High Rankings Advisor
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The High Rankings Advisor has been in existence since 2002! Anything and everything you ever wanted to know about search marketing and SEO has probably been covered at some point. Search or browse through our past SEO articles here.
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Ever get the feeling that some clients and their web development teams are looking at you (as their SEO) suspiciously? You're not alone!
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SEO Consultants Are Not the Enemy! - When a client hires an outside SEO consultant during the design and development of a new website, it's often not looked upon kindly by the development team. Chances are the team has had bad experiences with an SEO who forced them to design for search engines and not for people.
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| Twitter Question of the Week - Which SEO recommendations also make a website more usable to people?
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| | Advanced Forum Thread of the Week - Where Have All The Advertisers Gone? Is AdWords dying?
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| HRA 296: Wrap-up - That's all for today!
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Are you ready to learn how to research keywords?
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Back to SEO Basics With Keyword Research - Today's article focuses on your first line of SEO defense -- keyword research. Optimizing for the wrong keywords -- either those that are not truly relevant to what your business offers or those that aren't being used by searchers -- will have the dire consequence of making you think that SEO is mythical marketing magic that doesn't work.
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| Twitter Question of the Week - What's the most difficult/frustrating part of keyword research in your opinion?
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| | Advanced Forum Thread of the Week - Google Is Reindexing Old Redirected URLs
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| HRA 295: Wrap-up - That's all for today!
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Think you need "SEO articles" for your (non-SEO) site? Think again, and read today's article.
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Just Say No to SEO Articles! - Last week I was speaking with a potential client in need of SEO consulting who told me that they had been working on their product part e-commerce website over the past few months by adding "SEO articles" to it on a regular basis.
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| Twitter Question of the Week - What's the most creative content you've added to a website that enhanced its value?
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| | Advanced Forum Thread of the Week - Google Choosing Its Own Titles
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| HRA 294: Wrap-up - That's all for today!
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I was stuck for an article idea today when this one on SEO failure suddenly came to me in the shower.
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SEO Is Bound to Fail If... - ...If you don't keep your SEO abreast of website changes. ...If you think your SEO can work independently and not need (a lot of) your help. ...If you know enough SEO to be dangerous.
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| Twitter Question of the Week - What's the biggest reason you've seen for SEO failure with clients?
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| | SEO Copywriting Telesummit - It's somewhat late, but I have free passes available to Karon Thackston's SEO copywriting telesummit this Thursday, September 9, 2010.
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| Advanced SEO Forum Thread of the Week - Keyword Phrases in Product Listings
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| | HRA 289: Wrap-up - That's all for today!
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I decided to have a little fun with today's article. You might think it's a bit silly at first, but there's an important message within it for all companies and website owners.
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Do You Suffer From BlindWebsititis? - When you review the keywords from which people clicked to your site, are they only peripherally related to what you offer? If so, your website is likely suffering from BlindWebsititis!
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| Twitter Question of the Week - What's a catchy word or phrase for when a company uses their own internal language, forgetting that the rest of the world doesn't?
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| HRA 288: Wrap-up - That's all for today – and for August!
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I'm pressed for time this week, so I hope you don't mind that I'm running an article I wrote for Search Engine Land about social media not being a substitute for SEO.
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Social Media Marketing Doesn't Replace SEO - Looking at the latest search marketing conference agendas, articles, and online news in the SEM space, it certainly appears that social media marketing and networking are the wave of the future.
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| Twitter Question of the Week - What's your best use of social media?
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| HRA 287: Wrap-up - That's all for today!
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Hey all! It's time once again for an SEO Q&A High Rankings Advisor. Enjoy!
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Questions About Starting an SEO Company - I'm considering starting my own SEO company and working with local businesses and I was wondering if you could offer any advice.
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| Removing Links From a Site - What would be the best way for me to transition old pages off our website, while keeping up our SEO? They have a lot of links to other pages, some not related to our business.
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| | Will My Website Rank #1 With Articles? - Are articles a smart and strategic way to invest our money? Is this person being completely honest in saying we "will rank on page 1" with their articles?
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| No Metas? - I noticed you do not use meta descriptions or meta keywords on many of your pages. Why not?
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| | Twitter Question of the Week - Do you use "article marketing" as a form of SEO?
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| Advanced Forum Thread of the Week - Using Divs and JavaScript for SEO Purposes
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| | HRA 286 Wrap-up - That's all for today!
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Glad you could join me here again. Remember – if you enjoy this newsletter, refer your colleagues who might also be interested in the information.
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Opt Out of SEO at Your Own Peril! - If you're a small-business owner, you know you need a website in order to compete online. But I sometimes wonder how many owners know they don't just need a website, but one that's been developed with SEO baked in from the start.
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| Twitter Question of the Week - If you're a website designer, do you work with SEOs? If you're an SEO, do you work with developers?
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| | Stuff You Might Like - Google AdWords Setup, Tune-ups, Audits
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| | HRA 285: Wrap-up - That's all for today!
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I've got lots of good stuff for you today, so let's get straight to it.
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9 Steps to Diagnosing Lost Search Engine Traffic - For the past few weeks I've been tasked with reviewing a few different sites that have seen a loss in traffic – their owners hoped to find out why... I can usually make some educated guesses based on what I dig up in Google Analytics.
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| Twitter Question of the Week - Have you seen sites obviously penalized by Google and, if so, what was the cause?
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| | Advanced SEO Forum Thread of the Week - Forum member "KemoSabe" wanted to mask a keyword-rich domain with a more memorable one for humans.
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| HRA 284: Wrap-up - That's all for today. What a week it's already been.
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Do you think that the SEO you perform today could be penalized tomorrow? If so, you'll want to read this week's edition of the High Rankings Advisor!
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Search Engine Algorithm Changes Effects on SEO - Jill's response to whether today's SEO techniques could become tomorrow's search engine spam.
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| Twitter Question of the Week - True or false? Today's SEO could be tomorrow's search engine spam with the turn of an algo crank.
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| | Advanced SEO Forum Thread of the Week - Forum member "flarbas" posted that they were frustrated because their boss suggested crazy changes to the company website.
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| HRA 283 Wrap-up - Lots of new SEO website reviews and site audits to take care of over the next few weeks. Let me know if you're interested in one for your site.
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In today's Q&A edition, I've answered a few follow-up questions from last week's newsletter on creating tracking links for Google Analytics, plus I've answered a few questions about SEO for specific localities, and have provided a few other SEO nuggets that I hope you'll find interesting.
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Appending Tracking Codes to Email Signatures - In last week's newsletter you mentioned appending email signature links with campaign tracking codes. Can you please detail how to do this?
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| Dupe Content From Tracking Links - I have a question about the duplicate content issue when you append tracking codes. But, as a safety measure to avoid duplicate content, I've included a 301-redirect in the htaccess file...
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| | Ranking for Local Keywords – Part 1 - Why does one of our websites come up #5 on Google under the keywords "our keyword phrase Los Angeles" when the keywords "Los Angeles" are nowhere to be found on our pages?
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| Ranking for Local Keywords – Part 2 - My client has a local shop. Should every keyword phrase contain the locale, such as Denver, Arvada, Westminster, etc., and then just change up the item?
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| | Linking to Low-Authority Sites - If websites have links pointing externally, is there a difference when pointing to high- or low-authority sites?
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| Twitter Question of the Week - Do you ever use nofollow links, and if so, for what purpose?
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| | Advanced Forum Thread of the Week - Did any of you experience that faster load speed of pages got you better rankings at Google SERP?
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| Advisor Wrap-up 282 - That's all for today!
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Hope you are having a good week so far. Before we get started with this week's newsletter, I wanted to give you a head's up that there were a ton of interesting comments on the last newsletter's SEO myths article... | |
5 Types of Links You May Not Have Thought of Tracking - Think you're doing a good job of tracking and measuring the success of every link to your website that gets announced to the world in some fashion? Do you ever wonder where some of your "Direct Traffic" came from?
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| Twitter Question of the Week - How often do you view your web analytics?
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| | Advanced SEO Forum Thread of the Week - Title Tags and H1 Tags: Same or different for best SEO?
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| HRA 281 Wrap-up - We had a really good SEO class last week, but we're taking a break from these for a while.
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I want to give a special shout-out to all the new subscribers who joined us after taking our online SEO course at Lynda.com.
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Google Places (Formerly Local Business Center) - This week I learned through Search Engine Land that Google had changed this feature's name from Google Local Business Center to the simpler Google Places. In addition, they've added even more cool things you can do with your Google Page, once you've claimed your listing.
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| Twitter Question of the Week - Do you like it when local map listings show up in the regular Google results?
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| HRA 279: Wrap-up - I don't have any upcoming trips scheduled for a while, which is nice. It gives me a chance to keep up with work as well as perform those other pesky business chores that always seem to come up.
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It's that time of the month again when we have our High Rankings SEO Q&A Bonanza issue.
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Targeting Different Countries - As a long-term subscriber I would like to ask for your advice concerning optimisation of an e-commerce site for multiple countries.
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| Supplemental Index - Due to my very low link popularity, is that enough to send my pages to Google's Supplemental Index?
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| | HTML in File Name - Do we need to have .html at the end of the URL?
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| Manually Submit to Search Engines - Should one manually submit a site to a search engine?
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| | Forwarded Domains - I have one main website and own about 10 other domain name versions that are similar.
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| Ampersands and Search Engines - On my web page I have H2 tags that include the HTML ampersand (&) character code. I've been told that this confuses crawlers.
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| | Twitter Question of the Week - What do you feel is THE most important SEO tactic for any website?
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| Stuff You Might Like - High Rankings Online SEO Course
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| | Advanced SEO Forum Thread of the Week - Is building too many links with the same anchor text going to get me penalized with Google?
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| HRA 278 Wrap-up - It's been hectic around High Rankings headquarters as our small-business SEO packages have brought in a few new clients.
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We've got another great guest article on website copy from Karon Thackston today. Be sure to check out the Twitter question of the week and chime in on the website if you didn't catch the question on Twitter.
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Is Your Website User-Centric or Company-Focused? - By Karon Thackston Just for a moment, pretend you're a fly on the wall in my office. I'm on the phone with a prospective client and things are going well. We're talking about their target audience and they seem to have all the right answers. I am confident that these people "get it." Then the conversation takes a sharp left turn.
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| Twitter Question of the Week - Which Parts of SEO Do You Outsource?
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| | Stuff You Might Like - Global Search Marketing SEMNE Event in Connecticut!
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| Advanced Forum Thread of the Week - Forum member "Becs" is concerned because some automated SEO software told her she had too many URLs on her home page.
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| | HRA Wrap-up 276 - My trip to Arizona and California went well, but I'm glad to be home and in the office this week.
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Today's newsletter theme is time. Or the lack thereof ;)
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SEO Recommendations Don't Implement Themselves! - I've had the opportunity to work with a variety of businesses through the years – from tiny one-person small businesses to huge international companies. While there are many similarities in working with different sized companies, there are also important differences.
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| Twitter Question of the Week - If you had an extra 20 hours a week, what would you do with them?
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| | Stuff You Might Like - New Affordable SEO Small-Business Package.
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| Advanced SEO Forum Thread of the Week - Do image links have the same weighting engines as text links?
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| | Advisor Wrap-up 275 - This week I'm heading out to Arizona to do some in-house SEO training for a company there and will be visiting some more universities, but this time with my daughter Corie, who's looking into a couple of law schools there.
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Did you miss me last week? I think it's the first time in 10 years that I've skipped a newsletter other than during a holiday week, so sorry about that.
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Why We Do What We Do in SEO - One thing that can help you figure out how to SEO your site is to learn the whys behind the specific techniques you always hear about. But to understand the whys, you first need to get the gist of how search engines work.
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| Twitter Question of the Week - Do you build links for the traffic or for rankings?
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| | Advanced SEO Forum Thread of the Week - Have Big Companies Taken Over the Internet?
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| HRA Wrap-up 274 - Curious about my absence last week? I was in California recording my SEO training course!
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It's been quite awhile since we had an SEO Q&A Bonanza issue (since HRA 264 to be exact: ). I've accumulated a lot of SEO questions since then and figured it was time to share the answers with you. | |
SEO Copywriting Tomfoolery - Do you have any info on the issue of spamdexing – specifically the practice of adding keywords into text unnaturally and then emphasizing just the keywords (for example, boldfacing and/or italicizing them)?
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| Same Article on Blog and Website - Is it OK to have the same articles on your site as you do on your blog? And, if not, is it better to have a blog with a link back to your site, or to put the article directly on your site?
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| | SEOing a Live Site - When you begin optimizing a website, does it have to go down while creating meta tags – title, description, keyword? OR do we need to back up the website first?
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| XML Site Maps - Is an XML sitemap mandatory if you have a CMS?
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| | Many Domain Names for SEO - I own many domain names related to my business. Would I have a problem with Google if I made one-page websites with good related copy on these domain names and linked the one-page websites back to my main website?
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| Difference Between SEM and SEO - I was wondering what the differences are between SEM and SEO.
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| | Natural Inbound Links - Inbound, good-quality links are a struggle for me. I can sort though all sorts of tech stuff resulting in a good-looking, professional website, but link building is a real challenge.
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| Stuff You Might Like - New Press Release Package Discount!
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| | Twitter Question of the Week - What (if anything) will you be doing differently with your SEO strategy this year?
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| Advanced SEO Forum Thread of the Week - Forum member "krisflex" wants to know how to increase his or her PageRank.
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| | HRA Wrap-up 273 - Thanks for all the great comments on the decade wrap-up of SEO from last time!
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I've got a fairly long "decade of SEO in review" article for you today. I thought about splitting it into 2 parts, but decided it would lose a lot by doing so.
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A Decade of 21st Century SEO - I've been SEO'ing websites long before the 21st century began. Sometimes I feel I've been touting the same SEO processes and procedures for the past 10 years.
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| Twitter Question of the Week - What has changed most in Search Marketing since 2000?
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| | Stuff You Might Like - Brand-New Service! Link-Building Roadmap Report
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| Wrap-up 272 - I am totally brain-dead from looking at a decade's worth of SEO articles...phew...glad that's over with.
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