SEO optimise

A lot of people have made a New Year’s resolution to lose weight in 2010. For website owners, you might have made a similar commitment to lose some undesired thing: your high bounce rate. To make this type of resolution come true, first you need to understand what causes a visitor to bounce from your [...]

It is that time of the year again. You can feel it in the air and see it everywhere you go. The lights are on the neighbors’ houses and the stores are getting more and more crowded as we get closer to the 25th. For children, Christmas is a magical time where they dream every [...]

see more Epic Fails
As I’ve said in a previous post, SEO can be broken down into a couple of main categories: Content, Architecture, and Links. I think most people understand the importance of building content and getting links, but there are a lot of larger and poorly built sites that struggle with some fundamental problems [...]

When I started my career in SEO and Internet marketing there were many nights I would leave the office overwhelmed with the amount of information that I needed to know. I come from a marketing background, which means I understand the need to cater advertising to a specific audience, but all the talk of HTML [...]

I think it’s safe to say that everyone is familiar with the Hokey Pokey. You know, that song where you put a body part in, take it out and then shake it all about. Then in the end, you put your whole self in to finish the song.
Surprisingly, this song relates really well to doing [...]

As an SEO, I know that my industry is constantly changing and evolving. That is one of the reasons why I truly love marketing through the search engines. One upcoming change will be the release of what has been code-named “Google Caffeine,” which can be beta-tested here. It will be a new, more powerful version [...]

I heard something on the radio a few weeks ago that stuck with me and made me think about the basics of SEO. The line went something like this, “You have to have the fundamentals down before trying any of the fancy stuff. ” So before you go out and try to do things like [...]

Thanks to a couple of comments from Princess Zelda and Dan Schulz on my previous post about Transformers of SEO, I have had some inspiration to write a follow up to it. This follow up will compare some of the current blackhat SEO strategies to the Decepticons.

Believe it or not, all SEO’s were newbies at one time or another. Launching a website can be a very exciting event for an individual or new business owner. However, that excitement can quickly turn to disappointment when the site owner finds out that they are getting little or no traffic. If they are getting [...]

“A generalist is someone who knows less and less about more and more until he knows nothing about everything, while a specialist is someone who knows more and more about less and less until he knows everything about nothing.”
In some fields, neurosurgery for example, nothing short of a specialist will do. There’s a reason we [...]

“Hundreds and thousands of times, for her I searched in chaos, suddenly, I turned by chance, to where the lights were waning, and there she stood.” –Chinese Song Dynasty Poem
The name Baidu was literally taken from an ancient Song Dynasty poem written about the persistence of searching for the ideal. Well la de da! Ain’t [...]

Banned from Google? Ouch. Anyone who’s been banned from Google before knows that it’s not a fun ordeal. As of June 22, 2009, a report shows that google.com is used for around 90% of all searches done on the internet (worldwide). And with the next closest search engines in the running being 85 points away [...]

When it comes to SEO there are a few things that can be done that will have the ability to transform an SEO campaign. These are what I call the transformers of SEO.

According to Google their mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. I might add that they are also striving to provide  the best user experience possible.
One aspect of SEO that is either looked over or forgotten is the technical side. I am not referring to the optimization of website code [...]

Getting good rankings in the Baidu search engine is not an easy task if you are accustomed to working with Western search engines such as Google US. The Chinese search engine spiders sites much the same as other spiders. It follows links from one site to another and also follows links that are submitted to [...]

In my last post, I wrote about using keywords in your domain.  If you have already chosen a domain, you can still benefit by naming your deeper pages with keywords.
When placing keywords in the URL you can use hypens or underscores. In the past, the hyphen has been recommended, but opinions vary on which is the [...]

Looks can be deceiving. Have you ever seen a movie with a beautiful woman who turns out to be a less than beautiful on the inside? Something can look gorgeous on the surface, but underneath lies a complete mess. Websites are no different. How many websites visually display a superficial Hollywood makeover, but hide an absolute train wreck of [...]

It seems to come up with almost every child - the somewhat awkward yet vitally important question that every parent knows will one day be voiced. Although we aren’t in the business of educating youngsters about the origins of babies, we are in the business of helping SEO youngsters understand where keywords come from.
Let’s imagine [...]

I know my title is long and ridiculous, but it does help emphasize what long tail is all about. “Long tail” keywords are a string of three or more words that make up a phrase. The concept of long tail is pretty simple: Tap into the large amounts of search traffic using longer keyword phrases. Like [...]

Let me tell you a story. Because my career finds its focus in the internet, I get asked a lot of questions about the internet in general, especially from family. Sometimes the questions are as simple as, “How can I create a family web site?” or “What’s this thing called ‘twitter’?” Others are more difficult, [...]

On site optimization is an important factor affecting search engine rankings. It involves all of the changes and tweaks made to the code and content of a website, and tells Google exactly what the site is about.
This sounds like a no brainer, huh? Just a simple tweak here and there, and your site is search [...]

What is Rel=”NoFollow”
The Rel=”NoFollow” link attribute made its debut back in January 2005. It was brought to the internet scene by Google to help combat comment spam for blogs and guestbooks.  The name implies that search spiders should not follow the link. What it really means is, “don’t pass on any rank to the following link” [...]

Search engine optimization is about influencing what people read about you just as much as whether people read about you. I’m confident that most SEO professionals understand this when it comes to their companies, clients, and corporate SEO. Yet my personal feeling is that people, SEO specialists included, frequently fall short in the area of [...]

There are many interpretations for SEO on-site and off-site optimization best practices. Hopefully, most webmasters understand the importance of SEO, and have implemented the basic elements necessary for a website to obtain visibility on the internet.
While real success in search engine optimization usually requires the assistance of a professional SEO or SEO company, there are [...]

Not too long ago, Dustin wrote a post about the importance of selecting a strong domain name and a few tips to help you come up with good domain names. I recently came across a great example of how much added value having keywords in your URL can bring to your SEO efforts.

I have a [...]

Over the past four or so months, I have talked to many individuals in the SEO industry who believe the days of the Google Sandbox are behind us. I, myself, don’t agree in the slightest and neither does Rand over at seomoz.
I am an SEO who loves to test, test, test, test, test! Over the [...]

For some reason there are some things that are just impossible. By “impossible”, I don’t mean that it can’t be done. I mean that it never gets done. It’s absolutely impossible. For example, for those of you that live with roommates (or can remember), it’s “impossible” to put the toilet paper roll on the dowel. [...]

When I search for a topic in a search engine, I don’t always click on the top listing. I scan the titles and results for what seems relevant and interesting. If you want people to come to your site AFTER you are ranking well in the SERPS (search engine results pages), you need relevant and [...]

A few months ago I posted a brief guide of “The 5 Don’ts of SEO” listing suggestions of things not to do when designing a website. These guidelines include a few of the common “Don’ts” and suggestions from Google to help you keep your site compliant with search engines’ webmaster guidelines. Each month I’ve been [...]

Ranking well for a popular keyword phrase is getting harder and harder these days. But did you know that about 10 million times a day someone misspells a keyword in their search? Normally to those poor saps I would say, “Hey, good luck with that!” But the truth is, more and more [...]