SEO Archive

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.

Monday, Frank Schilling coined the term Ballmerfreude -- taking pleasure from Steve Ballmer's misfortune. I shared that post from within Google Reader, so it shows up on my sidebar now. Well, an unintended side-effect of that is that I'm now the only site that ranks for that term right now in both Google and MSN, while Frank is the only one who ranks for it in Ask. (Strangely, Yahoo still doesn't have any ... Keep reading »

Of course, that's not because I have budged from my PageRank of 4, but because ProBlogger.net, CopyBlogger, John Chow, and Blog Herald have all been chopped to a PR 4 -- apparently for selling links. Again, I'm not taking a stand on it one way or another, but if this doesn't convince you to stop selling text links, you must be earning a ton.

When trying to drive traffic to your site, bloggers are your best friends. Not only can they drive some great traffic with just a mention on their site, but when they link to you search engines take notice. Right now, nothing beats a good link from a blog. So how do you get them to mention your site? Get Their Attention If you've got a great site, this might be all you have to ... Keep reading »

If you care about traffic from Google, it's time to stop selling text links. They have confirmed that publicly now. I realize this may be pure FUD on their part, and I realize that I'm totally drinking their Kool-Aid, but if the largest source of my traffic says that they'll penalize me for selling text links, then hey, I'm not going to sell text links. I'm going to find another ... Keep reading »

Sounds like a scam, doesn't it? Well this time it's not. $9.99 is what GoDaddy charges for a year of domain name registration, and extending your registration by an extra year can have significant impact on your rankings. Back at the beginning of 2005, Google fulfilled the requirements to become a domain registrar. They had no plans to sell domain names, though. Instead, they were very up front about that ... Keep reading »

Many of you may hear a buzz this weekend about Google's "PageRank update," so I wanted to clear up some misconceptions so that you don't lose focus on what's important. PageRank (or PR) is a measure of the link weight pointing to a page. The more links you get from pages that have more links to them, the higher your PageRank. PageRank is just one of more than 100 variables that determine where Google ranks a page in the search results. ... Keep reading »

We all know that search engines can bring us free traffic, so last week we covered the basics of how to SEO a blog. That's where you should start if you haven't already. The next step, though, is to start ranking well for terms that you already rank for somewhere in the results. Pages in the top 3 results can get ten times as much traffic (or more) than ... Keep reading »

A month ago yesterday, I made a open attempt to start ranking for "Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan" as part of an example of how important <title>s are. Well this morning I discovered that that was an even better idea than I thought it was. Not only am I now ranking fourth in Google (as of this writing), but 14 of the last 100 visitors to ... Keep reading »

You've probably heard many times about all the free visitors you can get from search engines. Well SEO, or search engine optimization, is the science -- and art -- of getting a site to rank well in order to get as many of those visitors as possible. The great thing for you as a blogger is that you don't have to been an SEO expert to see quite a bit of search engine traffic to your site because most blogs are tailor-made for ranking well in search engines. Just take a look at the top ten search engine ranking factors and notice how many are naturally inherent in blogs. I count seven to nine, depending on how strict you want to be. Since blogs are almost always text-heavy, very community-driven and interlinked heavily, it's hard to find your blog not ranking for lots of things if it becomes popular. However, there are a few easy things that you do need to do to ensure that you're set up for search engine success. The basic principle behind all of them is that SEO, first and foremost, is about so much more than your homepage. Especially with blogs, you'll find that most of your search engine visitors come in on anything but your homepage. So almost all the basic SEO for a blog has to do with your individual pages. Keep reading »