SEO And The Amazon Paradox
It was there all along and we unknowingly walked past. Apple’s reinvention of music and the phone created distraction. “Shock of the new” toys romanced us. In fairness, they are cool, empowering things, but the real revolution was happening quietly 850 miles north from Apple’s headquarters at 1 Infinite Loop ...
12 Most Overrated SEO Tactics (That Don’t Work!)
Knowing where to focus your time and energy when it comes to executing SEO tactics that will have value and drive rankings, traffic, and conversions is key to building a long term strategy to grow your online business. Below you will find ...
[Video] On-Page Optimization Tips For Advanced SEO
On-page optimizing is still a huge part of helping a site rank for primary head terms as well as mid and long tail keyword. A recent study by Conductor showed that optimizing on-page elements for the keywords marketers want to rank for is critical. On-page optimization for keywords ...
Top 9 SEO Reasons Against Building Microsites
I was recently asked by a client if they should create a microsite for a product set they were adding. This question really made me think about the value of microsites for SEO and branding purposes. What is ...
[Video] What Is Cloaking, The Definitive Answer By Google’s Matt Cutts
Video Summary A lot of people have questions about cloaking; what exactly is it, how does Google define it, and why is it high risk behavior. There is a lot of HTML documentation and Google has done a lot of blog posts, but Matt wanted to ...
Tips For Syndicating Content So You Don’t Hurt Your Rankings
Many websites and businesses operate on a distribution business model in which their sales come from other websites listing their products. These businesses sell their white label products into other businesses, and then the business utilize their own websites to sell the products through to the consumer. This ...
Tips For Optimizing Video for Organic Search (Google, Yahoo, Bing)
Optimizing Video for Organic Search In the past video has presented an interesting challenge for SEOs as it's widely accepted that Google cannot see or understand this content. However, the popularity of video with consumers, and the correlation with an increased conversion rate, indicates that it should not be omitted ...
SEO Tips For Sites That Operate On A Distribution, Affiliate, or Reseller Model
Distributors. Resellers. Affiliates. All are names for business entities who purchase goods and products directly from a supplier to resell, or redistribute to consumers. Distributors offer the manpower and cash flow needed to promote and sell products directly to consumers, and take the burden of mass distribution off the ...
Google Sitelinks FAQ: Where Do They Come From and How Can You Change Them?
We get asked this at least once a week by clients or prospects "where do the links under the first Google result come from?", or "how do I get Sitelinks to show up for my site?". So we decided to give our readers a resource guide for Sitelinks to answer ...
Not So Common Questions about the SEOmoz Tools and Pro Campaigns
As seasoned practitioners know, SEO is all about the details. I’ve been using the SEOmoz Pro campaigns and tools for awhile and along the way have noticed minor quirks and details that raised some questions beyond those answered in the FAQ section. Thanks to much help from the SEOmoz support team ...
Guide To Finding Your Real Online Keyword Competition
So when working with clients there are many things we look at to determine how well they are doing online. One metric we analyze is a clients online competition. We look at this from two angles; competitive link metrics and competitive ranking metrics. The problem we often come ...
How Many Pages Should I Add To My Site At One Time?
Q: “Ok let me explain my question. I own a few large sites 50,000 urls plus on each. We get large chunks of content from providers and traditionally we have added it all at one time. Recently we have seen a degrade in the amount of conent we add compared ...
How Do I Do SEO Myself?
I think that there are alot of things that one has to learn before doing seo themselves. Yes there are many great books that you can find that will give you insight into the science behind SEO, which will get you some results, but I think that until you actually ...
Where Does The Description Tag Come From In Google?
There are 3 primary ways Google gets your description tag for the search results. The first being the meta description tag that is in the header of the code. This will show up most of the time if the keyword being searched for is in that tag (which is why we ...
Why Submit Your Sitemap To Google
What is a submitted or off-site Sitemap: A Sitemap is a list of the pages on your website. Submitting a Sitemap helps make sure the search engines know about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by normal crawling process. There has been alot of ...
Hit Counters: Why You Should Never Use Website Hit Counters
What Are Hit Counters? We have all seen those little counters on the bottom of older websites and blogs that count the number of "hits" (which is a word that nobody should use anymore) a website gets. Back in the 90's during the time of GeoCities and other free site ...
What is SEO: The Evolution of The SEO Job
The following post was inspired by Rand at SEOmoz A little background on me. I started in the SEO space about 8 years ago, after spending 6 years of building sites without SEO in mind. Over the years the responsibility of the SEO (Me) has changed, not in ...
Screaming Frog SEO Spider: Mac’s Version of Xenu’s Link Sleuth
What is Xenu Link Sleuth? Xenu's Link Sleuth checks Web sites for broken links along with returning some valuable SEO data such as header code, title tag, page size. Xenu checks html links, image links, frames, plug-ins, backgrounds, local image maps, style sheets, scripts and java applets for broken links ...
How Does Google Rank Pages: Possible Ranking Factors
Domain Domain age Length of domain registration Domain registration information hidden/anonymous Site top level domain Site top level domain Sub domain or root domain? Domain past records Domain past owners Keywords in the domain Domain IP Domain IP neighbors Domain external mentions Geo-targeting settings in Google Webmaster Tools Server-side Server geographical location Server reliability / uptime Architecture URL structure HTML structure Semantic structure Use of external CSS / JS ...
How to Optimize PDF Documents for SEO
Verify the PDF is text-based For this select Advanced > Accessibility > Add Tags to Document and then select Advanced > Accessibility > Touch Up Reading Order. Acrobat will then show you the various parts of the PDF, including ...
SEO Past and Present: Remember When SEO Was Easy
Remember when SEO was easy. When if you focused enough energy and time on the 5 things below you could rank for just about anything. Create a useful page for the user Use the keywords in the correct way Get high quality external links with focused anchor text Make the site ...
The Difference Between Facebook Like, Website Like, and Become a Fan
Facebook Like Button that is placed on a clients website (that is pulled from the Facebook developers page) This is a script that pulls in the specific page a user is on (or it can be set to just pull in a specified URL). Must be logged into Facebook to use, and ...
Rank Better: Possible Google Ranking Factors In 2011
Below is a growing list of possible ranking factors that affect how a website or page ranks in the Google search results. This list has been compiled by Rand Fishkin at seomoz. These, along with a black box of Google ranking factors are given different weight as to how ...
When to Involve SEO: Top 10 Signs SEO Needs To Be Involved
A big question we hear alot from clients is "when should I bring in SEO?". This is a popular question since some companies are not well versed in what SEO actually can do or does on a day to day basis. Read our what is seo article for ...
Video Ranking Signals: How Google Could Rank Video Content
Video search is an ever expanding area that local and small businesses can use to capture some of the real estate on the first page of Google. They can also use this content type to add supplemental data to their Google Places listing. A video that is placed on your ...
The Key To SEO (Ranking Better): Acquisition and Optimized Distribution of Metrics
If one could bring all the details of SEO down into two simple concepts it would be the concepts of acquisition and distribution. Acquisition and distribution networks have been used in the offline business world long before the internet was around. These two concepts are inclusive of most ...
SEO and URL Analysis and Planning Tools
KnowEm KnowEm allows you to check for the use of your brand, product, personal name or username instantly on over 500 popular and emerging social media websites. Grab your name and secure your brand before someone else does. Check out Linchpinseo KnowEm profile Website W3.org Check the markup (HTML, XHTML, …) of ...
List of TLD (Top Level Domain) Country Website Codes
.ac Ascension Island .ad Andorra .ae United Arab Emirates .af Afghanistan .ag Antigua and Barbuda .ai Anguilla .al Albania .am Armenia .an Netherlands Antilles .ao Angola .aq Antarctica .ar Argentina .as American Samoa .at Austria .au Australia .aw Aruba .ax Aland .az Azerbaijan .ba Bosnia and Herzegovina .bb Barbados .bd Bangladesh .be Belgium .bf Burkina Faso .bg Bulgaria .bh Bahrain .bi Burundi .bj Benin .bm Bermuda .bn Brunei Darussalam .bo Bolivia .br Brazil .bs Bahamas .bt Bhutan .bv Bouvet Island .bw Botswana .by Belarus .bz Belize .ca ...
List of TLD (Top Level Domain) Types
.aero air-transport industry Must verify eligibility for registration; only those in various categories of air-travel-related entities may register. .asia Asia-Pacific region This is a TLD for companies, organizations, and individuals based in the region of Asia, Australia, and the Pacific. .biz business This is an open TLD; any person or entity is permitted to register; however, registrations may ...
Great content, natural links and buzz = the new SEO
This post is one of the best posts I have read in a while, one I actually agree with 100%, and 1 which outlines exactly what I have been preaching for about 2 years now. ...See the point here? It’s the epic frenemy battle of SEOs vs. Search Engines that ...
What SEO IS, and What SEO is NOT
Many businesses think SEO is all about the small things; the title tags, the description tag, the rankings or the XML sitemap. These are all part of SEO, but by focusing on these minor things, businesses are missing the big picture about what SEO is really all about. ...
List of HTTP Status Codes for SEO and What They Mean
The following is a list of commonly used and returned HTTP response status codes that a website can return. This includes codes from IETF internet standards as well as RFCs status codes that have not been standardized. These codes are valuable for SEO when determining if the pages are returning ...
Siloing Content, Keyword Themes And Consumer Silos
Keyword Themes Consistency throughout the search engine optimization structure of an ecommerce site with both internal linking and keywords will help you capture the organic rankings you deserve. There was a great article about internal linking and how to engineer the anchor text from SEOmoz which expresses my thoughts exactly about how ...
You’re Not A Surgeon Just Because You Read A Book About Anatomy
Ok so I want to start this off by saying a few things before I go into my primary point. This post has grown out of the immense pride we take in our work, and the enjoyment we get with helping people and their business succeed online. So let ...
How to capture incremental traffic by cutting out pagination
So you have a well categorized website that has thousands of products and there are some categories or subcategories which paginate. I want to take a look at a possible cost of pagination compared to what I feel is a better option. The first thing to take a look at ...
Tips for writing a reconsideration and reinclusion request to Google
So your site has been de-listed in the search engines, your losing money, you don’t know why Google would do such a horrible thing to a great user focused website and you’re going to submit a reconsideration because you can’t stand it anymore. I will start by saying that ...

