Marketing on the Web
I just read a great article by Ian Lurie at Coversation Marketing titled Things You Don't Know About Your Customers. Perhaps more aptly named Things to remember when designing a website, its a great read with clear points we all need to remember. In summary: Updated 3/2020: Reading onscreen is hard, for everyone. Use short paragraphs. Use wide line spacing and nice margins. Use dark text on a light background. Scrolling up-and-down is OK Use lists. They view in an...
MoreNew Ways to Address Duplicate Content
Duplicate Content has long been an issue with webmasters and is cause for concern because duplicating content dilutes your ranking in search results. Perhaps the most common cause of having duplicate content is in allowing both www. and non www versions of your site to exist. However, another place where I see duplicate content occur is when a customer has multiple domain names pointing to the same content. When you use multiple domain names, and there are good reasons to do this, you should pic...
MoreCreating Content that Relevant and Reputable
Matt Cutts at the 2009 WordCamp. In this video he discusses terms like google juice, page rank, and back links, but don't get overwhelmed by the jargon. The central theme is creating content that is relevant and reputable. Worth watching! There are so many nuggets in this. You can skip the first 5 minutes and 30 seconds, but from there to around 19 minutes in, it's great general information to help you understand ranking and content. After 19 minutes, it briefly goes more into WordPress ...
MoreWhitehat SEO for WordPress
Matt Cutts' Whitehat video from WordCamp 2007 still rings true. While it's targeted at WordPress users, it has broad application and conveys an enormous amount of information. The video discusses SEO tips in plain speak - recommended. Note, he starts with a site that has been banned and gets a bit technical, but quickly moves into more general territory. The Q&A at the end is very much worth watching.
MoreYahoo and Microsoft Deal
The big news in the press today is the Microsoft/Yahoo deal. I have already received questions about this from a couple of clients, so I thought it best to expand here. In the deal the search brand at Yahoo will remain to be "Yahoo Search" but it will be "Powered by Bing." There will be no immediate changes however until they get regulatory approval, following approval the integration effort will move forward (expected early 2010). What about allocating advertising dollars? In the deal ...
MoreAdWords Search Query Performance Report
The Search Query Performance report in AdWords is a rich source of information that can help you hone in on the most productive phrases in your campaign. If you were bidding on a broad term like "Marketing" the report shows all the phrases that were triggered from that term, you might see "internet marketing", "web marketing" or "marketing on the internet." You can then evaluate the click thru rate (CTR), cost per click (CPC) and conversions on that term to determine if it's a good fit for yo...
MoreDoes Your Site have a Google Penalty
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...
MoreLink 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
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