The Phonebook is Dead

Increasingly people are going on-line, not only for phone number and addresses, but for reviews and recommendations. Website’s not only give you the opportunity to list the standard phonebook info like you’re address, when you’re open and years in business, but also detailed information and photos about your products and services. You can explain who you are and why someone should do business with you. You can post videos not only about your company, but about the work you have performed and of ...
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Are Meta Keywords Obsolete?

Yahoo announced at the SMX East conference yesterday that they were no longer using meta keywords. In the report Yahoo stated that they had announced this earlier in the year - but apparently no one outside Yahoo got the memo. While none of the major engines now support meta keywords, I still recommend using topic and category specific keywords in all your pages. There are a lot of spiders crawling the web that still use this information to categorize your content and can result in back-links to...
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Website Design Recommendations

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...
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New 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...
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Creating 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 ...
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Whitehat 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.
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Yahoo 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 ...
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AdWords 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...
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