One of the most important considerations in DIY website design involves getting website design templates that are search engine friendly. This is essential because many do-it-yourself website design suites are based on content management system (CMS) platforms that may not allow you to control page titles, meta descriptions, and other factors that are going to determine how well your site ranks in the search engines. Read the rest of this entry »
Developing Good SEO For Your Site
March 9th, 2010 by Patrick HareIncreasing Your SEO Through Extended Tagging
February 24th, 2010 by Brandon LeibowitzGoogle has been using snippets automatically generated from websites to show as instead of the Meta description. Only until recently, the last few years, have Google and the other search engines began to recognize the use of custom generated Meta tags that webmasters have inserted into the HTML code to show up in the search engine rankings. Read the rest of this entry »
Building Site Architecture And Internal Links
February 10th, 2010 by Stoney deGeyterIn order to move your site up in the search engine rankings you have to get your optimized content to the search engines in the most streamlined way possible. There are some common problems that often stand in the way of that. These problems may not keep the search engines from finding and indexing and even ranking your content, however they can greatly effect the performance of that content in terms of how well it ranks in the search results.
Cleaning And Speeding Up Your WordPress Blog
January 27th, 2010 by Debbie CampbellThis is a followup to my previous post on adding scripts only to the WordPress pages that need them. Please read that first, or this might not make much sense…
To cleanup the dynamically generated head section even more, you can disable the styles associated with scripts that aren’t loaded on every page.
The easy way to do this is very similar to what I talked about last time – add this code to your functions.php file (or custom-functions.php if your theme supports it):
To Create Compelling Headlines You Need To Work Backwards
January 12th, 2010 by Jim BerkowitzHere’s a synopsis of an excellent post by Adam Singer, How to Write Compelling Social News Headlines; check out the complete source article for a discussion of each recommendation:
Crafting unmissable headlines which resonate with social users is something which appears deceptively simple. Yet it’s an art form requiring writers, bloggers and marketers to craft thousands of headlines to perfect.
SEO Tools To Analyze Your Clients And Competitors Websites
December 23rd, 2009 by Mark ThompsonThere are a number of SEO tools I use on a daily basis to help me analyze a client or competitors website. I will use specific tools depending on what type of data I am looking to analyze. These tools can save you a lot of time when researching links, on-page/off-page SEO, social media, ORM, and site analytics.
Best of all.. each of these tools all free! Read the rest of this entry »
Building Your Site For Your End User Not Your Rank
December 9th, 2009 by Shawna FennellI am here at Search Engine Stratgies Chicago 2009 and today I had the pleasure of enjoying a wonderful panel on analytics with Jim Sterne, Matt Bailey, and Dennis Mortensen from Yahoo.
Dennis Mortensen worked as COO of Index Tools up until the day they were bought out by Yahoo. He is the author of Yahoo! Web Analytics book and today he provided an interesting topic of discussion. Read the rest of this entry »
Fixing Simple Issues To Get Your Site Listed With Google
November 24th, 2009 by Patrick HareIn the world of SEO, there’s nothing worse than finding out that your site is no longer listed in the search engines. In many cases, you may be missing a whole site, or several pages, because of one or more simple problems that can be resolved fairly quickly. Also, if you have a new site that hasn’t gotten any search engine attention at all, you may want to look and make sure you’re telling the search engine spiders that they’re allowed to come in and take a look around.
Addressing Issues That Plague Web Application Measurements
November 11th, 2009 by Gary AngelOnline Applications and highly-interactive web sites written in full-on programming languages are becoming the norm on the web, not the rare exception. Measuring these applications is challenging for a whole host of reasons. In my last post, I talked about the importance of automated testing to bring measurement fully into the application development life-cycle. In today’s post, I’m going to cover an issue that plagues application measurement, video and most other rich media measurement – how to balance cost vs. coverage when it comes to measurement.
Correcting Z-index Stacking Issues Within Internet Explorer
October 28th, 2009 by Dustin BrewerHaving trouble with elements (divs, tables, ul, lists, etc) stacking incorrectly in only IE6 and IE7? Your issue is relatively (pardon the pun) easy to fix without going too far out of your way to fix the issue. This issue has been around for awhile but I feel it is something that should definitely be out there, despite the fact we are talking about going back 8 years (nearly 9) with IE6. They even carried the z-index issue over to IE7. Fortunately the CSS issue is now fixed in IE8 (in standards mode) so we don’t have to worry about fixing it for the newest version of Internet Explorer.