When it comes to search engine algorithms, the one thing you can count on is change. Google says there were hundreds of tweaks last year, Bing is always refining its indexing, and scores of other “Google Killers” are trying to worm their way into the market with a better search experience. In the process of all these changes, there are sites that keep their positions, ones that suddenly move up, and others that drop off the map. People who employ search engine optimization tactics usually see their sites hold positions or improve slightly during these updates. Despite this, the majority of SEO work involves playing “catch up” with the latest indexing changes, even though they could have been anticipated with a little foresight.
Archive for the ‘Tutorials’ Category
Build Your Site For Tomorrow’s Algorithm Change
Wednesday, July 7th, 2010Improving The Quality Of Your Blog Post
Friday, May 7th, 2010I was having a a few conversations on twitter last week. It was clear that more than one person needed a little bit more explanation about how to put some of the tips I mentioned into action, so here are 6 quick tips to help you improve your posts.
Adding Better Security To Your WordPress Blog
Wednesday, April 21st, 2010Last week I was asked by a client why he wasn’t seeing the https: prefix in his URL (and the little lock icon in the bottom of the browser window) when he was logged into his WordPress site. That got us into a discussion about SSL and we wound up installing an SSL certificate on his hosting account, as well as making some additions to his WordPress installation to make it less appealing to hackers.
How To Develop A Complete DIY SEO Strategy
Wednesday, April 7th, 2010Is DIY SEO any good? Does it work?
When I got to look at DIY SEO my first thought was: good structure & layout, lets see what is under the hood. But then after opening up the hood I found a car with no engine.
On a score of usability I would give the site a 9 or a 10, but in terms of utility it would be lucky to score as high as a 2 or a 3.
Improving Your Natural Rank Using AdWords
Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010People who are new to SEO and PPC often think that having a Google Adwords campaign somehow improves their natural search engine results. Even though Google has insisted that this is not the case, and almost all SEO experts agree, there are still occasional claims of a correlation between paying for PPC and improved search engine rankings. Alternatively, there are some people who claim that their natural search engine rankings dropped when they started paying for ads. (more…)
Building Site Architecture And Internal Links
Wednesday, February 10th, 2010In 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.
SEO Tools To Analyze Your Clients And Competitors Websites
Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009There 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! (more…)
Building Your Site For Your End User Not Your Rank
Wednesday, December 9th, 2009I 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. (more…)
Fixing Simple Issues To Get Your Site Listed With Google
Tuesday, November 24th, 2009In 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.
Correcting Z-index Stacking Issues Within Internet Explorer
Wednesday, October 28th, 2009Having 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.