I recently had a good friend ask me to figure out why her friend’s website was not coming up in Google. After a quick review, the answer was obvious: the site had no text content, it was 100% flash. It also had zero backlinks. There was no reason why Google would rank this site, in fact, it wasn’t even in the Google index at all. It had a splash page, and played the same music on all pages. Which leads me to a familiar theme that keeps running in my head: who should you select to design your website: an Artist or an Engineer?

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My partner runs a dog training forum to provide a community space for her clients and others to share information about dog training. This morning, someone posted a fake item that I thought I’d share with you as an example of how NOT to build backlinks to your website and trust in your business.

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Duplicate content is not a topic I usually talk about with my website clients. Perhaps it’s because of my academic background and the fear of being accused of plagiarism that my professors drilled into me.

I presume small business owners know they shouldn’t put content on their websites that they didn’t create themselves, but recently, I realized this was an incorrect assumption. And like I usually do when something surprises me, I write a blog article about it
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To optimize your blog for search engines (search engine optimization or SEO), you should understand how much of an impact individual post titles can have on your post’s rankings, and how to manipulate post slugs. Titles and slugs?!
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Bounce Rate has become my very favorite metric to watch when looking at website traffic statistics. This article explains what bounce rate is, how it’s measured, what bounce rate statistics look like, and what the bounce rate is trying to tell you to do.
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I often encourage my small business clients to add WordPress blogs to their websites. WordPress blogs are a wonderful way to add relevant content that attracts visitors. Before visitors can find your WordPress blog article though, the search engines, like Google, need to crawl over your blog article and index it. How long does it take for search engines to become aware of a blog article, crawl it and index it? Read on…
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This is a short video of Matt Cutts who works for Google. He often publishes information that’s helpful to website designers. In this video, he explains the different parts of a “search snippet”, the results that people read and hopefully click on. I thought this would be helpful for clients who are trying to understand search engine optimization - understanding the different parts of the search results seemed like a logical first step. Here’s the video:

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Website clients often ask me, “how long will search engine optimization take” or “how long will it take me to have good Google rankings” ? There are many different opinions out there, and I’ll show you my answer, with real statistics from my own website.

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You may have heard of “weblogs” or “blogs” for short and wondered what all the fuss was about. While blogs are a great way to express your opinions on a myriad of topics, they are also an excellent way to increase visitor traffic to your website. How do they do this?
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There are many articles on the Internet containing advice for people who want to change their domain name but don’t want to risk their search engine rankings (or SERP). The topic has lots of controversy, apparently. So, being an engineer, when I changed my own domain name, I actually collected data, and I’m going to share it with you!

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