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Just over a week ago Aaron Wall of SEOBook.com agreed to do an interview with us.
We thought it might be nice for you, our loyal readers and participaters (new word I just made up) in this blog to ask him any questions you had relating to SEO.
Below are the seven questions and answers […]
Continue Reading: 7 Questions With Aaron Wall of SEOBook.com
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After writing my review of Wordpot, the fast and free keyword discovery tool, I received an email from Nicole over at Trelian.
She wanted to know if I’d be interested in a free one-month trial of their Keyword Discovery tool which costs $49.95. That’s $10 less than Wordtracker and $49.95 more than Wordpot.
Nicole was probably […]
Continue Reading: Trellian Keyword Discovery Tool
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Here is a short video of Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, discussing snippets.
A snippet is the information that appears about your web site when it appears appears on a search engine results page. A snippet will usually contain your web page title and meta description, but there is more to it than that. In this video Matt uses Starbucks as an example to explain a few things about the information that appears in a snippet.
The one thing to take away from this video, is that no matter how well your site ranks in Google, your snippet can be the deciding factor on whether someone visits your site or not. So the more you know about them them the better…
Continue Reading: Google’s Matt Cutts Discusses Snippets
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Aaron Wall of SEO Book is giving away free SEO advice to anybody who wants it.
He usually charges $500 per hour for this type of advice. So this is a steal.
To ask Aaron a question, post a comment on his Q & A Open Thread post. I’ve already asked him a couple questions and […]
Continue Reading: Free SEO Advice From Aaron Wall
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Since Overture’s free keyword research tool went off line in January, there has been a void in the market and a need for another free keyword research tool. Wordpot has stepped up to fill that void.
With a database of more than 80 million keywords and search terms, Wordpot is a free keyword research tool […]
Continue Reading: Wordpot Free Keyword Research Tool
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As many of you should be aware of by know, Google updated it’s Page Rank last week.
Part of the Page Rank update included lowering the Page Rank of many web sites that were selling links.
By lowering the Page Rank for web sites that sell links, Google tried to do two things…
Continue Reading: How to Sell Links Without Feeling the Wrath of Google
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The “invisible web” is all the web pages that search engines have not indexed. It is estimated that the invisible web is 544 times larger than the visible or indexed web.
The fact that most of the web is not indexed should be very important to internet marketers and SEO’s.
There are probably many web pages that are linking to web sites you maintain that Google has not indexed. These links could be the difference between higher rankings.
Continue Reading: Making the “Invisible Web” Visable
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Many web sites use the NOSCRIPT HTML element to gain very high Page Ranks and search engine rankings for the keywords they want.
The intended use of the NOSCRIPT element is for providing alternate content when a javascript is not executed. When the javascript is executed the content between the NOSCRIPT tag is not displayed. Since […]
Continue Reading: The Hidden Links That Google Turns a Blind Eye To
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Since our Get Indexed and Ranked in 24 Hours post gets a fair amount of search traffic, I thought it would be a good idea to share with you the Quick Indexing Tool created by Blue Hat SEO that I recently discovered.
The Blue Hat SEO web site claims that the Quick Indexing Tool (QUIT for […]
Continue Reading: How to Get Indexed In 24 Hours The Easy Way
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Late last week I received an email from One Way Back Links that said they have an extra 2 million text links that they need to sell by the end of the month. That sounds like a lot of links.
I wanted to get the skinny on One Way Back Links, so I called the number in the email. I spoke with a guy named Dave who gave me the run down.
What’s the deal?
Just over a year ago One Way Back Links started creating a lot of directories filled with free articles. They now have over 1000 web sites with over 100,000 pages. They sell three different types of links on these pages:
Continue Reading: The 411 on One Way Back Links
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A Google hand-edit is when a Google engineer manually goes through your web site/back links and gives you the ranking that they think you deserve.
If Google finds that your web site violates their webmaster guidelines, you’re web site will probably be penalized.
The importance of avoiding a Google hand-edit
For many web sites the only way to compete for some keywords is by ignoring Google’s webmaster guidelines and buying links. This is because the competition is doing it and it works really well.
Many businesses are in business because of their Google rankings. A penalty due to a Google hand-edit could put them out of business. Web sites that avoid being edited do well for themselves.
Continue Reading: 5 Ways To Avoid a Google Hand Edit
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Back when Flash technology was new, many people opted for all Flash web sites because of the ‘cool’ factor.
Today we see a lot more hybrid web sites (html sites with some Flash elements) because all-Flash sites are a nightmare for search.
Search engines have a very hard time knowing what text is in your […]
Continue Reading: How To Get Search Credit For Flash Content
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Google is cracking down on link selling by going after the biggest text link broker, Text Link Ads.
Do a search for ‘text link ads’ in Google and the Text Link Ads web site shows up 43rd. There is no other explanation for a web site with a PR7 not showing up for a search on it’s own name than Google is penalizing it.
Continue Reading: Google Penalizes Text Link Ads
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A client of mine recently asked me if I thought they should write a Wikipedia article about their company.
It may seem like a good idea to have an article about your company in the largest and most popular online encyclopedia. However, like I told my client, there are a few good reasons why many companies should stay out.
Continue Reading: 4 Reasons Not To Put Your Company in the Wikipedia
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I recently purchased an after-market domain from Buy Domains for a project I’m working on.
I believe that I paid much less than I should have because of the age of the domain, which goes back as far as August 2000 according to the Way Back Machine. There are still links coming into the domain that first appeared in 2002.
Having an old history to a domain name and inbound links can drastically increase the value of a domain.
Continue Reading: Intelligent Domain Buying and Selling Tips
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Question: Should SEO professionals get 15% commission on the links they buy for their clients?
Most ad agencies and media buyers make a 15% commission on the media they purchase for their clients. This includes the placement of television commercials, radio spots, print ads, web site banner ads, billboards and more.
Ad agencies and graphic design firms also make a 15% commission on the printing of brochures, magazines, stationary and so on. This commission comes out of what the client pays to the media and printing companies.
Continue Reading: Link Buying vs Media Buying: Where is the 15% Commission?
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This is the sixth part of my SEO for Wordpress series. Previously I wrote about title tags, header tags, filenames, meta description and duplicate content.
Today I am writing about a Wordpress plugin that allows you to modify the default number of posts displayed by the Wordpress loop before it creates a new page.
By default, the number of posts displayed by the Wordpress loop before it creates a new page is the same for all pages that list multiple posts. (ie. home page, category pages, search page)
This can have a negative effect on our SEO efforts because it places less importance on our older posts by putting them a few pages deep.
Continue Reading: SEO for Wordpress Part 6: Organizing Category Pages
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Introduced by Google in 2005 and initially intended to prevent blog and forum comment spam, the rel=”nofolow” tag is used to instruct search engines that a link should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index.
Most blog software like Wordpress and some forums use the “nofollow” attribute on links that readers submit.
Individual search engines handle rel=”nofollow” differently:
- Google does not “follow” the link at all.
- Yahoo! does not use the link in it’s ranking calculation, but does “follow” the link and index the page.
- MSN does not use the link in it’s ranking calculation, but there is little data to show whether they “follow” and index the link’s target.
- Ask.com does not support the attribute.
Continue Reading: Everything You Need To Know About rel=nofollow
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This is the fifth part of my SEO for Wordpress series. Previously I wrote about title tags, header tags, filenames and meta descriptions. Today I am writing about duplicate content issues for Wordpress blogs.
What’s Wrong With Duplicate Content?
When search engine bots see duplicate content, they try to determine the original source so that they can choose which version to display in the search results. Duplicate content is often associated with content theft, spamming, splogging (example of splog: http://howtoblog.cc/?p=254) and other SEO bad practices, so it is possible that a site or pages within a site can be penalized.
Continue Reading: SEO for Wordpress Part 5: Duplicate Content
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This is the fourth part of my SEO for Wordpress series. Previously I wrote about title tags, header tags and filenames.
Even though the meta description tag is less relevant for influencing search results than it was a few years back, it can still play an important role in bringing traffic to your site.
Most search engines put the first 190 characters of your meta description tag below the linked title of your page in their search results. If written in a compelling manner, combined with your title tag it may draw searchers into your site.
Continue Reading: SEO for Wordpress Part 4: Meta Description
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This is the third part of my series on SEO for Wordpress. The first two parts were on title tags and header tags.
Filenames Important To Search
Since the filename of a page is an important factor in search engine algorithms it is important that we name our pages appropriately.
Ideally we want the main keywords of our article separated by dashes. For example, a good name for this page would be ‘wordpress-file-names’ or ’seo-wordpress-file-names’.
Continue Reading: SEO for Wordpress Part 3: Filenames
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This is the second part of my series on SEO for Wordpress. The first part was on title tags.
The H1 Tag
After the title tag, the H1 tag is the most valuable on-page asset in influencing the search engines.
Most Wordpress themes have the same H1 tag on every page of the site because there is one header.php file that is used for each page. In this header.php file the name of the blog is surrounded by H1 tags. That will work great for the home page, but not for every other page on the site. For all other pages, we will want to put the title of the page in the H1 tag.
Continue Reading: SEO for Wordpress Part 2: Header Tags
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When redesigning the Virtual Marketing Blog, we ran into a number of issues related to optimizing the site for search engines. One of those issues was the title tag.
The default title that come with Wordpress will likely leave a lot of your pages in Google’s supplemental results because the name of your blog appears at the beginning of each title on every page. By default the blog name appears first then some funny arrow and lastly the name of the post, archive or page. The most important information appears last.
Continue Reading: SEO for Wordpress Part 1: Title Tags
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With 2008 just a few months away, it’s time to start thinking about what your goals and strategies are going to be. Here are a few tips and tricks for SEO (okay, I threw a few other tips in there as well).
Optimize for Mobile Phone Traffic
With the iPhone taking the mobile spectrum by storm, […]
Continue Reading: 2008 SEO Checklist
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Building incoming links is the best way to improve your search engine rankings. Do it improperly and you could drop out of the rankings. Below are seven tips to successful link building and a natural looking link pattern.
Build links from sites that are similar in theme to yours. A link from a site that has […]
Continue Reading: 7 Tips to Successful Link Building
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I recently purchased some Post Level Text Link Ads for one of my clients and was pleasantly surprised with the results. Post Level TLA’s are positioned just below the end of blog posts and before the comments. Advertisers are allowed to have a full 80 character title and 150 letter description, and there can be […]
Continue Reading: Review of Post Level Text Link Ads
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ReviewMe launched a new service today called Advertorials. The new service allows advertisers to order blog posts like their current offerings with the difference being the advertiser writes the post. ReviewMe says that Advertorials are an “advertisement written in the form of an objective opinion editorial, and presented in a printed publication usually […]
Continue Reading: ReviewMe Launches Advertorials
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With the new updates at Google, companies using YouTube to advertise, and video use up, it’s time to start thinking on how to get videos to rank well organically.
Like any other organic search project, you need to write quality title tags. However, since your main purpose is people not search engines, you’ll […]
Continue Reading: Video Search Engine Optimization
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I’m looking for exchange links with a few related sites, so if your website is a pagerank 3+ and is internet marketing related, please contact me.
My sites statistics:
Pagerank: 3
Alexa: 100,000
Technorati: 17,000
On an unrelated note and thanks to FeedBurner, you can now subscribe with your email address to Virtual Marketing Blog! And in case you […]
Continue Reading: Let’s Exchage Links and Subscribe by Email
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Here is a cool video about leveraging nofollow to your benefit. In short, nofollow pages like about us, sitemap, privacy policy, etc (pages that don’t generate money) and keep money generating pages followed. This will increase PageRank on those money generating pages. Great idea, but I’m not sure how much that is […]
Continue Reading: Leveraging Nofollow To Your Benefit
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With the recent launch of the iPhone and many more Americans having access to the mobile internet, it’s time to start thinking about landing pages | |
