to providing keyword rich content that is structured to provide quality content for users and rank well in search engines. One of the key mistakes people make is that they create multiple pages that […]

Todd “Oilman” Friesen recently did a post emphasizing the importance of location, location, location. In it, the Oilman takes Kevin Rose to task for dividing up the powerful Digg empire into 3 sites. It’s a mistake that lots of webmasters make. There are many reasons for this. Not too long ago, a big trick was […]

So what’s the story with outbound links? Should you, or shouldn’t you? In our view, you should. You can see similar thoughts offered up about the value of outbound linking on Jim Boykin’s blog. This flies in the face of traditional SEO that was into hoarding page rank and keeping visitors on your site. But […]

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 […]