I don’t have much faith in Google’s (or any other engine’s, for that matter) estimated number of results, and I’ve held this view for a long time. I believe it to be a wildly inaccurate number. If you think about it, why would a search engine put a lot of effort or processing power into […]

It’s not unusual for prospects to be under the mistaken impression that natural search (SEO) is free. It takes ongoing investment, that investment comes at a cost, and that cost has to be budgeted for. But while these prospects are trying to hire our firm they are also sending us a very mixed message: “We […]

I’ve always taught in SEO training sessions that Google queries are case-insensitive. Indeed, Google states this in their online documentation in no uncertain terms: Google searches are NOT case sensitive. All letters, regardless of how you type them, will be understood as lower case. For example, searches for george washington, George Washington, and gEoRgE wAsHiNgToN […]

The most important on-page factor for SEO is the title tag — that bit of text between the <title></title> tags. There are already some outstanding articles out there on how to craft successful title tags — specifically, Netconcepts’ own Brian Brown has a two-part guide on successful title tag strategies (part 1 and part 2) […]

As I mentioned over on Searchlight, Yahoo Suggest is a quick-n-dirty, free keyword research tool that can serve as a nice alternative to Google Suggest. Google Suggest has Yahoo Suggest beat for convenience if you have the Google Toolbar installed, since you just start typing keystrokes into the toolbar’s search field and it displays a […]

When I spoke at SMX West in February on the “Unraveling URLs and Demystifying Domains” panel, I got pretty geeky with the regular expressions, rewrite rules, conditional redirects, and so on. I won’t geek out so much here in the post, so no I won’t be going into pattern matching gotchas that can make your […]

Howie Jacobson, author of AdWords for Dummies, asked me about the SEO implications of aliasing multiple domain names to one IP address as a workaround for Google’s new AdWords rule change. As of April 1st, Google no longer allows a display URL in your Google ad if it redirects to a different domain name. This […]

I’m helping Danny Sullivan with coordinating the “Buying Sites for SEO” panel session at SMX Advanced, taking place June 3-4 in Seattle. And I’m looking for panelist recommendations. The session will cover how to find the gems out there, criteria to consider, ways to negotiate, how to best leverage your new purchase etc. and will […]

As many of you know, I’m a strict white hat SEO. In the SEO world, I see some people (who shall remain nameless) who use very gray hat methods… And guess what, sometimes it works. However, you have to believe that Google is keeping a record of what you’re up to, even if you haven’t […]

WebProNews did a bunch of great interviews at SMX West. I wanted to highlight three in particular (granted I’m a bit biased!)… First is this interview of me is on how to optimize the flow of PageRank through your site and the tactic of “PageRank sculpting”: Second is this one of my brilliant Netconcepts’ colleague […]