“News is anything that’s interesting, that relates to what’s happening in the world, what’s happening in areas of the culture that would be of interest to your audience.” Kurt Loder, American journalist. Consider this: does the above quote describe the content of your website? Does your website publish a continuous flow of fresh content about […]
Search crawlers are becoming more and more effective every day in discovering new content pages on websites. But, that process of organic discovery can be slow and spotty, so it’s hardly any solace to sites that publish hundreds of new pages a day, or publish extremely time-sensitive content such as news articles, or publish a […]
If you live on the left coast of the US, you know that wine is an integral part of the social culture. From California through Oregon to Washington State, some of the world’s best grapes are grown and magically transformed into world-class wines. Since moving to the Pacific Northwest 20+ years ago, I’ve become a […]
One of the things I really like about the field of SEO is how so many professionals are willing to help others in their free time. They volunteer to help non-profits, write blog posts for free (ahem!), and attend public SEO meet-ups. In the Puget Sound area of Washington State, the Seattle SEO Network holds […]
There is a certain segment of the population that firmly believes the world is a black-and-white, cause-and-effect proposition. They believe that doing task X, directly and inescapably, leads to result Y. They seem to believe that the world is easily whittled down into discrete segments that occur in a vacuum. That cause and effect are […]
Does it bother you as much as it bothers me? Surely you’ve seen it. Perhaps you know someone who’s done it in the past (or good grief, is still doing it!). I can’t imagine anyone who reads Search Engine Land on a regular basis would do it, but then again, many things in life surprise […]
Driving around recently in my hometown of Woodinville, WA, gave me a pair of contrasting marketing experiences I wanted to share with you: Scenario #1: I was driving to the grocery story along a two-lane curving road when I came up on a fellow in dark clothes, standing in the shade, probably 30 or more […]
The world of SEO seems to be ever-changing, and the pace of that change is ever-accelerating. It’s both the blessing and the curse of this industry. Today there are evermore options and issues to contend with to fully optimize websites and online properties. Unfortunately, it now appears, at least to some, that even some of […]
At SMX Advanced 2011, Matt Cutts announced the Google initiative to begin attributing content to original authors. Since that time, the process in which authors and websites attribute content to authors has evolved. A lot. Many times over, in fact. If you’ve heard about Google authorship markup, but have been confused as to how to […]
I admit that I am more than just a tech geek. I actually enjoy watching the TV show “This Old House.” I started watching it way back when Bob Vila was the host (does anyone else remember Bob Vila?). I have been a fan of the show over the years, and for most of the […]
As an Internet marketing professional, I love the power, influence, and reach that social media has to offer. Online venues such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ enable a level of instant human outreach that is unparalleled in history. For example, if you are a fan of a TV, movie, music or sports celebrity, your ability […]
When I do an SEO audit on a webpage, one of the first things I check is the <title> tag. Why? Well, I have several reasons. In my book, the <title> tag possesses all of the following: It has the most SEO power of any tag on the page for establishing keyword relevance Its contents […]
Many webmasters are obfuscating the content of their sites’ pages from view of the search engines. They post content that appears differently for human readers than it does for search engine crawlers. And as a result, their sites receive inferior treatment from those search engines in the indexes. No, I’m not talking about page spam […]
Wow, it seems like only yesterday we were all obsessed with the first (of what became many) Panda updates (which was initially called the Farmer Update) from Google and the New York Times story on JC Penney’s Holiday 2010 foray into buying paid links. Oh, yeah, good times. But 2012 is now staring us in […]
Link building is hard work. Allow me to clarify that: Building legitimate links that have genuine value in search is hard work. Some folks don’t have patience for that hard work, so they turn to alternative means to acquire links. Sometimes they simply do ineffective work. Sometimes they seek links from junk sites that accept […]
If you read my previous Link Week entry, Why Canonicalization Matters From A Linking Perspective, you know that canonicalization – the process of selecting and using one specific URL for each page on your website for indexing in search – is vitally important for consolidating potential link juice. This is because search engines index URLs […]
Everyone in our field knows that inbound links are an important facet of search engine optimization (SEO) – search engines regard them as votes of approval from the linking sites. That’s why webmasters and optimizers invest so much work on link building. Unfortunately, with link building, you are usually left counting on someone else to […]
Search engine optimization (SEO) can be like any other technical field of study. It is filled with specialized jargon that, to a newbie, can be more than intimidating. I recall that feeling was especially strong when I first encountered the term canonicalization. It is a 14-letter, seven-syllable monster of a term. I first heard it […]
At the SMX Advanced Conference in Seattle last June, Google announced it was supporting the HTML5 “rel” attribute in anchor tags for the “author” and “me” variables. To me, this was very interesting news. I have been in the business of content development for a long time (stretching back deep into the 1990s), and Google’s […]