 | April 10, 2013Is it okay to have the same few sentences on every page of your website? Read More >> |
 | April 10, 2013What do you do when you accidentally provide the search engines with a bad URL? Read More >> |
 | March 26, 2013I've known Dianna Huff since at least 2007, but she's been helping B2B companies get their websites in good order since 1998. From the best way to market your content via mobile devices to how to write content that appeals to a B2B target audience, Dianna has got it nailed down. Read More >> |
 | February 13, 2013With the introduction of the Panda filter by Google (originally dubbed "Farmer") in February 2011, one commonality of sites that were hit was what I called merry-go-round sites.
Read More >> |
 | January 30, 2013Is using hidden text within class tags ideal for SEO, or should it be avoided? Read More >> |
 | January 30, 2013It seems that after switching to a 3-party shopping cart I no longer have individual keyword conversion rates and costs in my Google Analytics.
Read More >> |
 | January 30, 2013Everywhere I have read that title tags should be no longer than 65 to 70 characters. Is this true?
Read More >> |
 | January 16, 2013In my "18 SEO Killers" article from the end of last year, I mentioned footer links as a potential SEO problem. I know this confused many people because I didn't explain what I meant by them. This article takes an in-depth look at footer abuses. Read More >> |
 | December 5, 2012As part of my SEO for 2013 and beyond series, I promised to provide more in-depth information about the "SEO killers" I mentioned last time. Today I'm delving into duplicate content as it relates to SEO. Read More >> |
 | November 14, 2012There's a lot of talk lately of Google having finally killed SEO through their Panda and Penguin algorithms, which continue to ensnare more and more websites with every new update. So is SEO really (finally) dead?
Read More >> |
 | October 3, 2012When I searched a phrase on my computer, I did not come up at all but I get traffic for that phrase. How does that happen? Read More >> |
 | September 19, 2012Have you had good success moving old static HTML sites to WordPress (not losing traffic, getting more, etc.)? Read More >> |
 | September 19, 2012Does moving from an HTML site to a WordPress site have any big SEO issues? Read More >> |
 | August 8, 2012In some of my recent reviews of websites that have recently lost Google traffic, I've found a common thread: lots of low-quality content pages. But the interesting thing is that this wasn't the sort of low-quality content created by some scammy SEO in an attempt to boost search engine rankings.
Read More >> |
 | May 16, 2012Is a "List Internal Links" in My Website Footer Bad After Google's Penguin Update? Read More >> |
 | May 2, 2012Today I browsed through the 3,500 or so SEO questions people asked at Google and chose the most common ones to answer. Read More >> |
 | January 11, 2012If you're thinking that implementing the Rel-Author tag on your content isn't worth the trouble, Jill Whalen provides 5 6 reasons why it's super important. Read More >> |
 | January 11, 2012Google passes value from an iframed link. Read More >> |
 | December 14, 2011I know that incoming links are important in search engine rankings, but do the search engines consider anchors the same way as an incoming link? Read More >> |
 | December 14, 2011Save $1000 when you get a new Drupal website from Ventures Interactive! Read More >> |
 | September 21, 2011Once my site is ready, I'll be approaching owners within the niche. So I really don't want people to find me for the first few months. My thought was that I would not add my new keyword-rich titles, headings, links, etc., until after a month or so, to keep people from finding me too soon... Read More >> |
 | September 21, 2011I ran my website through a website grader type of tool and it provided me with some recommendations which I'm wondering about... Read More >> |
 | September 21, 2011Can I use a splash page to direct two different target markets to the appropriate sections of my website? Read More >> |
 | September 21, 2011Recently I had a conversation with an SEO expert who claimed that the most important thing we need to do for SEO on our website is URL rewriting. Our old CMS system still uses parameters in the URL ("?pageid="). Read More >> |
 | September 21, 2011Do you change URLs for SEO purposes if they're not currently using keywords but are being indexed fine? Read More >> |
 | July 27, 2011I have many questions about SEO. Any help you can give me will be greatly appreciated! Read More >> |
 | July 27, 2011Canonical Tag for DNS Redirect Read More >> |
 | July 13, 2011Today's feature article is a guest post from my friend and B2B marketing consultant Dianna Huff. If you're a B2B company in need of online content writing and marketing, you'll be in good hands with Dianna! In addition, she’s also hosting local, low cost, lunch time web marketing seminars in the MA-NH Merrimack Valley area. Read More >> |
 | July 13, 2011Wildcard Subdomains & SEO Read More >> |
 | June 29, 2011Is "Hidden" Read More Text Okay? Read More >> |
 | June 1, 2011Do you think the hashtag in a URL affects the site's SEO or link building in any way? Read More >> |
 | June 1, 2011Do you "optimize" for search engines regardless of whether it's from a computer or a mobile device? Read More >> |
 | March 23, 2011If your company wants people to actually understand what you do when they come to your website, how does playing with the spinning balls further this goal? Read More >> |
 | March 2, 2011By now you've surely heard of the recent Google algorithm changes dubbed the "Farmer Update." This article highlights some of the interesting things I noticed that made me go hmmm...with the small set of sites I've looked at so far. Read More >> |
 | February 2, 2011Question About Mobile Site and Duplicate Content Read More >>
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 | January 19, 2011Non-nefarious Cloaking Read More >>
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 | January 5, 2011Going live with a redesigned website without considering the SEO implications is like being ensnared in a nasty trap that you cannot escape from. Read More >> |
 | January 5, 2011What reasons have you seen for a loss of traffic after a redesign? Read More >>
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 | December 15, 2010When 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. Read More >> |
 | December 15, 2010Which SEO recommendations also make a website more usable to people? Read More >>
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 | November 3, 2010We are moving our site to a new CMS and have a few questions regarding URLs and our sitemap. Read More >> |
 | September 22, 2010Getting Better Rankings for Category Pages Read More >> |
 | July 28, 2010I noticed you do not use meta descriptions or meta keywords on many of your pages. Why not? Read More >> |
 | July 14, 2010If 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. Read More >> |
 | July 14, 2010ASP to WordPress Read More >> |
 | June 30, 2010Forum member "KemoSabe" wanted to mask a keyword-rich domain with a more memorable one for humans. Read More >> |
 | June 16, 2010Jill's response to whether today's SEO techniques could become tomorrow's search engine spam. Read More >> |
 | June 16, 2010Forum member "flarbas" posted that they were frustrated because their boss suggested crazy changes to the company website.
Read More >> |
 | June 2, 2010I 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...
Read More >> |
 | June 2, 2010Did any of you experience that faster load speed of pages got you better rankings at Google SERP? Read More >> |
 | May 19, 2010Title Tags and H1 Tags: Same or different for best SEO? Read More >> |
 | May 5, 2010Help Choose: Subdomain or Directory? Read More >> |
| April 21, 2010Coding from Scratch or a CMS? Read More >> |
 | April 7, 2010Do we need to have .html at the end of the URL? Read More >> |
 | April 7, 2010On my web page I have H2 tags that include the HTML ampersand (&) character code. I've been told that this confuses crawlers. Read More >> |
| March 10, 2010Forum member "Becs" is concerned because some automated SEO software told her she had too many URLs on her home page. Read More >> |
| February 24, 2010Do image links have the same weighting engines as text links? Read More >> |
| February 10, 2010One 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. Read More >> |
| January 20, 2010When 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? Read More >> |
| January 20, 2010Is an XML sitemap mandatory if you have a CMS? Read More >> |
| December 16, 2009You need to address a number of SEO tactics before you get too deep into your website redesign. The reason you need to keep SEO front and center during this time is twofold: so that you do not lose your previous traffic, but also so that you can gain additional targeted search engine visitors when the new site goes live. Read More >> |
| November 11, 2009This morning I woke up to someone having submitted a pile of SEO questions using our newsletter question form. At first I thought, "Yikes, that's kind of pushy to think I have time to answer all those questions!" But then I remembered that this was a newsletter week and I still had no idea what I was going to write about. Read More >> |
| September 2, 2009My plan is to move all the home decor products from the old site to the new one AND change the products of the old one back to selling the jewelry, perfume, wallets, etc. – that is, the "gifty" stuff.
What is the best way to make this change? Read More >> |
| September 2, 2009I am new to SEO. I am writing my first website and would like to get a better understanding of building a great website that will attract my target market to my site. Can you suggest any good books that can help me achieve this goal? Read More >> |
| July 8, 2009The other day I stumbled across Google's 1-click for free program, which is a way of indexing content that can normally be viewed only by registered users. Read More >> |
| June 24, 2009Forum member "taterchips" (great name!) is interested in tackling a specific niche within their profession and was looking at the most effective way to play to that niche. Their question has to do with whether they should add a new page or section to their existing website or start a new website for this particular niche. Read More >> |
| June 10, 2009There was big news last week from the SMX Advanced conference, which we've been discussing at the forum, regarding the use of PageRank sculpting. Read More >> |
| May 27, 2009Are the Title, Description and Keywords (the metadata) always the same for each blog post? Read More >> |
| May 27, 2009We want to put a calendar of events on our website. Google Calendar appears to be a great product but since it is not hosted on our website the long-tail SEO value (which is one of the main reasons we want to do the calendar) is lost. Read More >> |
| May 27, 2009We have a website of which the home page has 5 PageRank. This website has 5,000 pages that are indexed in Google.com and many of the pages have good PageRank. Read More >> |
| May 27, 2009A few months ago, I was quoted by Google's Matt Cutts as saying that "website developers keep SEOs in business." I honestly do believe that and have for a long time. While I don't mean to say that ALL website designers and developers believe or do all of these things, you'll likely encounter many who have done or believe in some of these. Read More >> |
| April 15, 2009I realize that Google picks up Alt text data (aka Alt tags), especially if the graphic acts as a link; however, I am a bit puzzled on how Google ranked a particular site. Read More >> |
| March 4, 2009I run an apartment search website. The sites search results pages are dynamic and pulled from the database. If these dynamic pages also have dynamic page titles, will they be search engine relevant? Read More >> |
| March 4, 2009I disseminate news releases for clients using online wire services. Additionally, the releases are posted on my clients' websites, usually as PDFs, and on my firm's website, the same PDF. My programmer just told me that unless I make these releases different I am causing search engine apoplexy. Please let me know the facts and, more important, what I should be doing. Read More >> |
| March 4, 2009We have a travel website where people can enquire about beautiful small hotels we offer. Even though each hotel has a unique URL with unique content, the categories pages have a duplication problem. Read More >> |
| March 4, 2009I would like to ask a question too, please. Our website is geared to sell GPS equipment. Many of the products have a life of about 6 months to a year. Google indexes these very well, and we rank highly. However, some searches display discontinued products (I guess because they have been around the longest). Read More >> |
| March 4, 2009Forum member Convergent7 has a website that uses a subdomain along with the main domain. He/she wonders if it would be better to combine them into one. Read More >> |
| February 18, 2009Forum moderator Jonathan Hochman posted about Google's new method for specifying canonical URLs, which the other major search engines have also agreed to use. Read More >> |
| February 4, 2009I have a new website selling children's eco friendly toys. The site was designed to enable customers to search for toys by age, by type of toy, by brand, and by country of manufacture. A given toy description would be in each of these categories as well as in multiple age categories and multiple toy types (i.e., in puzzles and wooden puzzles). Read More >> |
| February 4, 2009I've been researching absolute vs. relative links and there seem to be two camps -- one that advocates absolute as better for SEO purposes and the other that says that absolute links won't improve your rank. My site is set up with relative links, so is it worth the effort to change them to absolute? Read More >> |
| February 4, 2009I'm redesigning my website using CSS for the layout. In the HTML code the navigation information comes before the actual page content. What worries me is how I have my navigation set up. I use CSS and span tags to make neat little information boxes appear when my navigation links are hovered over. These boxes will tell the visitor more about what to expect from that particular link. Read More >> |
| January 21, 2009It was a few weeks before our annual trip to Pompano, FL to visit my grandmother and get away from the nasty New England weather. We had our plane tickets and hotel reserved, but still needed a rental car. I'd been reserving cars for years through a rental car aggregator website that I found many years ago when searching online for rental cars in Ft. Lauderdale. Read More >> |
| January 7, 2009While traveling by plane to Florida to visit my grandmother for the holidays, we were sitting next to a couple with 2 small children, probably around 2 and 3 years of age. We expect a lot of children during holiday travel, and typically it's not that big of a deal. With this family, however, it was a different matter. Read More >> |
| December 3, 2008"I'm just about to launch a new site. It should really be 3 sites but the client talked me into making it one or the deal was off. It's for private sales of cars, property and boats. It also has a business directory for each section. The sections are in subdirectories rather than domains for easy maintenance." Read More >> |
| November 19, 2008I work for a nonprofit that since 2000 has been operating an e-commerce website to provide emerging artists with a web presence. It has earned a toolbar PageRank of 5, thanks to some decent inbound links. Due to a variety of things, the parent company of the website has decided it's time to shut the site down. Read More >> |
| October 22, 2008How important is it to have a large number of indexed sites through Google? If so, how do we increase the number, and how do we edit what text appears under the link? Read More >> |
| October 22, 2008Forum member "bobmeetin" explains how a business he's evaluating has a main website plus 4 subdomains and seems like one big organizational mess. Read More >> |
| October 8, 2008It's funny how we, as website owners, don't always think like our visitors. A course of action that might seem perfectly obvious to us may stop our visitors right in the middle of their buying process. Take, for instance, e-commerce–type copy. Do you realize that what happens after your customers read your copy could make or break your sale? I'm not talking about shopping cart abandonment. I'm talking about good communication that keeps the buying cycle moving forward. Let me give you a real-world example. Read More >> |
| September 23, 2008Forum member "wonder371" is wondering which software products and programming languages would be the best for him as he embarks on his new career as a website designer. Read More >> |
| August 27, 2008For purposes of discussion, let's say my main URL is www.example.com. I have a plethora of links in my site for indexing purposes between pages. The page links all go to their respective pages properly, but are linked to example.com (without the www part).
Read More >> |
| August 27, 2008I'm wondering if there is more link value provided by a new blog if it is hosted on an IP with a different C block than the IP address of the web site itself. The owner of the business would be writing the blog and sharing business expertise with the idea of building the brand of the business. Read More >> |
| August 27, 2008Forum member "don h" discusses a website problem that's been plaguing him for ages. Read More >> |
| July 30, 2008Forum member "Webstream" wonders if it's okay to use the "noscript" tag as a place for links and text on a site that is all Flash and images. Read More >> |
| May 14, 2008If you're a true techie geek, you will like this High Rankings forum thread where member "doughayman" notices some weirdness in his server logs. With some probing, forum moderator and all-around server wizard "Randy" helps diagnose the problem, and all is well again. Read More >> |
| April 30, 2008Forum member "johking" posted that her 404-error page is getting tons of hits, and wonders if it's set up incorrectly.
Read More >> |
| March 26, 2008Now that the nofollow link attribute has been around for awhile, and even sanctioned by Google's Matt Cutts for "PageRank Sculpting," forum member "nethy" is wondering what your thoughts are on it. Read More >> |
| January 2, 2008A lot of my clients pull data/products from semi-public databases to populate their websites, similar to how real estate agents show listings of homes on their sites. I've been ensuring that each client has unique valuable and professionally edited content whenever possible on the rest of the site, but I’m afraid that if I make the portions of the site that use the semi-public data accessible to the search engines, they will find duplicate information on other sites and my client site(s) would not be indexed. Read More >> |
| January 2, 2008Forum member "ronfrank" is new to SEO and is having trouble figuring out how to categorize his site based on keyword phrases. Read More >> |
| November 28, 2007I am in the process of changing all my URLs from things like news123.html to
OurCompany_Announces_New_CEO.html Read More >> |
| November 28, 2007For those looking for some advanced SEO info, we have a ton of it in our
“Technobabble” area of the forum. There’s tons of
great info on dynamic sites, as well as mountains of technical info on
redirects, mod_rewrites, etc. Read More >> |
| November 14, 2007It appears the text Google is now showing [for a particular keyword phrase] is from our DMOZ directory listing. Read More >> |
| November 14, 2007My company is considering building some new sites where content is loaded from a database. We plan on using static URLs no matter what, but we are wondering if it matters whether the content comes from static, unique HTML files, or if the HTML page is served from a database. Read More >> |
| October 3, 2007I have a plastic surgeon client who specializes in many procedures and has
spent a fortune on developing a very nice site that has been done in Flash.
In efforts to get him some traffic, we are doing a double campaign, one with
pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and one using SEO tactics.
Read More >> |
| September 26, 2007I am a small business owner with a circa 2003 website that needs an overhaul
both in terms of SEO optimization and visual appeal. I have no time or
talent to do this and want to hire a company.
I have received a reply from one company that said the problem with my
website is that it was written in FrontPage. They implied that that was a
problem both from a design perspective and for SEO. Do you agree? And if
so, does my website need to be recreated in HTML? Read More >> |
| September 26, 2007Forum member "rolf" told the community of a website design company that
created a brand-new site completely in Flash for a client, even though the
client expressed an interest in having the website found in the search
engines. Read More >> |
| September 25, 2007I submitted our website sitemap to Google a while back, but I was reading a
forum this morning where somebody was saying you have to submit every page
to Google. What is the real procedure and are sitemaps important? Read More >> |
| September 19, 2007At the place where I work as an e-commerce copywriter, we are about to take
a pretty successful, basic, unpretentious e-commerce website and guck it up
– er, I mean, enhance it — with fancy Flash animation on virtually every
page. Read More >> |
| August 29, 2007Hey everyone! I’m back from vacation and the conference and raring to go. Today’s article is an updated version of one I wrote back in 2004 on the art of SEO. I recently reviewed it and was surprised at how accurate it still is today. I figured there are many of you on the list who never read it the first time around, and for those who did, you’ve probably forgotten it by now. Read More >> |
| July 25, 2007Forum moderator Jonathan Hochman (jehochman) noticed a post on Matt Cutts’ blog asking people to vote for what features they’d most want added to Google’s Webmaster Tools. Jonathan thought it was curious that one of the proposed features would tell webmasters which pages on their sites don’t validate. He wondered why Google would do that if they don’t care about pages that validate. Read More >> |
| July 11, 2007Last night was our third SEMNE event (Search Engine Marketing New England), and we were humbled to have Dan Crow, director of crawl systems at Google, spilling the beans about how to get your site into Google. He talked for a half hour or so, and then proceeded to answer audience questions for at least another hour. As I sat there listening to him (yes, I actually listened to this one!), I was struck by what an awesome opportunity it was for everyone in that room to be provided with such important information — straight from Google. It was clear that the 100 or so people in the room agreed. In fact, at 7:30 on the dot, everyone spontaneously stopped their networking activities and simply took their seats without being asked to. These folks definitely came to hear Google! Read More >> |
| May 30, 2007In another post, "DannyAFC" says he feels that his site needs a redesign but
isn't sure what elements he can safely change without hurting his search
engine rankings.
Read More >> |
| May 30, 2007Forum member "Brandon C" asks, "I want to be able to offer a true breadcrumb
for customers in an ecommerce store, but I am afraid that the product page
will get penalized for duplicate content if I'm not careful." Read More >> |
| May 29, 2007Forum member "Doogie" wonders why we've gone from <br> to <br />? Read More >> |
| May 23, 2007Our site has a blog which is www.blog.domain.com — should it really be
www.domain.com/blog ? Read More >> |
| May 23, 2007I have to create some pages for a client. They are full of images and little
to no content and have no title tags…however, they still want SEO
services…*groan* Read More >> |
| May 9, 2007 I wanted to discuss the possibility of developing a best practice/checklist
guide for our company to follow. Our new initiative will be to launch 50
or so micro-sites focused on our key product categories. These sites will
need to be rolled out quickly. Read More >>
|
| May 9, 2007What if you have 2 identical websites with the
same Meta tags and same content, but one is “100% HTML web design (clean
code, CSS design)” and the other is “100% Joomla, fully loaded with SEO
options”? Read More >> |
| April 18, 2007I started answering this question with the usual answer, but
as I looked at the site in question, I realized there was more going on than
meets the eye. Please read through the entire question and my response to
see what I mean! Read More >> |
| April 18, 2007What is more important to you and the other major stakeholders within your
organization? Read More >> |
| April 4, 2007We have a website with tips and advice about health products. The
competition is quite tough in this field, but we have one product that is
doing extremely well in search engines and other websites are starting to
link to it as well. Read More >> |
| March 21, 2007I recently had an inquiry from someone who was looking for some possible SEO consulting with me. He was in the process of a redesign and wanted to be
sure not to make any mistakes along the way, which is super-smart! The time
to be looking at SEO is definitely in the beginning stage of any design or
redesign project. Read More >> |
| March 21, 2007Are Sites Created with CSS Better than Those Created with Tables? Read More >> |
| March 7, 2007Forum member "joeeee" asks if it's okay to hide a link behind a Flash menu. Read More >> |
| February 28, 2007Your email newsletter is one of my favorites, and I get a bunch of them from
SEO “experts” and others. Read More >> |
| February 28, 2007Great newsletter. My business partner is developing our site and wants to
put a list of keywords at the bottom of some of our shop pages (i.e. below
the text) in the hopes that this will get the search engines to notice us
slightly more. Read More >> |
| February 21, 2007"Johking" is looking for a PHP calendar he can add to his website. Read More >> |
| January 31, 2007I have a question relating to Meta tags and the head document. Read More >> |
| January 3, 2007Our web site has been around for many years and we are switching over to a content management system coded in JSP, but with extensions ending in .do as opposed to what we currently have, .asp. Read More >> |
| January 3, 2007I am working for a Flash site that is brand-new. How can that be indexed and come up in the SERPs? Read More >> |
| January 3, 2007I recently met with a company that provides SEO as one of their services and I was told point-blank that our site is written with the “wrong code,” and therefore the search engines can’t read it. I use FrontPage and have nothing more fancy than text, tables, pictures, and some links to other industry sites. Should I be suspicious? Read More >> |
| December 13, 2006I have a client whose web site has been created in Cold Fusion. I am not all
that familiar with these types of pages but right now most of their page
text and metas are being pulled from another document and are not actually
part of the “live site code.” Read More >> |
| December 13, 2006If my pages are in a table, and if I add a header to
that table for a caption, put my main keyword for that page in it, and make
it a bold and big h1 tag, will it help? Read More >> |
| November 29, 2006As you know there are a lot of so-called SEO/SEM experts/gurus claiming all sorts of things. The analogy to me is like "quack" doctors compared to the genuine article. Are there 6 or a dozen questions that would expose those purporting to be experts? Read More >> |
| October 25, 2006Sixty-year-old newbie here with his first e-book! My site is unlinked -- just "up there." I teach project management for a living -- but ill health is forcing early retirement, and I have an urgent need to keep paying the mortgage! Read More >> |
| September 20, 2006I have been a regular reader of your newsletter for some time. I hope you
have time to give me your thoughts on the following comment that I received
from a website designer. Read More >> |
| August 30, 2006In case you were on vacation during the last newsletter and haven’t had a
chance to catch up yet, I wanted to point out my quick recommendation for
website maintenance from Pop2.net. Read More >> |
| August 2, 2006Do you know if repeating keywords in the URL will help increase rankings
within search engine results? If so does it have a big impact? Read More >> |
