Stoney deGeyter founded Pole Position Marketing in 1998 working from a home office and has since turned it into a leading search engine marketing business with a small team of seasoned Reno SEO and marketing experts. Stoney pioneered the concept of Destination Search Engine Marketing which is the driving philosophy on how Pole Position marketing helps their clients expand their online presence and improve online conversion rates.
Stoney is a moderator at the Small Business Ideas Forum, a regular contributor to the Search Engine Guide blog and has a monthly column on Search Engine Land. He posts his SEO and business insights at the E-Marketing Performance blog where you can also find his e-books: E-Marketing Performance: Effective Strategies for Building, Optimizing and Marketing your Website Online and Keyword Research and Selection: The Definitive Guide to Gathering, Sorting and Organizing your Keywords into a High-Performance SEO Campaign.
Stoney is married with five wonderful children and, if away from the computer long enough, enjoys riding his dirt bike, watching DVDs, reading books and spending quality and quantity time with the family.
There is no better way to create an infinite amount of duplicate content on your site than to force session IDs onto each visitor (and search engine). 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.
When shoppers can access secure and non secure versions of the same page, then likely the search engines can as well. This creates almost a complete duplicate of your site, one secure and one non-secure version. It's essential to tell the search engines what to think, especially when it comes to which pages of your site should or should not be included in the index.
Registering multiple domain names is, and should be, common practice for businesses wishing to protect their brands. Once purchased, what you do with these domains can have a positive or negative impact on your main URL. Here are some tips on how to set up alternate domains to prevent the search engines from seeing duplicate content.
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.
There are two kinds of duplicate content: content that is duplicated on multiple websites and content that is duplicated on multiple pages of a single site. I believe the search engines treat each differently and, of course, there may be different standards applied to duplicate content within each of these two main differentiations, depending on the cause and instance.
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.
There are two important questions that every business needs to be able to answer: What's in it for me? and Why should I buy from you? The first questions, when answered correctly, helps sell your product or service, but it...
Performing a complete website review is rarely easy. I've found that you can start a site analysis intending to spend just a few minutes looking over it only to find that it quickly spirals into a multi-hour marathon of research....
As more and more users gain access to the web it becomes increasingly important to ensure that your website is accessible to all, not just a few. Just as businesses must comply with the American Disabilities Act to ensure proper access to customers with disabilities, businesses should do all they can to make their websites accessible to all users regardless of the means in which they access the site. And of course not all accessibility issues involve meeting the needs of the disabled. What must be considered is the growing number of users that now access websites through non-traditional means, whether it be mobile phones or with images turned off. These users can still be your target audience and ensuring your site can be used through alternate avenues is essential to capturing that audience.
Rarely does SEO bloat happen all at once, but it's usually an accumulation of edits and tweaks made over the course of several months or even years. This is what makes it particularly damaging to your marketing efforts.
Sites that are designed to sell products and/or services must go the extra mile to enhance the visitor's engagement with the website. Shopping cart abandonment (shoppers abandoning their carts before deciding to pay for the "items" they've added to...
Trust is a key usability issue when it comes to running a successful online business. Most people automatically view web businesses with a bias against them compared to their brick and mortar counterparts. Your ability to convince your visitors that yours is a trustworthy business is one of the key components to getting visitors to convert into customers. Creating a website that conveys trust can be tricky. There are rarely any answers that are always "right" for every visitor. There are, however, several factors that have universal appeal to the weary shopper.
Getting links is great, but as search marketers we should be looking far beyond that. We should not be so much as trying to get other websites to link to us (that's certainly a welcome result) but we should instead be working on getting exposure, in whatever format that comes in.
Last February (2007), I had a diabolical plan to become a household name in the SEO community. Here I was, a guy who has been in SEO for almost ten years and remained a relative unknown. Sure, I made a few friends here and there and have been slowly building my reputation, but who would of thought 12 months ago that I would be able to snag an interview with one of the biggest names in the SEO. And that's not me interviewing the big name, mind you... that's the big name interviewing me!
Since the "purchase" is the ultimate conversion, it is imperative that you remove as many obstacles from the customer's research-to-buy cycle as possible. Providing your visitors the key ingredients in their shopping experience creates a smooth and worry-free transaction process. The easier it is to shop and buy the more customers will overcome the natural hesitations that many feel before they commit by hitting the final "complete order" button.
While it has taken many years for SEO to be considered a marketing function within the business community, I sometimes wonder if the pendulum has swung now too far away from SEO being a function of the IT department. SEO is very different from traditional marketing.
Think of all the ways that companies use branding to build awareness of themselves or to promote their social awareness and customer service values. A few things come to mind such as greeters at the entrance of your my...
Not every site needs, nor should have, an on-site search feature. But those that do must be sure that the search isn't just an after-thought. It needs to be more than something to add because you think visitors want it....
When putting the framework for a solid optimization campaign you have to spend some time evaluating various aspects of your site. This evaluation gives you an idea of any shortcomings the site has, what will be required to overcome the competition, and will then allow you to map out an effective strategy for success. But there is more to the evaluation than just looking at how the website currently performs in the on- and off-page analysis.
How engaged a customer is with your website will determine whether they can be persuaded to buy, comment, download or submit their information for you to follow up on. Customer engagement goes beyond just getting the customer's attention, you must keep their attention. This can be done by providing your visitors near immediate gratification.
To do that you have to first know who your audience is, know what they seek and then also know their purpose for being on your site. Knowing all this then lets you work toward meeting the needs of your target audience. But it also means taking things a step further and building a relationship with them. The ability to build a relationship with your visitors can be crucial to driving them through the persuasion process. Relationship building starts the moment the visitor hits the website.
Whether you are putting together a proposal for a client or assessing your own needs, you need to be able to accurately predict how much time, energy and effort will be necessary to build a successful SEO campaign. Of course, in order to predict the time involvement you need to first know the strengths and weaknesses of the website which will then help you determine what will need to be done to accomplish your goals and make the site a viable competitor.
Not every site needs a site map, they can certainly be a good idea. Site maps provide a dual purpose: They provide search engine spiders easy access to all of your site pages and they provide site visitors easy access to all of your site pages. The difference is that search engines and visitors access your site map differently and therefore there are different methods that need to be applied to creating site map(s) that are friendly for both engines and search spiders.
Your website's privacy information and security settings can be significant hurdles when it comes to gaining trust with your visitors. Establishing trust is paramount to enticing visitors to make that final commitment, whether that be making a purchase, choosing to provide their info, or simply making initial contact with you. Your job is to make sure your visitors feel confident that their information is kept safe and will not be used for nefarious means, or anything other than what they fully expect. While providing assurances are nice, those assurances only go so far as what actually happens. Be sure that your small print reinforces what your visitors already expect to find in regards to how their information is used.
Every SEO campaign has to start somewhere. Any good plan; whether you're building a home, preparing for a family vacation or looking to optimize your website for search rankings, starts with research. Before you are ready to optimize your first piece of code you need to understand the landscape around you, which means you need to know the condition of your site as it currently is, and the goals you wish to achieve over the course of your campaign.
Sites that require users to log in to access certain information and/or purchase products add an additional layer of potential complication to the usability process. To avoid potential visitor confusion and the possibility for errors, it is important that any login process requires little or no thought on the part of the site visitor. Once logged in, you must be sure that visitors are able to find the information they want and expect to find. My Account pages need to provide visitors with access and ability to view and change personal information, as necessary.
Every day we get businesses coming to us looking to improve their search engine rankings. They want to talk about an SEO campaign but one quick look at their site and we see that SEO may not be the right approach for them. Usually in these cases the site needs a complete usability makeover.
The other day I received an email from a client noting that some of his Yahoo rankings have slipped as of late. They are still ranking strong on Google as well as MSN and heck, many of their Yahoo rankings are still very strong. But there was, in fact, some slippage and the client was concerned. Well, first we know that there is more to web marketing than top rankings. In fact rankings are just a small piece of the bigger web marketing pie. I know that and you know that, but for whatever reason, we all still have to deal with clients that refuse to accept that. But that's a story for another post. So what do you do in this situation? I know for a fact that the client's business has seen 100-200% growth year over year since we started working with them oh-so long ago. They obviously see the big picture, but they still come back looking at rankings. And Yahoo rankings at that.
For many business owners, writing can be a daunting task. Sure we know our products and services inside and out and putting what we know into words is easy enough, but that's about as far as it gets. Is that enough to sell? Sure. Could more be done to sell better? You bet!
Depending on the nature of your site, Help and FAQ's (Frequently Asked Questions) can span a few or many pages. Building up these sections of your site can greatly enhance your visitor's experience with your website. These pages are often sought out by shoppers who are looking for just a bit more information to help them feel confident about their purchase. Building comprehensive Help and FAQ pages gives your visitors confidence that you're there to provide them the information and help they need to be comfortable purchasing from you. Solidly built pages can often reduce visitor confusion, lessen support call frequency, and create higher conversion rates as more shoppers are satisfied and confident that you can meet their needs.
Not every site needs, nor should have, an on-site search feature. But those that do must be sure that the search isn't just an after-thought. It needs to be more than something to add because you think visitors want it. Adding a search function is not necessarily good for on-site usability. Implementing a search function improperly is often a greater source of frustration than not having one altogether.
There is a distinct difference between editing a site for search engines and making edits for visitors. Traditionally in SEO, adding keywords to a web page falls under the category of editing for search engines. But many don't realize that adding keywords to your copy can and should be a function of making the site function better for visitors. The copy of your website falls very distinctly into the marketing realm of website management. Yes, search engines look at copy too, and adding certain keywords can help you achieve search engine rankings rankings, but each page needs to appeal to your readers first.
While search engines are important, keep in mind that your visitors are even more important. When making edits to your site always consider the implications on both your human visitors and the search engines as well. Every change you make will have either a positive, negative or neutral effect on your human visitors and the search engine spider. You need to know ahead of time the effect any particular change will have and use that as a basis for determining if its worthwhile or not.
Forms are one of your primary points of contacts with your visitors. While many visitors still use email or even the telephone to contact you or to place an order, the vast majority will contact you first via your web forms. Forms that are broken or improperly implemented cause frustration and can greatly reduce your conversion rate for leads and sales.
Customers who, by all means, appear to be ready to make a purchase are often found abandoning their shopping carts before they complete their online transaction. In many cases this is part of the normal online shopping experience as the shopping cart is just used as a place to collect items of interest but which the user has no real intent to purchase. But all too often it is a failure of the shopping cart page itself that leads visitors to abandon their items which they do, in fact, wish to have.
A properly built web site will ensure that the search engine spiders are able to access all pages of your site with more importance placed on the more important pages. It will also insure that the human visitors are able to accomplish their goals, either finding the information they came for and/or purchasing your product or service.
To be effective, your website must implement product pages that are able to satisfy each of your visitor's needs. But information isn't enough either. While providing necessary information, these pages must be convincing enough to entice your visitors to move through the purchase process -- on your site rather than on a competitor's website.
Can a proper balance between optimizing for spiders and humans be struck? Can you achieve the perfectly optimized web page for search rankings, while also maintain a perfectly optimized page for your audience? No, but since perfection is unattainable, what you can do is find the most effective balance between being both user friendly and search engine friendly.
Along with the About Us page, your Contact Us page is one of the most important and crucial pages on your site to get right. In fact, the Contact Us page could be considered the absolutely most important page. Even if the rest of your site succeeds in the goals, if visitors fail to find the information they need to contact you then you will bring their shopping experience to a screeching halt.
While looking at every last minute detail of SEO is advantageous, it is effective only to a point. One can't get mired into trying to get every last little detail right all of the time. To do so often comes at the expense other important things. Instead of focusing on the big picture, you're mired in the little things that don't provide the return you may have imagined.
I'm not the first one to chime in on this topic, mostly because I've gone both ways and I can make pretty valid arguments from either side. But I've finally settled it in my mind which is "best". Full RSS feeds are better than summary feeds. Let me tell you why...
I had an alternate title for this post: "Ask not what Google can do for you, but what you can do for Google". We're moving into a new age where we have to pay closer attention what Google does -- despite what Google says.
For many sites, visitors that find their way to your About Us page tend to have a somewhat higher conversion rate than those that don’t. Potential customers that do visit this page are showing a bit more than a casual interest in what your site has to offer and are looking for additional signals of trust.
On the web it is impossible to have a conversation without content. That is why content will never truly be dead. Every word written, every blog post, article, instant message, forum post, etc/ (the list goes on and on) is done via content. But content, outside of community, is not a conversation, it's merely a one-way communication. To paraphrase an old philosophical riddle, if someone communicates and no one is around to hear (or read) it, is he really saying anything at all?
Your home page is the single most crucial page of your site. This is the page that will be the primary entry point for a majority of your visitors. It is also the page that sets the stage for the rest of the site giving visitors a birds-eye view of who you are, what you're about, what you can do for them, what you offer, and how they get the information needed.
During the design phase of building a website all too often we find that the end result is really nothing more than what somebody decided "looked good". In some cases it's a combination (or compromise) of what a handful of individuals have determined to be "good enough". What many fail to realize is that web design and visitor usability go hand in hand.
These figures can't (or can, depending on how you look at it) be ignored.
Last week, as I recounted my story of a troubled client, I got to thinking about this question. In the world of SEO, where do the lines of responsibility fall? When is the SEO responsible for failure and when is...
The content of your website is your #1 sales tool. Pictures, tools, and other fun stuff can be important in making your site visibly and functionally appealing, but it is the content that sells. Well written and user focused content allows your visitors to "find out" more about your products and services, as well as how your company will be able to meet their needs.
I recently made a mistake. I took on a client without first having fully vetted them and their prospects for success. Several months later, with a more accurate picture of the situation, things are not looking so bright....
Last month I posted about Barnes & Nobles tedious process for unsubscribing from their email newsletters. It was so complex that I honestly couldn't even figure out why I was receiving emails to begin with. By all appearances I was...
A site's navigation structure is extremely important in providing a rich, friendly user experience. Well designed and implemented navigation assists in the process of helping visitors identify sections and pages of the website that interest them and then in moving them in that direction. If you're able to implement a solidly developed navigation system on your site you'll also be providing strong visual cues to the depth of content you have available. This alone can be an immediate first-impression indicator of trust.
A while back there was quite a bit of scare mongering going around the SEO industry about how reciprocal links were dead. I had a potential client once tell me that so-and-so-big-name-in-the-SEO-industry told them that reciprocal links were dead. I've said this before and I'll say it here again. There is nothing wrong with reciprocal links.
I like to create systems for everything that I do and SEO is no exception. While not every aspect of search engine marketing can be programmed, categorized or easily referenced, (I have a mighty team to handle that stuff!) the bulk of the work can at least be outlined into a handy check list.
In my last article I declared that content was dead and community was the new king online. The title of that post was a bit of an overstatement which wasn't backed up by the rest of the article. (It was...
Motivation is a funny thing. You can try to encourage people by telling them the benefits of this, that or the other, but sometimes it's just not enough. You've got to make them "feel" it. If you craft your message right, you can do just that using words only.
In the last of my four part series about lessons learned from Blockbuster's Total Access program, I'll explore the need to make sure you're giving site visitors enough information to make the sale.
I can hardly bring myself to say the old cliche about content being... well, you know. I think it's one of the original cliche's in the SEO industry. And as redundant as it has become, for whatever reason we keep...
Blockbuster provides a perfect real-world example of a company struggling to get it right. Sometimes they get the DVD in the tray and sometimes they don't. (That analogy sounded better in my head!)
Every week I receive weekly emails from Barnes and Noble telling me about books that are being released and other such stuff that I'm not interested in. The other day I decided to go ahead and click the "unsubscribe" button...
While high-speed access is far more common today than it was just a couple of years ago, web technology has also gotten more advanced. With each new whistle and bell added to your website, with every new feature, wait time...
Last week I started looking at the branding savvyness of a handful of speakers at Search Engine Strategies, San Jose. There was no way I could go through each and every speaker so I narrowed the list down to those who spoke in sessions I attended. Here I continue through the list (alphabetically) and will provide an additional bonus: me. Yeah, I got my own set of branding issues which I uncovered once I started looking into some of the others here. But before I rip me a new one, let's continue...
While I was live blogging the search engine strategy sessions last week I was often in a hurry to find links to each presenter's website. Come to find out it wasn't as easy as I thought it would be. In...
What happens when a company asks users to spend a great deal of time filling out a "customer experience" survey, but fails to offer anything up in return?...
Blockbuster figured out how to leverage their offline properties for their online rental service, namely the local Blockbuster Video store. Instead of putting your movie back in the mail to be shipped back, you can now take your movie, which...
There is a lot that goes into developing good content for websites, and there are a lot of schools of thought into how to develop text that is "just right" for search engines and customers alike. We've heard all the...
There is a lot more to SEO than often meets the eye, but sometimes the SEO eye isn't enough to make a good optimized page great. While the actual SEO work can be pretty straight forward, it's the additional effort...
A few weeks ago one of my employees ran across co.mments.com, a free, web based comment tracking tool. It's turned out to be a very nice one-size fits all solution to keeping up with any comments on any blog post,...
MIVA is updating their records... and in the process giving all of their contacts access to over 1200 email addresses. Early this morning I received an email from MIVA and there it was, right in front of me, over 1,217...
One of the things we've been trying to wrap our head around is the concept of writing content for both personas and the personality of site visitors. We battled with this for several days, trying to distinguish properly between a...
Do you ever get the feeling that there are super cool websites out there that you have not discovered? Sites that everybody is talking about, except to you? Well, fret no longer, young Internet Junkie. Time Magazine, in partnership with...
I've been submitting my articles to Ezine @rticles for a few years now and I have great respect for them, but lately, well, they've been riding the short bus to school drinking crazy Uncle Joe's home made Koolaid....
With Google's new universal search being rolled out the concept of "top search engine rankings" changes dramatically. On one hand a first page ranking is much more difficult to achieve, and on the other, there are now more ways in...
Two years ago I put together a post about what I thought was the perfect SEO firm. I revisited that post this morning as I was looking at one of our white boards that had a list of positions that...
In a previous article I wrote that a search engine friendly website is not the same as a search engine optimized website. I'm using that as a jump off point for this article on the topic of building a search...
Having the right message is critical to the success of any business. The number one key to business growth is crafting a message that speaks to your target audience....
Though already successful, Pepsi understands that long-term success and company growth means always being willing to attempt new ideas and strategies. Marketing online has proven that rule time and time again....
We once had a client complain that they didn't know if we were doing anything for them. I guess the ranking improvements they were seeing wasn't enough of a clue. That complaint only happened once. We realized then that there...
Google realized that very few people were using their individual search areas such as images, video, news, etc, and universal search is their one-size-fits-all fix to that. The result is a bunch of, what I would consider to be, irrelevant...
A recent New York Times article has pointed out a trend showing the slow down in the growth of online shopping. The article points out a few previously hot industries are starting to show a slowing in growth....
McAfee recently reclease their State of Search Engine Safety report, an updated from their May and December 2006 reports....
People often find themselves looking for the winning scenario for themselves or their businesses. Finding the winning scenario is important for any long-term success. But even better than the winning scenario is the win-win scenario....
Google recently added Experiemental Search to their list of Google labs options. I spent some time playing around with it and found it quite interesting, to say the least....
Link bait and reciprocal linking programs have quite a bit in common. Without disparaging anyone who engages in link baiting strategies I do believe that many forms of link baiting are just a dressed up version of reciprocal links without...
Our company has built our own custom task management system that integrates with our SEO and Marketing client reporting system. It's great. In fact, I'm a big fan of task management. But having a task management system in place, and...
When we are quoting development work for prospective clients we are often asked to develop a website that is search engine optimized. This usually brings me into a long-winded explanation on how developing a website to be search engine friendly...
When you think that your employees just don't listen or follow directions very well perhaps its time to sit down and start listening to yourself for a change. Get out of your own head for a second and hear your...
Finding biblical wisdom in a pop-culture geek film! I love it! (Oh, I love the marketing angle, too!)...
When we find something that works, it may not be for the reasons we initially thought. Only after thoroughly analyzing one success, and seeing the big picture we can realize that the strategy that we thought was the reason for...
If you're paying for marketing that will drive traffic to your website but have not spent any time or money providing a better customer experience on your website, then you might as well be paying your visitors to leave....
The Internet allowed many mom and pops to move out of mom and pop status and develop a new kind of corporate identity. But as the e-marketplace began to grow, driving traffic to a new online business became increasingly difficult....
As a small business, everything you do has an impact on your marketing message and ability to get that message out clearly. This includes how (or whether) you answer your phones, how you reply to email messages, what you say...
No, I'm not going to give you a list of most searched or most clicked keywords or whatever. Instead I'm going to talk about how to determine which keywords will be the best for you....
It's not often that a company finds success outside of its intended target market. But that seems to be what is happening with the makers of Slingbox....
Have you ever been suspicious that your traffic stats are overinflated? Well, you should be, especially if you use cookies to track user analytical data. According to a new press release by comScore cookie-based counting overstates the size of a...
Fridays are typically the most unproductive day of the week, with the exception of the occasional Monday doldrums. By Friday everybody is ready for the weekend and its often just difficult to get into the work rhythm of the first...
The Internet allowed many mom and pops to move out of mom and pop status and develop a new kind of corporate identity. But as the e-marketplace began to grow, driving traffic to a new online business became increasingly difficult....
Simply by adding the following line of code into your robots.txt file, the engines will know where your sitemap is located on the server and pick it up on their routine crawls....
The other day I went to a local seminar on "internet marketing". I honestly didn't expect a whole lot; it was one of those "how to make money on the internet" things, which promised to tell you tips on how...
Years after having any sort of relevance in the search engine landscape, Microsoft has finally chosen to close down their bCentral Submit It service. Yesterday I received an email from Microsoft explaining, in that Microsoft sort of way, what's happening....
Providing a little (or a lot) of information can go a long, long way to building a good relationship with your visitors. That, in turn, can lead to more sales and significant business growth. Unfortunately, many online businesses go with...
Yesterday MSN posted on their blog that they have turned of certain advanced search queries because, (gasp!) people are using it for research!...
What does valid code have to do with SEO? Honestly, not a whole lot. But it can help you quickly and easily spot potential coding problems that can effect your SEO efforts....
Within the last week or so Google updated their Google Alerts service to incorporate it with some of Google's other services. Somewhere in the process of the change they screwed up as over half of my Alerts are missing!...
Ever wonder what it would be like if we had all the conveniences of the Internet in the "real" world? I do. A lot, actually. Whether I'm sitting at a stop light, looking where I left my keys or just...
In reading an article about the plummeting of music CD sales believed to be caused by the increase in music downloads (purchased and pirated), I got to thinking about the music business in general. While most news stories and editorials...
Lionsgate films may have an unintentional hit on their hands. It appears that someone put up the wrong billboard campaign which many are finding objectionable....
The SEO industry has changed significantly in the last few years. Gone are they days when SEO focused exclusively on top search engine rankings. Today's SEOs, or at least any worth paying more than one dollar to, are focusing on...
Right now Google is the 900 pound basket delivering a sizeable chunk of traffic (eggs?) to businesses on the web. That's fine and all but what happens when you lose your Google rankings for a day, month, year?...
Should you change your page content frequently? The answer is yes and no....
As SEO enters the mainstream of business marketing strategies you would think that less time would have to be spent educating people on why SEO is so very important. But the fact of the matter is, many people still just...
There are literally thousands of signals that can be changed to improve one's conversion, last week I pointed out ten. Today I give 10 more, but they are not quite as easy to implement as those on the first list....
My SEO firm has been spending a good deal of time analyzing conversion and usability aspects for our clients over the past year. While there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of things that can be changed to help improve...
The big news of the past couple of days is that Yahoo now allows you to opt out of having Yahoo use the directory title and description in their general search results. As I was installing the new robots meta...
In just about any form of marketing, when something works it gets repeated to death until the strategy is no longer effective. Online marketing, especially link building, is similar. While there is no replacing the concept of building a good...
According to comScore, 65% of Bank of America account holders use their online bill pay service. In fact, B of A is dominating the online bill pay market. According to the study, Wells Fargo has the next highest usage at...
We are in business to serve our clients, not ourselves. But the more I thought about this the more I realized that this sentiment is not entirely true. While we want our purpose to be client-centric we realized that in...
I think Rand had a bit too much of the secret SEO sauce. His post "What separates Search Marketing Novices from Experts" is, well, just downright ignorant. I think of Rand as a true SEO business man but I think...
Matthew Inman has just posted an excellent CSS resource over at SEOmoz. For those of us who are not designers but are found frequently editing HTML and CSS, Inman's 15 CSS Properties You Probably Never Use (but perhaps should) is...
A new company is about to change the face of off-line advertising as we know it. They are starting in the movie industry (and only for eight seconds at a time) but the implications of this will reach into every...
Have you tried to break into the SEO elite and found it somewhat cliquish? You're not the only one. Aaron Pratt talks about the circular linking patterns of the SEO elites....
The time spent on billable activities is important information to know, and not just to have a better picture of the bottom line. How our time is spent affects both us and our clients. The more time we spend on...
Google Webmaster Central has just releases a tool that allows you to check your site's backlinks. Hows that different from the link: operator? Well, this one actually works!...
True success doesn't come easily but requires patience, determination, hard work and sometimes even personal sacrifice. If you do want to succeed and are willing to put forth the effort, here are seven steps to success in business and in...
Mapquest now lets you find and compare gas prices in your city, state or zip code....
The problem with most link emails is that there is never any real effort involved in getting the links. Just some generic crap about how they "really liked your site!" Wow. That's awesome! When I was contacted about getting the...
According to recent press release by ComScore, overall internet usage increased 10% from Dec. '05 to '06. Also includes information on top web destinations and category growth trends....
Ever wonder just what you as a client and your SEO firm as a service provider have the right to expect from each other? You're not the only one. As such, Stoney deGeyter has put together a comprehensive list of...
It doesn't take much to get the SEO industry from driving straight to Kooksville with their conspiracy theories and predictions of doom and destruction. After Google blogged about their algorithm change to combat Googlebombing, some in the SEO community came...
Someone asked me my definition of success recently and I responded: Life, Health and Happiness. Life and health are easily determined, but happiness is pretty darn vague, and I deliberately answered that way. What makes me happy?...
Last Wednesday Eric Enge put together a great article called "An Introduction to SEO Best Practices" for Search Engine Watch's Search Day subscribers. In the article Eric boils SEO down to four crucial components....
Investment into the stock market and PPC marketing has a lot of similarities. By drawing these comparisons this article sheds some light on the expectations of a well-managed PPC campaign and provides solutions to effectively managing your PPC "portfolio"....
If you're like me, that frugality carries over into just about all areas of your life, including searching for an SEO company. But one thing that bargain shoppers tend to find out the hard way is that sometimes the best...
What were you doing the day after Christmas? If you were like many folks, you were online. According to Nielsen//NetRatings online shopping for the day after Christmas rose 35% over 2005....
Optimized text (OT) is first and foremost marketing copy for the website. Each optimized page must be written with the client's products or services in mind. They are not general information pages, but pages designed to provide the visitor with...
The ignorance of the Wikipedia community in regards to SEO is, well, interesting. There is an internal debate as to whether or not Matt Cutts is noteworthy for his own Wikipedia page. Huh? Really?...
PPC (pay-per-click) advertising has been a great way to almost instantly start an online marketing campaign and get immediate returns. Recently, however larger companies seem to be cutting back on their PPC spending. Last week MarketWatch posted a story about...
I've always thought of SEO as a long-term process. More of a perpetual process, really. SEO firms (not to be confused with SEO consultants) tend to provide one of two different types of service. For the most part, they can...
Matt McGee has a great post over on his Small Business SEM blog titled, The #1 SEO and Marketing Tactic for 2007: Trust. Keep reading to find out more......
The blogosphere is a great place to get information, learn new things and even to spread your own knowledge. It's also a way for myths and rumors to spread, many times unchecked. These myths get passed on from blog to...
SEO Guru Dan Thies has announced that he'll be closing his doors to his SEO training programs. Why, you ask? Well, Dan will explain it all at his "retirement party" teleseminar, during which he'll answer all our questions....