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30 Apr This post is from from my other blog here Aside from the title tag, which isn’t really a part of the visual page, the heading tags can provide both visitors and the search engines significant cues to the importance of your on-page content. There are six different heading tags: H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, and H6. Collectively these are referred to as Hx tags. The value of the Hx tag is much the same as the value of your main points in an outline for a book or paper. Your outline shows your main topics and sub-topics. These are often then used as section headings in your final draft. Your ...
29 Apr This post is from from my other blog here This is one of those Basic SEO posts, that i feel silly writing about because “everybody knows” this information already. But then I look at websites of prospects and I realize that not everybody really does know. Or maybe they do and they just forget. In any case, this will be a quick reminder / refresher. Most duplicate content issues have to do with on-page content. Mass page/content duplication can often have a negative effect on how the search engines spider and index your site. While I believe the title tag is the single most important piece of real estate on ...
28 Apr This post is from from my other blog here
28 Apr This post is from from my other blog here There is no better way to create an infinite amount of duplicate content on your site than to force session IDs onto each visitor. Typically, session IDs are used for tracking a single visitor’s navigation path through the site, including the adding or removing products from the shopping cart. They are great for tracking purposes, but really, really bad for search engines and inbound linking.
Ok, first of all, that’s a bad URL shown above, but aside from that, tacked on at the end there is the session ID. Both URLs pull the same page pulled open via a different browsing ...
25 Apr This post is from from my other blog here
25 Apr This post is from from my other blog here
First of all kudos goes out ...
24 Apr This post is from from my other blog here I am a day behind on getting this out for the day 2 of Small Business Marketing: Unleashed, but better late than never. Day 2: Workshops The day was kicked off with a presentation by one of the sponsors ideablob.com, and then we were released to go to workshops. (Sage Lewis, of SageRock.com tends to refer to each session / workshop as a class, which truly describes what the conference was like.) There were three time blocks with four workshops running in each block - Each block running an hour and a half. With that amount of time, we really were given ...
24 Apr This post is from from my other blog here
Google March: 58.7% February: 58.7% Change: +0 January 2008: 56.9% Change: +1.8 Yahoo March: 18.1% February:17.6% Change: +0.5 January 2008: 19.0% Change: -0.9 MSN March: 12.0% February: 11.2% Change: +0.8 January 2008: 12.1% Change: -0.1 ASK March: 2.4% February: 2.5% Change: -0.1 January 2008: 2.4% Change: +0.0 AOL March: 4.1% February: 5.2% Change: -1.1 January 2008: 4.7% Change: -0.6 Data scoring techniques tend to change over time making past data inaccurate. As always, information here is for entertainment purposes only. Source: Nielsen//Netratings
22 Apr
22 Apr This post is from from my other blog here Day 1: Sessions WOW. What a great day. The day gave us four sessions / two tracks of indepth introductions to all aspects of Search Marketing for small businesses. Each speaker had a full hour to go into more depth on their subject than any conference you’ve ever attended. Rather than have a keynote speaker, Unleashed opened with a general overview of what Online Search Marketing is all about. Jennifer Laycock introduced three incredible presenters,
Matt McGee of Marchex and Small Business SEM (who happens to hate Twitter I do not like green eggs and ham, I do not like them Sam I ...
21 Apr This post is from from my other blog here Speed Dating Networking Have you ever speed dated? I’ve been married long enough that I’ve not ever had the opportunityneed to attend a speed dating meeting, yet I’ve seen it on TV. (wow I feel like I just almost made a bad quote, “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV.”) Last Night I attended Charity Speed Networking as part of Small Business Marketing: Unleashed and it was FUN. Honestly, if I were single, I may seriously consider speed dating if I was looking for someone with common interests. Do you know how this works? Well let me tell you. We ...
17 Apr This post is from from my other blog here Search engine spiders can be very forgiving with a lot of duplicate content issues. I’ve found that, given enough time, the engines learn when two websites or web pages are complete duplicates of the other. Once they figure that out then they basically understand that a link to one is a link to the other, etc. One version will ultimately be dropped from the index in favor of the other. There are two basic problems with this. First, it all takes time. Until the search engines figure out which dupes should be “merged” you’re essentially splitting link flow. Two inbound links, ...
16 Apr This post is from from my other blog here Copy Writing
Marketing. Social Media
SEO
16 Apr This post is from from my other blog here
Google March: 59.8% February: 59.2% Change: +0.6 January 2008: 58.5% Change: +1.3 Yahoo March: 21.3% February: 21.6% Change: -0.3 January 2008: 22.2% Change: -0.9 MSN March: 9.4% February: 9.6% Change: -0.2 January 2008: 9.8% Change: -0.4 ASK March: 4.7% February: 4.6% Change: -0.1 January 2008: 4.5% Change: +0.2 AOL March: 4.8% February: 4.9% Change: -0.1 January 2008: 4.9% Change: -0.1 Data scoring techniques tend to change over time making past data inaccurate. As always, information here is for entertainment purposes only. Source: comScore
16 Apr This post is from from my other blog here Registering multiple domain names is, and should be, common practice for businesses wishing to protect their brands. I discussed buying alternative domain names earlier this week, but I wanted to address it again, this time from the context of duplicate content issues which may arise if you don’t set up your new domain names properly. Domain Name Redirects The first thing you need to consider after you’ve purchased additional domain names is to decide what you want to do with them. Not every domain name needs to have a site on it, though it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have some ...
15 Apr This post is from from my other blog here Last month I posted some of my thoughts and theories on duplicate content where I explained the different types of duplicate content that the search engines find. I wanted to expand a bit on the in-site duplicate content that we often see with various websites. I’ll take these one at a time over the course of the next few days or weeks, depending on how often I post. www. vs. no www. Real quick, go to your browser and type in yoursite.com. Does the URL in the browsers address bar change to a) http://yoursite.com or b) http://www.yoursite.com? Now type in www.yoursite.com. Does ...
14 Apr This post is from from my other blog here
In much the same way, the domain name(s) you select can also be a preventative measure against someone finding you. We can use The Home Depot as an example once again. My first ...
10 Apr This post is from from my other blog here
Success means a lot of things to a lot of people, but the bottom line, for most of us, is that success doesn’t come easy. Most people who see someone else’s “overnight success” cannot fathom the months or years of hard work, lost sleep and sacrifices made to achieve that success. Of course success is more than money or power. I tend to subscribe to definition #1 above rather than #2. You don’t have to have any of those things to truly be successful, and you can be successful in many things that won’t ever provide them. In business, success ...
09 Apr This post is from from my other blog here I remember when favicons first started to appear, it was like, hey, how cool is that. But now they are so common that I hardly notice them anymore. Well, no, that’s not exactly true. I do notice them, and like them, it’s just that I’m not surprised to see them anymore. But I AM surprised when I don’t see them. Ok, let’s back up. What is a favicon? If you’re reading this post from emarketingperformance.com then you need to do no more than look up to the address bar. If you’re reading this through a feed reader I’ll go ahead and throw ...
08 Apr This post is from from my other blog here Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of sites where the designers were a bit lazy on the coding of the visual elements. Especially when it comes to creating new styles for the style sheet. In CSS, it’s pretty easy to develop a style that allows you to have certain portions of text display exactly how you want. But apparently, coming up with a unique style and name is just. too. difficult. So instead of naming a new style, the developers just style an Hx tag and then plaster it throughout the site. One site that we’ve been working with has just ...
07 Apr This post is from from my other blog here Like a sound site architecture and directory structure, product categorization can play a significant role in how both search engines and users are able to access your products. There are two important things to consider when determining how to categorize your products. 1) Is each product assigned to the most appropriate category or categories? and 2) is multiple categorization creating duplicate content? The first issue frustrates your users and the second the search engines. Looking for examples of both of these I found exactly what I was looking for on The Home Depot website. Improper Product Categorization Frustrates ShoppersBelow you see ...
04 Apr This post is from from my other blog here
I’m just now getting around to checking my stats after posting Link Building Secrets Revealed on our site early last month. I thought I’d share a few stats: The main page linked above was viewed just over 7,500 times. That’s not bad traffic. But who’s secret was most popular? Here’s the breakdown on page views for each contributor’s page:
There were another 1,891 views for a broken link. I think we’ll see why below. Next we’ll look ...
03 Apr This post is from from my other blog here
As I said, I was reluctant to move on, but working in the IT industry it was pretty much mandatory, and I did ...
03 Apr This post is from from my other blog here I just noticed this morning that Google AdSense ads just added scrolling arrows. The top ad below was the ad displayed on this blog. Click the down arrow in the bottom left corner of the ad and each of the following ads appeared in succession.
Five was the limit here, not sure what others are seeing. You can read Google’s announcement here. I’m not sure what to think of this. Will this increase the likelihood of ads getting clicked? Will this increase interaction with my site? Or does this distract even more from the content. What do you think?
02 Apr This post is from from my other blog here
In many cases, as I peruse through the text and code, I can hardly tell where any “optimization” has occurred. It’s like knowing that surgery was performed but not being able to see the scar. Yet in some instances ...
02 Apr This post is from from my other blog here Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz asked his readers to present their three best link building techniques. Instead of posting mine in the comments of his blog I thought I’d post mine here for the benefit of all my readers:
Yep, that should do the trick.
02 Apr This post is from from my other blog here
Google March: 51.70% February: 51.64% Change: +.06 January 2008: 52.14% Change: -0.44 Yahoo March: 10.73% February: 10.95% Change: -0.22 January 2008: 10.94% Change: -0.21 MSN March: 4.31% February: 5.79% Change: -1.48 January 2008: 5.78% Change: -0.21 AOL March: 1.91% February: 1.84% Change: +0.07 January 2008: 1.86% Change: +0.05 ASK March: 1.03% February: 1.01% Change: +0.02 January 2008: 1.09% Change: -0.0+ Data scoring techniques tend to change over time making past data inaccurate. As always, information here is for entertainment purposes only. Source: Net Applications
01 Apr This post is from from my other blog here
I’ve never claimed to be a programmer but working in SEO means that I’m involved in creating or editing hundreds of pages over the course of a year. Understanding how CSS works, and being able to implement basic to more advanced CSS strategies, has become essential over the past few years. Until now I’ve only had a rudimentary knowledge of CSS. The CSS Anthology has helped me grow my knowledge significantly on the topic. I’ll admit that I didn’t follow the coding examples line by line, ...
01 Apr This post is from from my other blog here Top Blog Posts:
Reading List
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by 
how poor product categorization can frustrate shoppers and search engines alike. Strictly from a user standpoint, improperly thinking out how each product should be categorized can cause many products from being found by your shoppers. When determining the category or categories of any product, you have to put yourself in the mind of the searcher. How would they look for it?
Dogpile.com and it instantly became my favorite engine. When Google entered the scene, I was horribly reluctant to leave my old friend Dogpile and the mascot Arfie. When teaching computer training classes to newbies, one of my favorite parts of teaching the “Introduction to the Internet” was introducing everyone to the meta search results that Dogpile returned.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reviewing optimization work performed by my team as well as many of our client’s competitors. I’ve been studying the quality of the optimization work performed, both as a measure of comparison, and to simply get a feel for what other people are doing that perhaps we are not. What I found was pretty eye opening.
Author: Rachel Andrew
Paperback: 400 pages
Cost: $26.37
Published: August, 2007
, Mark R. Levin
, William Goldman
, Dean Graziosi