Last week I was in Sydney speaking at the new Australian SEO conference Search Engine Room. It was my first time in Australia, which is inexcusable considering it’s just “across the ditch” from New Zealand — where I’ve been living for over 5 years now. For a brand new conference, I found Search Engine Room […]

Sad but true! We don’t control the search engines. All we can do is endeavor to create content that the search engines will find worthy and rank accordingly. To rank for the most generic (yet still relevant) keyword possible, your page content needs to be focused on one (or possibly a couple, but certainly no […]

If you read Marketing Profs, you may have seen my two-part article over the last couple of weeks Ten Tips to Help Your Blog Soar in the Search Engines. The tips involved… Specific customizing of your title tags Ways to clean up your URL structure and aggregate link gain to a single definitive (canonical) URL […]

There has been plenty of discussion in the blogosphere about blogs and search engine optimization (SEO). Google in particular seems to love blogs. Blogs are rich in content, heavily linked, with links that tend to be contextual, and without much in the way of code bloat or gratuitous flash animation. In short, blogs are search […]

The problem with embedding a tracking code into URLs to track referrals from particular marketing campaigns or from particular partners is that inevitably those URLs end up in other places, such as in the search engines. Thus your referral numbers become overinflated. Case in point: Google’s “Inside AdSense” Blog. A couple days ago I searched […]

Understanding your competitors — their strategy, their tactics, their level of success, etc. — is crucial to the success of your SEO initiatives. I’m not just talking about your traditional competitors, I’m referring to the other sites occupying spots in the SERPs (search engine results pages) for keywords that you are targeting. Many free competitive […]

The web team at Verizon Information Directories who operate the top online yellow pages site SuperPages.com, are really clued in to SEO. (I should know since they’re one of our clients!). So you could imagine my delight when Chris Smith, who heads up the team there, accepted my offer to become a contributing blogger at […]

I am hearing from a lot of business people who are trying to hire an in-house search engine optimization expert that they’re having a heck of a time finding people. All the SEO experts are gainfully employed and already earning a heck of a lot of money, making it very hard to lure them away […]

If you’ve got a multi-author blog and those bloggers have their own independent websites, they’ll probably want and appreciate getting links from you. Include links to all your author’s websites in your sidebar rather than at the bottom of your page, because footer links don’t get as much weight by the search engines. Or better […]

Using bold, strong, or emphasis tags within the body copy of your blog posts will help identify to search engines like Yahoo! which words/phrases should be given more weight. This is a useful technique for blog optimization. Notice that I made the phrase “blog optimization” bold in the previous sentence. That’s an example of this […]