Topic Category: General SEO Tips
Here you will find articles providing tips and advice on topics related to search engine optimization (SEO).
April 08, 2008
Name Squatting 2.0
By Scott Goodyear
The other day I was thinking about registering for a free email address. Of course, all of the names that I thought to register were taken. I tried to register a new domain, all of the names that I really wanted were long gone. I went to a couple of Web 2.0 social sites and thought about names that I didn't really want but might be interested to post under... it turns out WebTrends was already taken at Twitter. Was this a real or fake account?
March 13, 2008
Does Google Think Your Site Was Hacked?
By Scott Goodyear
Has your site recently taken a nose dive in the rankings? Do you find that your site is no where to be found even if you use your domain name as the search term? Whether you have a Google WebMaster Tools account or not, you may now find a note from the WebMaster team waiting for you, after you've created an account and verify your site.
February 22, 2008
International SEO - Two Tips To Consider...
By Scott Goodyear
I was reading an associated press piece this morning and it brought up a good point about names with dashes, apostrophes, and other characters that me non-standard to many English based web sites. Most customer relationship management apps (CRM), databases for credit card applications, hotel reservations systems, and more usually require name fields that allow only for a standard first and last name. Non-standard names may cause problems or even shut down your systems.
December 27, 2007
Organic and Pay Per Click Rankings: More Than "Hits", Perform A/B Testing.
By Scott Goodyear
The other day I was reading a post at Google Blogoscoped called "How Google Tests Results Quality" and thinking about how many people will use advertising as a crutch for sites that have low rankings. While searchers may click on advertisements and top ranked pages, that doesn't mean that they like what they see once they reach their destination. This is why some web masters become perplexed that they can have a high "hit" count and high pay per click ad spend but low conversions or sales. This often leads to sentiments like "Pay Per Click advertising is a joke" or "top rankings don't really matter".
October 24, 2007
Reciprocallinksarenotdead, Googlebombs still not dead as well.
By Scott Goodyear
What do you think of when you hear the words "Reciprocal Link Exchange"? (The title reciprocallinksarenotdead, is intentional, I'll tell you why at the end of the post.) I usually think of all of those lousy spam emails that we all get from time to time. You know the type, emails from various web sites that are completely unrelated to SEO or online marketing with text similar to: "We are interested in exchanging links with your site. Exchanging links can bring more business for both our sites and, as you may know, can increase our search engine traffic because Google ranks sites higher that have a good number of relevant links. We will add your link on http://www.somewebsitesellingstuffedanimals.com/linkexchange58.htm..." The problem is that these guys don't really get how reciprocal linking does and does not work.
September 17, 2007
Top Rankings In Google Guaranteed! Really? Nope. The SEO Reputation Problem.
By Scott Goodyear
SEO has a reputation problem. While every web site wants to have a top ranking (or 20) in Google, web site owners can get burned by search engine marketers who over promise and under deliver. Because of this and other issues, some view SEOs as "sharks circling the unwary"; not unlike used car sales people and ambulance chasing lawyers. I summarize my attendance of the "The SEO Reputation Problem" session at SES San Jose below and offer a few thoughts on the issue.
September 06, 2007
"Are Paid Links Evil?" from SES San Jose, what you missed...
By Scott Goodyear
I'm back from attending the Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference in San Jose and I'm putting together a few posts about my experience. In the meantime, I'll relate part of my experience from the "Are Paid Links Evil?" session. It was a lively session that was more food for thought than actionable tips...
June 19, 2007
The Secret To Getting More Links For Boring Sites: The Importance of the Secondary Audience
By Scott Goodyear
You have a web site. You are looking for better rankings in the search engines, but your site is pretty boring. Perhaps not boring by your own standards, maybe not boring even by the standards of your target audience, but what about the secondary audience for your site? Can you hope to obtain links, essentially search engine recommendations, from some one outside of your core audience?
May 17, 2007
Apple.com telling Google "we don't want to rank"?
By Scott Goodyear
As I mentioned a while back, Google states that they are getting more aggressive in how they treat links. High rankings based entirely on links (i.e. the term does not appear on the page) are often called "Googlebombs". For several years Apple.com has enjoyed a first page ranking for the terms MP3 Player, MP3 Players, and often top 10-20 rankings for related terms like MP3 device, digital music player, and others. Today they no longer rank in the top 100 for keywords that they should dominate like MP3 players and simply MP3. In the past, they were supported by benign Googlebombs.
December 27, 2006
SEO for Images
by Curtis Friedl
As the saying goes, an image is worth a 1000 words, but this is not the case for SEO. While this is true to you and I when we are attempting to compare a list of very similar cameras, or reading a map, search engines are able to discern very little from most website images. However this article should help you to provide more to a search engine as it attempts to index the images, text, and other data from your web site.
December 20, 2006
International SEO, A Check List for Improving the Rankings of International Web Sites.
By Scott Goodyear
www.webposition.com
Need to improve a site's rankings in an international search engine? Have you already tried traditional optimization of content and link strategies? What else can an SEO do? Surprisingly, there are a few more steps to be considered in order to improve an international web site which can also prove helpful when pursuing improved international search engine rankings.
April 24, 2006
How URLs Can Affect Top Search Engine Rankings
Strategies you need to know about...
How URLs Can Affect Top Search Engine Rankings
...and everything else that's nice to know about them too! - By John Heard
Courtesy of SearchEngineNews.com | February 2006 Planet Ocean Communications, the top-rated source of search engine marketing information.
You've seen it a million times; you even know it by name - URL. You know that URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator and you probably refer to it by its 3-letter acronym: "U-R-L." Or maybe you're one of the cool kids who calls it an "Earl." Either way, you may not know how URLs can affect your search engine optimization (SEO) strategies. Well, move over cool kids, 'cause you're about to learn something new...
March 27, 2006
The 7 Essential Title Tag Strategies of High Ranking WebPages in 2006
...and how to apply them to each of the three major search engines - By John Heard
Courtesy of SearchEngineNews.com | February 2006 Planet Ocean Communications, the top-rated source of search engine marketing information.
Perhaps you remember the days when cutting-edge webpage design boasted animated gifs and focused on keyword density for top search engine rankings. These days, however, standard fare often combines flash animation with a heavy incoming link campaign. But through all the changes, one element remains constant-the importance of the HTML <title> tag. This little tag was, and still is, the single most important onpage element of high ranking webpages.
December 13, 2005
Unraveling the Versatile 301 Redirect
Elude those expensive site management errors by...
Unraveling the Versatile 301 Redirect
...so YOU can avoid serving cheap beer and hot dogs at your next Superbowl party!
By Stephen Mahaney
Courtesy of SearchEngineNews.com | January 2005
What does...
...all have in common?
September 20, 2005
Controlling Search Engine Robots With robots.txt and Other Methods.
By Scott Goodyear
So what is a "robots.txt" file?:
When a search engine visits a web site through a submission or when following a link from site one site to another, the search engine robot (also known as a "spider") will look for a text file called robots.txt. The file normally resides in the root directory of the site such as "www.site.com/robots.txt". This file will give instructions to spiders that might visit your site regarding what folders or files the spider(s) may or may not visit. With a correctly set up robots.txt file in place, files that are made available to a normal web surfer while can sometimes be kept hidden from a search spider. This can be useful if you are trying to conserve bandwidth (data transfer) since some engines will completely skip files and folders indicated with robots.txt, if you need to keep certain private files from being indexed like data bases, stock images, if you want to link to another site with out promoting for ranking purposes, etc.
May 15, 2004
How to Leverage Expired Domains to Increase Your Rankings and Traffic
Written by Matt Paolini / Edited by Brent Winters
New sites appear on the Web each day at a blistering pace. Just as thousands of new sites are born each week, according to DomainsBot.com, one hundred thousand other domains will disappear. What happens to these domain names? Unless the owner continues to pay rent on the defunct domain, the name will eventually expire and be offered back to the public.
January 15, 2004
New Year's Resolution: Put Your Web Pages on a Diet
by Christine Churchill
It's January, the time for New Year's resolutions. Polls show that going on a diet is the number one resolution Americans make. After all that holiday eating we start eyeing our waistlines and promising ourselves to do something about it. It occurs to me that this same resolution should apply to search engine marketers this year.
July 15, 2003
Make Your Dynamic Web site Search Engine Friendly
by Brad S. Konia
Do you have a dynamic Web site or are thinking of building one? If so, failing to make your dynamic site search engine friendly can dramatically reduce your visibility in the search engines. Even though some engines spider dynamic URLs, others still do not. Those that do spider them may still place artificial limits on how deep they will travel within such links.
June 15, 2003
Save Time by Optimizing a Single Generic Page!
By Robin Nobles
While WebPosition allows you to easily optimize pages for each of the major engines, you can save yourself an enormous amount of time and energy if you start by creating a single "generic" page.
May 15, 2003
Advanced Tip: Improving Table Prominence for Higher Rankings
Seasoned search engine marketers know that to gain top rankings, your important keywords should appear as close to the beginning of your HTML code as possible. In search engine marketing lingo, this is called keyword "prominence." Search engines assign greater value to keywords that appear early in the text.
October 15, 2002
Advanced Tip: Improving Rankings via Server Side Includes (SSI)
Recent changes in Google's algorithm have caused sites to disappear or to shift in rankings this month. Many searchers have complained that Google's relevancy has declined from the changes. Therefore, don't be surprised if they continue to tweak their formula causing ranking to bounce up and down for awhile.
June 15, 2002
Increase your Click-Throughs With Killer Title Tags
By Robin Nobles
As you probably know, the majority of engines place considerable relevance on the HTML title tag, making it generally the most important tag on your page.
January 15, 2002
Top Reasons Why You May Not Be Indexed
At one time or another you may have used a submission tool, or submitted by hand and then wondered why you had not been indexed. Unfortunately, there are many reasons that may delay or prevent you from being indexed by a search engine. There's rarely one simple answer for why you're not being found. Fortunately, there is generally an explanation and a way to correct the problem if you know what to look for.
November 15, 2001
Meta Tags: Your Questions Answered
If there's one topic that comes up almost as often as how to submit, it's questions about meta tags. Meta tags have been mentioned so many times by the press, many people perceive them as the Holy Grail of search engine marketing. "Don't even think about building a Web site without knowing the in's and out's of these mystical meta tags," right? Well, the truth is that meta tags are far from being a silver bullet solution to your search engine woes. However, educating yourself is the first step toward "search engine enlightenment," and thus achieving those elusive top 10 rankings.
October 15, 2001
TIP: How to Make Better Use of Heading Tags
Here's one of the powerful search engine positioning tips found in this month's WebPosition Gold Knowledge Base update:
May 15, 2001
Will I get Into Trouble if I Repeat Words in my Meta Tag?
Question from a subscriber: "This is driving me crazy: If I have a client who makes metal stakes, spears and rods, as well as wooden stakes, spears and rods, is this the best way to do the keyword meta tags?:
November 15, 2000
Benefits of Organizing Your Content Into Separate Domains
If you run a Web site and own only a single domain name, you may be missing out on a great deal of potential traffic. Continuing changes with the search engines have been adding to the list of reasons for owning more than one domain name.
October 15, 2000
How and Why to Build a Robots.txt
Some of you have asked "How do I keep 'search engine A' from indexing pages designed for 'search engine B'." The answer is to use a robots.txt file. There are also other reasons for wanting to keep search engines from indexing some or all pages on a site. Therefore, I’ve put together this detailed article to show you how to do that, and to avoid common mistakes that are made all too often.
August 15, 2000
What Does the Average Search Look Like?
A common misperception in search engine marketing is that most people search on a single keyword to find what they're looking for. However, we've long recommended that customers spend most of their time targeting multi-word phrases. This will not only bring you more targeted visitors who are more likely to buy what you have, but you'll find it much easier to achieve those top rankings on phrases rather than single words.
February 15, 2000
Buying and Selling Domains
Some of you have asked how to legally buy and sell domain names. Because of a recent law passed in the United States, you want to think twice about buying a domain based on a word or phrase that is trademarked by another party or a domain containing the name of a celebrity. The new law makes it easier to sue parties who purchase trademarked domains in "bad faith" and do not otherwise have a legitimate claim to the name.
February 15, 2000
Should I include dashes in my domain name?
We are frequently asked whether a domain, which includes multiple keywords, should be purchased with or without dashes between words. Popular opinion is that, for advertising purposes, most people like to type shorter domains without the dashes.
January 15, 2000
How to Gain New Traffic from E-bay
Here's a tip that Brian Waring forwarded to me regarding generating traffic on E-bay:
January 15, 2000
New 67 character domain names: Your Questions Answered
As I reported previously, domain names are no longer limited to 23 characters. They can now be up to 67 characters long including the extension. What this means is that you can now get longer domain names that you couldn't get before. You can also get domains that include a great many keywords. Including keywords in your domain can significantly improve your rankings on many major search engines.
January 15, 2000
How to Host Multiple Domains to Maximize your Rankings
The question has been raised, if shorter domains are better for "human consumption" and search engines favor longer domains, what do I do? The answer is simple: Advertise your shorter domain but submit your longer domains to the search engines. Many hosting services will allow multiple domains to point to the same Web site. Generally this service is free, or available for a small fee.
December 15, 1999
67 Character Domain Names
This is one of the most important Web marketing articles you will read all year. I just got a note from Corey Rudl, and I was so excited I almost fell over. It is so important I wanted to forward it to you RIGHT AWAY so you could profit from it immediately and at the same time, PROTECT yourself. I talked to Corey on the phone and asked if I could reprint the article and distribute it to you. He said "yes". So here it is:
September 15, 1999
Better Rankings with Heading Tags
Although I discussed heading tags back in December 1997, I felt this topic was sufficiently important to warrant a refresher course.
July 15, 1999
Creating "Hallway" Pages to Improve Rankings
Many people believe that submitting a Web site is as simple as typing the URL into a search engine's submission form and pressing the "submit" button. However, the way you perform the actual search engine submission will help determine whether your Web site achieves top 10 rankings for keyword searches or if your site joins the land of the lost.
June 15, 1999
Doing Doorway Pages Right!
A common complaint and misconception about "doorway pages" is that they're ugly. However, you can take your home page (or any page) that is the best looking page on your site, optimize it, and have a great looking doorway page that also ranks #1 on a keyword search. The best of both worlds!
May 15, 1999
Important: Get Listed in the Open Source Directory
IMPORTANT UPDATE! Lycos just added support for the "Open Source Directory (previously known as the "Newhoo" directory)" to their search engine in mid-April. This new feature lists matches found in categories and web sites from the Open Source directory before listing relevancy ranked pages from the Lycos database.
April 15, 1999
Move your Table Text Topside for Better Positioning
Most of us have heard that your site's most important keywords should appear as close to the beginning of your HTML code as possible. In search engine marketing lingo, this is called keyword "prominence."
March 15, 1999
How to Make Better Use of Images
Most Web sites have graphics (i.e., images). Search engines cannot read any keywords or text that you may have embedded in your graphical menu or other images. Therefore, make sure you make use of ALT tags to describe your files. For example, if you have an image like this:
December 15, 1998
Multiple Domain Bonus
For many of the engines, including Excite, HotBot, and AltaVista, you’ll find it easier to get high rankings on your home page over secondary pages.
December 15, 1998
Hook Your Audience
Here’s a "power tip" you’ll want to incorporate into your Web site: The first few sentences of your main page must sell your service. The reason is quite simple.
December 15, 1998
Benefits of Doorway Pages
I last discussed in detail the concept of "doorway" pages way back in September of 1997. After receiving the following e-mail and others, I realized it was long overdue to re-visit this crucial Web marketing concept. Doorway pages can make or break any business that?s struggling to be "seen" on the Web.
December 15, 1997
Heading Tags and More: Secrets to Better Rankings
After you submit your page, most of the major search engines with the exception of Yahoo will index (read and then store) all the words of your page to determine "themes". Their automated indexing engines attempt to discern what your page is about so that when a user conducts a search, it will return pages that it feels are most relevant to that topic. If you can make your page appear near the top of the list when users search for topics related to your Web site or business, you'll see all kinds of new traffic.
November 15, 1997
How to Create Effective Page Descriptions
In past issues I've talked about the importance of your position in the 10 major search engines. I still preach that if you don't appear in at least the first two or three pages of matches, you might as well be invisible. However, some of you worry too much about climbing from position #3 to #1 and overlook another facet of site promotion that is every bit as important.
September 15, 1997
Benefits of Doorway Pages
So you've submitted to the search engines, but you're still waiting for that traffic to start flooding in? Unless you know how to create pages that target specific keywords, you may be in for a long wait! There are so many pages on the Web now, that just submitting your URL to the engines will likely just throw you into the middle of a very large search list for just about any keyword you try to search on.
