Every day a new SEO myth is born; unfortunately, not every day does an old SEO myth die off. The net result is a growing population of myths. These are nearly impossible to squash because the snake-oil salesmen of our industry keep perpetuating them — bringing them back from the brink, even. You can talk […]
Let’s deconstruct the Google snippet in all its glory — from the Posts/Authors/Last Post line, to the document date, to the Keywords in Context (“KWIC”), to the ellipses, to the inside-the-snippet anchor links. But before we do, it would probably be a good idea to define the term snippet. Google defines a snippet as “a […]
One aspect to search marketing that I feel doesn’t get enough attention and indeed is misunderstood by the SEO practitioner is the interaction between organic search and paid search. For years when teaching SEO workshops, I touted the synergistic effect of being at the top of both organic and paid results. I would encourage attendees […]
When it comes to SEO, folks tend to think of me as super-tactical (perhaps because, when presenting at conferences, I cram so many tips and tricks into my infamous 80 slide PowerPoints when I have only 10 minutes to present!) But in actuality, I’m really very strategic. My new title at Covario (now that Covario […]
SEO is an art. (Hence, the name of my and my co-authors’ brand new book, The Art of SEO). Crafting copy that sells, as well as ranks, is an art. So is link baiting. But SEO is also a science. Crafting rewrite rules, robots.txt directives, and so forth is pretty geeky stuff. The science side […]
The holiday shopping season is coming up fast. Don’t worry, there’s still time to do some quick-turnaround SEO that can have an impact on your natural search traffic (and resulting revenue!) in time for Black Friday and CyberMonday. For many online retailers, November and December are the busiest months of the year. Of course, this […]
Nowadays, a great many websites are powered by a content management system (CMS) along with a back-end database. And for good reason. It’s too unwieldy to code HTML on a page-by-page basis, as you expand your content offerings to the thousands or tens of thousands of pages (and beyond). Content managements systems to the rescue! […]
Links long ago became the currency of the Web, thanks in no small part to Google and its PageRank algorithm. Like anything of value, link authority is bought, sold, leased, bartered, brokered, swindled and stolen. The fact that links are valuable is widely accepted. But yet when pressed, can any SEO or link builder really […]
Building links is a struggle we SEOs all face. Of the three pillars of SEO (content, architecture, and links), it’s the “link authority” pillar that i’s usually the weakest. Looking at sites individually, formulating your approach, sending personalized emails, picking up the phone to speak to the webmasters – it’s a lot of hard slog. […]
The currency of the SEO industry is, and has always been, “dollars for hours” — in other words, the traditional consulting model that is in use at accounting and law firms around the globe. Just think of what would be possible if it were to change to something more tied to the value being delivered! […]
What follows is a rant, which is something I rarely, if ever, do. It’s done in the spirit of fun, so don’t take it too seriously. Enjoy! I feel like the grandpa who laments in a crotchety voice to his grandkids: “Nobody ever writes letters anymore! They just sit on their computers and their cell […]
The Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) is not exactly a complicated protocol and its uses are fairly limited, and thus it’s usually given short shrift by SEOs. Yet there’s a lot more to it than you might think. Robots.txt has been with us for over 14 years, but how many of us knew that in addition […]
Welcome back from Part 1, where I discussed in detail how to implement URL rewriting with Apache’s mod_rewrite module — complete with example rewrite rules, the more common regular expressions and how to use them. If you recall, I was just starting to get into rewrite rules for 301 redirects using the [R=301] flag. (Incidentally, […]
If you’re dealing with a large complex website, rewriting your URLs from dynamic to static and placing all the necessary 301 redirects in place is – as programmers would say, nontrivial. The devil is in the details. Granted, the redirecting piece may not be quite as onerous anymore thanks to the advent of the search […]
The need for keyword research is pretty much a given. But applying that research on a massive scale is where things usually break down. If you’re dealing with 100,000 web pages, you don’t have time to touch every page. How can one do this scalably? The answer: programmatic optimization.
In SEO, success is as much about your toolkit as it is about your skillset. Without great tools at your disposal, your ability to get the job done is really hampered. At SMX East this month I presented some of my favorite tools on the “Tools, Glorious Tools” panel. (Download my Powerpoint.) What I came […]
Google’s recent blog post recommending that webmasters avoid rewriting dynamic URLs caused a minor furor in the search marketing industry. Reactions ranged from nervous fears that sites with rewritten URLs should suddenly reverse out their extensive work, all the way to amazement and even anger that Google should recommend a halt to something that many […]
Whenever you make changes to a web site, one of the most important considerations should be how to use “redirects” to alert the search engine to your changes to avoid having a negative impact on your search rankings. Whether you’re moving pages around, switching CMS platforms, or just wanting to avoid duplicate content and PageRank […]
Learning is a fundamental and highly adaptive function in human beings. More than any other species, humans are designed to be flexible learners and active agents in how we go about acquiring knowledge and skills. Yet much of what people learn happens without any formal instruction. Think about it. When we’re kids, we learn not […]
When optimizing URLs for high rankings, little attention is given to optimizing the URL for maximum clickthrough. Yet the URL undeniably affects searcher clickthrough rates in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), as demonstrated by MarketingSherpa in their eyetracking study published in the 2008 Search Marketing Benchmark Guide. Specifically, MarketingSherpa found that short URLs get […]
One of the first jobs I have to do as a consultant going into an SEO engagement is to debunk the myth that SEO is “free.” SEO has never been, nor will it ever be, free traffic. It takes work, and that comes at a cost. You need to hire staff or allocate internal resources […]
Ok, perhaps I’m being a bit provocative here, but sometimes it’s the off-topic, off-message, or off-brand content that earns you the most valuable links—links that you wouldn’t have otherwise gotten. Those links can really pay the bills, in terms of the extra search traffic and resulting sales. The brand police within your company may pitch […]
Over the years I’ve seen quite a few Requests for Proposal from companies seeking to buy SEO services. If your RFP is not written well, it hinders the SEO firm’s ability to understand and define your needs and to scope and price your project. This in turn leads to a disconnect in expectations for both […]
Have you been trying to “fly under the radar,” engaging in activities outside of Google’s guidelines but subtly so as not to get caught? More and more SEOs are moving into this dangerous territory as the guidelines continue to broaden (prime examples of which being the expanded definition of doorway pages and the addition of […]
If you are a large online retailer, you’re looking at thousands upon thousands of pages that have the opportunity to get crawled and indexed in the SERPs (search engine results pages). You’re also looking at near infinite choices for how you interlink all those pages. Out of all those permutations, there is one configuration that […]
In this era of Web 2.0, it seems that blogs, mash-ups, RSS feeds, and wikis have been the buzzwords occupying most of the limelight. But personally, tagging is the Web 2.0 technology that excites me the most, because of its versatility and wide applicability. A tag, according to Wikipedia, is “a (relevant) keyword or term […]
Wouldn’t it be great if all those whiz-bang Web 2.0 interactive elements based on AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and Flash—such as widgets and gadgets and Google Maps mashups— were search engine optimal? Unfortunately, that’s not the case. In fact, these technologies are inherently unfriendly to search engine spiders. So, if you intend to harness […]
I’ve never been a fan of “one page salesletter” web sites espoused by some marketers (here’s an example). Such sites seem to drone on, with so many screenfulls that I get tired of scrolling. And there are so few pages to the site that it’s an SEO nightmare. If each page should only have a […]
Since I’m speaking this week at Search Engine Strategies on the topic of SEO through Blogs and Feeds, it seems fitting that this issue of “100% Organic” be related to blog optimization. Even the top SEOs make mistakes with their blogs (and yes, I make some of them too). What are they? Here’s my list: […]
Optimizing a website that has tens of thousands—or even hundreds of thousands—of dynamically generated pages, requires thinking differently. Old school SEO, where you assign each page a keyword theme based on keyword research and hand-craft a title tag, H1 tag and intro copy, then figure out the best internal links to send to the page, […]
My favorite session at SMX Advanced last month was “Give It Up,” the session where panelists shared little-known secrets. I’m a little biased, since that was the panel I spoke on. But still, as the last session of the two days, it really ended the conference with a bang. For those of you who didn’t […]
Having a supposedly “search engine friendly” website isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. In fact, it can be quite a disappointment. That’s because it’s not the same thing as being “search engine optimized.” I’ve seen the words “search engine friendly” bandied about quite a lot, particularly to market and sell blog platforms, shopping carts, […]
Wikipedia’s importance as an authority site is undisputed. It’s at the point where it seems a bit ridiculous how often Wikipedia shows up in the first page of Google for just about every search imaginable. In many cases, these Wikipedia entries are extremely light on content. Oftentimes they are what are known as “stubs,” just […]
Is cloaking evil? It’s one of the most heavily debated topics in the SEO industry — and people often can’t even agree on what defines cloaking. In this column, I wanted to look at an example of what even the search engines might consider "good" cloaking, the middle-ground territory that page testing introduces plus revisiting […]