Marketing on the Web It is often hard to tell what is a real penalty as there can be may causes for your content to drop in the search engine result pages (SERPs). There are things that should be obvious, like changes in SERPs that co-inside with changes you made to the site. However, often results don't directly co-inside with changes and therefore it can be difficult to track back. It can be challenging to discover if: You've got a true penalty You've been outranked according to the current algorithm It...
MoreSearch Engine Optimization
Marketing on the Web explores Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and how it can impact your web marketing efforts.
Link Building with Directory Services
Carrie Hill just published a summary of directories that should be on every one's link building list. These are credible sources that the search engines use to help determine the relevancy of your site for things like products, services, or locality. See Carrie's list of Must Have List of Directories Related: Building Incoming Links Directories and Incoming Links
MoreMod Rewrite for Better Living
I have written before about never deleting or renaming a page, but there are times when it is unavoidable. Restructuring a site, removing obsolete products and changing scripting languages (moving to shtml from php, or php from html) make this a common problem. I am in the middle of two large projects that will involve changing the names of many pages. These are both Joomla-based sites, so I am mitigating some of the problems by using sh404sef. It does a great job of helping you control page ...
MoreRel Canonical now supported by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo
There is a new Canonical tag that is supported by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. This is important news, especially as people are working more and more with CMS systems and database driven websites (such as Joomla, WordPress, etc). The issue is that people can arrive at your content in a variety of ways. The simplest variation being www. versus non www. version of your site. What's that, you say they are the same? Au contraire mon fraire, to a search engine www is a separate sub-domain. There...
MoreBuilding Incoming Links
One of the cornerstones of improving any business is referrals. Nothing promotes a product or service better than positive comments from someone you know and respect or from an authority in the field. The same is true for your website. To explain the importance of incoming links to grow traffic to your website, I often use a metaphor of selecting a roofer. You don't know a roofer, but you have a friend that builds houses, so you ask who he would use. The answer provides not only who to call,...
MoreGoogle Publishes SEO Guide
Google has a number of good resources for webmasters, but they have just released an Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. So, if you ever wondered if all that stuff you have heard about optimizing your website for Google is hooey or not... this is a great place to find out.
MoreLaunching a new Website / Changing an existing one
Whether launching a new website or changing an existing one it is important to do a little upfront work. I have had a couple of clients come to me recently either wanting to toss out their old site and start over or who have sadly, already made wholesale changes to page names or content only to find that their website can no longer be found in search results. Things to consider when launching a new Website or changing an existing one: Never rename or delete a page (well almost). If you a...
MoreLanding Pages to Improve Quality Score
I have been on a mission with several of my clients to establish good landing pages. Good landing pages can improve Quality Score and your rank for key phrases. A good Quality Score means Google considers your page to be relevant to the phrases used in your ad campaigns and directly impacts what you pay Google for your ads. This test demonstrates the real dollar impact (savings), when it’s done right. see: Landing Pages to Improve Quality Score Google suggests: Improve the quality of you...
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