The industry's top wizards, doctors, and other experts offer their best advice, research, how-tos, and insights—all in the name of helping you level-up your SEO and online marketing skills.
A few days back Tom Crichlow gave us a sweet Whiteboard Friday on PPC basics.One of his main points is that data is king. Even though my business partner and I are still Adwords rookies, I wanted to share a great report that has been especially helpful in increasing performance on any broad match keywords that you’re using.While in yo...
It amazes me that Keyword density is still touted as an important on page metric, the argument in its favor goes something like this: "The more times a term appears in a document the higher the keyword density for that term. The higher the keyword density the more relevant a document becomes for that term." The calculation used to back up this claimThe k...
We've got a special guest on Whiteboard Friday this week: Rand! After a few weeks of awesome stuff from our guest stars, Rand was missing the limelight and wanted to get back in front of the camera. So what's the topic? Indexation issues. What do you do when you have a large (or ginormous) site and thousands of your pages simply aren't getting indexed? Well, a lot of ti...
The work done by developers rarely hits the headlines but can often be the difference between success and failure in an SEO project. The following list may not be groundbreaking but then SEO often isn't. I think the following all fall under the heading of advanced common sense...
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After reading rishil’s post about linkbuilding for small business, I thought I’d throw in a post about linkbuilding for even smaller start ups – and how starting early with this nifty little linkbuilding tip could give you a sweet advantage. Er, by the way, some people may call this grey hat ...
Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: One star link: * Hacker News started a thread asking why hackers hate SEO. Most of the answers are frustrating, though some folks chime in to defend our industry.
It is greatly ironic that algorithms, the quintessential example of all that is not human, would be so fundamental to social media. Last week I wrote a post about how Google gathers user data. This week I continue by exposing how popular social media websites use algorithms to ut...
We all do it, take shortcuts I mean, keyword research is such a pain in the ass that any way to short circuit the process is welcomed with open arms. The obvious short cut is to ask the client, he knows what he wants; he is an expert on market research, he has analysed all the sites that compete in his search space, he has sat down and analysed his AdWords campaign and culled the dodo’s, ...
One of the frustrations of doing SEO for large websites is the fact that Google makes it very difficult to see more than a small part of the search index. Even in Webmaster Tools, Google's index search is built on the same mechanics as its web search, which only lets you see the first 1000 pages of any result. Whether you're trying to get pages discovered, struggling with duplicate cont...
With the proliferation of the Semantic Web all of our data will be structured and organized so perfectly that search engines will know exactly what we are looking for, all of the time. Even the newest of newbies will be able to create the most well-structured site that would take tens of thousands of dollars today. Everyone's information will be so precise and semantically cor...
Danny Sullivan's lovely wife, Lorna (who lent me a hat and gloves when we went to see Stonehenge on an especially cold, windy day), recently created Boudica, a social news site for women. The site is pretty new and is currently in Beta testing mode, but I thought I'd give an initial review of things thus far. I'll start with the following caveat: I'm not super...
About a month ago, I posed a question in the Q & A section of SEOmoz. THe question was: How does a website cross the threshhold from a PageRank 4 to a PageRank 5? A member of the SEOmoz staff answered that there is really no formula or set of criteria that will push a site from PR 4 to PR 5. However, I'm not so sure I agree with that statement. While there probably is n...
INTRO: In the most recent Whiteboard Friday, a good friend of mine, Tom Critchlow (I can call you a good friend can't I Tom??), went over some great PPC basic tips. I noticed a lot of people in the comments wanted to hear more about PPC. Well I've been doing the paid side of SEM for a few years (I remember Overture before Ya...
A quote from Google's Guidelines on Cloaking: Serving up different results based on user agent may cause your site to be perceived as deceptive and removed from the Google index. ...