In April, Facebook held its annual developers conference in California. Most of the buzz coming from this even has centered on the company’s efforts to redouble its efforts on creating an open network of integration with sites across the web. To summarize the initiative, participating sites will automatically recognize Facebook users, and any time a Facebook user goes to a page on their site, they will see which (if any) of their friends has interacted with the page before.

Yelp, for example, will automatically recognize who I am when I enter their site, and will be able to show me specific recommendations and reviews from my friends for restaurants, services, local businesses, and the like.

Read More

If you hadn’t yet noticed, Google Webmaster Tools has really been adding a ton of new features. Making the announcement on the Webmaster Central blog last week, a Google rep wrote:

We previously just reported the average position at which your site’s pages appeared in the search results for a particular query. Now you can click on a given search query in the Top search queries report to see a breakdown of the number of impressions and the amount of clickthrough for each position that your site’s pages appeared at in the search results associated with that query.

The obvious question here might be what, if any, practical value do these new data provide?

And the answer is that it depends on much traffic and search volume your site gets.

Read More

Obtaining a listing that shows up in the prominent Google one-box or local 10-pack is becoming increasingly important for any business looking to compete in a local marketplace. Where the print Yellow Pages used to dominate the local advertising dollars, the big 3 search engines, local and national vertical directories and IYP’s are on the rise, full steam ahead.

When Google one-boxes first started popping up years ago, it was few and far between for most local based searches without a great set of tools to further improve the visibility and rankings short of adding keywords to your business name. Read More

Google recently announced that they will be making some changes to their referral string format which will be rolling out this week.

The old url referral string looked something like this:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=flowers&btnG=Google+Search

The new one will look something like this:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=7&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm&ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN&rct=j&q=flowers&usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w&sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw
Read More

Today Google announced that they are rolling out longer meta description snippets for some keyword searches. The new feature will appear in search results for queries that are 3 words or longer and have a very specific intent. So for example, if you are searching for something like “Google Rolls Out Extended Snippets” you’ll see some results that have longer meta description snippets (3 or 4 lines instead of only 2) like this: Read More

One of the most important things a local business can do is to create a locally visible presence. 20 years ago a billboard may have seemed like the best option. Perhaps a 30 second spot on local television, or maybe a newspaper ad. Not having a Yellow Pages was small business suicide as it was the only place that people would actively look for what your small business had to offer. Today more and more people are jumping online to actively find local businesses.

It’s said that as much as 40% of all online searches have a local intent, with a said whopping 80% of commercial searches having local intent. This makes sense. If I search for “pet store”, I almost assuredly am looking for one in Chicago, where I live, and not in Florida. It’s not the most refined search, but these generic searches certainly occur with regularity. Read More

There are many good reasons to start a blog. I’ll give you a few. Perhaps you want to share your specific expertise with the world. Maybe you want to give your company a voice that speaks directly to your clients/customers. Or maybe you just like writing. Here’s one good reason not to start a blog…because somebody told you it helps with SEO.

Blogs do not help you with SEO if you have nothing interesting to say! Let me explain why.

If you’re not saying anything interesting you won’t have any readers and you will quickly drop blogging like a bad bean pie. You’ll have a blog that just sits there and stinks up the rest of your site. Your visitors will come to check out your blog and think you’re a big a loser because you haven’t updated your blog in over a year. You need to have commitment and/or passion to blog consistently and doing it for SEO reasons won’t provide that.

If you think you are serious about starting a blog, here are three things to consider: Read More

Ahhh Goals — Don’t you love ‘em…and hate ‘em! Once the hangover from the holidays wears off you are faced with the fact that it’s a new year and just like everybody else you feel compelled to make this the year that your going to make it happen.

Make what happen?

You know, that thing that you’ve been thinking about for the last 3 months. That thing that you KNOW you should’ve been doing by now. They say you should keep your goals simple and try not to take on too many things at once so I’m going to give you one simple suggestion that will help make your SEO campaign goals successful in 09.
Read More

Just read through all of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and noticed there was no mention of avoiding paid links. Hmmm… Do you think they simply forgot to mention this in their popular guidelines for webmasters? This is the page they tell webmasters to read if they are having ranking problems or for those who have been banned. Seems like it would be logical to mention linking practices that they definitely don’t agree with.

It seems a bit strage that I can’t find much in all of Google’s official documentation against BUYING paid links. It’s more geared towards those sites SELLING and how they should make sure they don’t pass “link juice” to sites that are buying advertising. Here’s some evidence of that…
Read More

Recently, Google released a starter guide explaining some of the basics principles of SEO. I believe this is a very positive thing for SEO’s since it confirms what we have been preaching (and practicing) for years. Things like title tags, meta descriptions, useful 404 pages, search engine friendly URL’s are the cornerstone of any well ranked site and should always be implemented before getting to the stuff that REALLY helps you rank above your competitors….that’s why I like that they appropriately named this a “starter guide”. It’s similar to a starter guide to renovating a house, you can probably cover a few of the basics yourself but if you want to do anything major and you want it done right, you’re better off calling in the pros.

Over the last couple of years I’ve noticed a couple things in the search space: 1. keyword tools are unreliable 2. PPC traffic can show some valuable search trends. Well here’s the point: PPC and SEO help to inform each other consistently.

There are reasons why SEO and PPC should always be in cahoots: On the SEO side, a simple look at the analytics queries that come through and spend time on site are usually from keywords that are relevant and have a value. If there is evidence that some terms that show up organically on page 2 or deeper in the SERPs are getting hit are are converting, then these are that have value for PPC. We can immediately pay PPC to be seen next to the top ranking organic sites showing for these competitive terms. Of course, because this is PAID traffic, and because CPCs can be so wildly different for each industry or vertical, ROI calculations should be applied constantly.

Now it gets interesting. Read More

Okay, the title of this post is a bit harsh but it got your attention didn’t it? This is the first in a series of posts answering some relatively basic SEO questions that people typically get confused by. The questions are actually not that stupid, they are common misconceptions about how search engines work.

Today’s question is: What’s worse…duplicate content from within your own site or duplicate content from other sites?

The person asking this question wants to know if having duplicate content on pages within your own site is better or worse than stealing content from other sites and putting it on your site. This is like asking, what’s worse, a broken radiator or a broken transmission? Obviously, both are equally as bad, in different ways.
Read More

How fast does your website load? You can test out your pages with this web page speed test tool.

There has been a lot of attention on page load speed lately. There used to be more focus on page load speed back when everybody was on 56k modems, but it seems a lot of the best practices from those days have gone out the window since high speed internet came along. I’d like to remind people that it’s still important to optimize the speed of your pages. It can affect how much traffic your site receives, how many vistors stay on your site after you get them there and the bottom line…how much money your site makes. This is especially true for ecommerce sites that naturally get more browsing and page views per visitor.
Read More