Now that the holidays are upon us, we all probably could use some cheering up. So I thought I’d have some fun with our favorite search engines: Google, Yahoo, Bing, YouTube, and Blekko. At Nine By Blue, I have been developing software that automatically checks sites for technical SEO best practices. Normally we run it […]
In last month’s post, I talked about how improving organic clickthrough rate multiplies the effectiveness of the other work that goes into optimizing a website for search, such as keyword research, SEO, and usability. Most of these ways of increasing clickthrough rate are directly in our control by tweaking the on-page code. I ended by covering […]
When I was in middle school, my favorite book and my favorite TV show were both Cosmos by Carl Sagan. I must have read the book at least 10 times, and I watched the series every time it was on the local PBS station. One of the most interesting parts of Cosmos that has stuck […]
So far my articles about technical SEO have focused on how to adjust a site’s configuration or architecture to make it more crawlable and indexable. In this post, I’m writing about the other end of the technical SEO process: using analytics data to analyze traffic and user behavior by keywords. When looking at keyword data, […]
Way back at the end of the last century, I worked for a company called Inktomi. Most people remember Inktomi as a search engine, but it had several other divisions. One of these divisions (the one I worked for) sold networking software, including a proxy-cache called Traffic Server. It seems weird now, but Inktomi made […]
In June 2011, I spoke at SMX Advanced about SEO issues that I commonly run in to during technical SEO site evaluations. The part of my presentation that dealt with Microsoft’s Internet Information Server (IIS) generated a lot of comments and questions afterward, so this column addresses some of those questions about how to improve […]
My kids and I really enjoy watching the MAKE Magazine video podcasts together. It’s one of those rare and happy things that a ten-year-old girl, an eight-year-old boy, and an adult can watch together and find interesting. Inspired by these podcasts, I thought it would be a good idea to create a do-it-yourself SEO project. […]
One of the most frustrating things about technical problems with a site is that the ways they show up in search engines are usually unexpected or subtle. What looks like a penalty can actually be a problem introduced with a new version or new feature of a website. Because the true causes of problems like […]