SEO Archive

Last week, Rob Ousbey from distilled posted a really interesting perspective on link building on the SEOmoz blog.  It's very much worth a read if you haven't yet.

I was an Internet Marketing consultant for several years -- including 2.5 years full-time while my first website was still getting off the ground -- and I still do pro bono consulting from time to time just to meet new people and be exposed to new industries. Virtually all the sites I've worked with have been U.S. sites that marketed nationwide, but I've worked with a handful who were only interested in marketing locally.  Here's what I've learned with ... Keep reading »

Back in January, Aaron wrote about the corrosive effect that Twitter is having on marketing online.  Because Twitter links are no-followed (and often TinyURLed), sites like Google never see the links that people tweet.  There's also a very temporal nature to Twitter that, as Aaron puts it, makes the content "here today, gone today."  Since then, he's even gone so far as to say that he's going to cut back on social networking because of negative effects like ... Keep reading »

I was talking with Aaron Wall last week, and he happened to ask if I had installed his SEO Toolbar.  I admitted I hadn't.  It wasn't because I didn't know about it -- if you're in this space at all, you saw everyone talking about it when it was released and it got phenomenal reviews.  It's just that I'm just not doing any heavy SEO lately, so I didn't think I needed it. Wow, was I wrong. I can't believe all ... Keep reading »

I'm frequently asked some form of this question: I want to make a living online, but I'm just starting out.  What's the number one skill I should develop? There are many skills that you can make a living online with -- there's no magic combination -- so I think I've answered most often that you should just try out several different things and see which you like and are the best at. However, I have realized that there is indeed one skill ... Keep reading »

If your site was deleted from the Google index would anyone other than you notice and care? That was a quote from Aaron in "How Does the Algorithm View Your Website?", and nothing has ever rang more true to me. See, I had a site in the same mold as so many others that I had had success with.  It was a very easy model for making great money: find a ... Keep reading »

Trying to rank well in Yahoo! can be frustrating (to say the least).  I know people who have tried for years to rank well -- and who own top spots for major keywords in both Google and MSN -- but who have had zero success at all with Yahoo!. Here's why. For at least some industries and/or keywords, the top spots are reserved for those who are paying to be there.  Yahoo! provides this helpful illustration:... Keep reading »

So I read Search Engine Myths Exposed yesterday. (If you're involved in Internet marketing at all, I'm sure you saw at least one person pushing it.) It was free, and since getting good at SEO is what started my journey, I figured I'd give it a look and see what "expert" advice this "guru" was giving. The first thing I found was that he definitely has the Internet Marketing Hype Meter turned all the way up to 11 ... Keep reading »

Well, to be more specific, the title tags are there but there's nothing in them. I thought it was just the homepage, but it appears to be every page on their site. Title tags are the single most important element of the page in terms of search engine performance, so they're really doing themselves a disservice. We used to have stuff like that happen all the time, though, so I understand. You don't notice the title tags very ... Keep reading »

Today Aaron Wall has the best definition I've seen yet of what constitutes search engine spam. It's simple, clean and true. We should all apply it to our sites.