Recently my life has been full of redirects. I have a client who had another web developer change her website pages from one naming convention to another, like “?p=123″ to “how to file dog fingernails”. I had another client that I did the redesign for, but her old page names had blank spaces in them, like “old page.html”. Both of these situations required creation of special files called “.htaccess” that map the old pages to the new ones. I wanted to give folks an overview of why creating redirects every single time they change a page name/page URL is so important to SEO (search engine optimization).

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve written several articles on SEO scams, and wanted to share with you a chart that one of my SEO clients sent to me today. It’s such an amazing SEO success story – and unlike all of the various and sundry false claims that SEO companies may make, I wanted to show you actual results. My client is Luis Periera, who is an attorney in Costa Rica, and we’ve been working on his website since August of 2008. Take a look at his wonderful stats!

Read the rest of this entry »

Like many of my blog articles, this one is written based on one of my client’s experiences that I’m hoping others won’t repeat. She has an online real estate tools website that helps real estate agents improve their marketing. She decided to outsource her search engine optimization (SEO) to a company she found on Biznik. After paying money to this company and waiting a month for the work to occur, she asked me to review what they had done. This article will focus on the link building portion of that work. Based on my investigation, I believe this is an excellent example of a link building scam.

Read the rest of this entry »

You know how when people are on vacation, they tend to be more trusting of other people than they would be in their own city? I think that Biznik and other social networks have a similar effect. People who use Biznik (including myself) are typically using it to network with other people in their region. It’s a friendly place where users post smiling photos and information about their businesses. Everyone is nice and happy to offer you free advice. But don’t let down your guard, because the bad guys are on Biznik too.

Read the rest of this entry »

One of my fabulous clients forwarded me an spam SEO email she received the other day from Marc Shneider, Ph.D. from Global Vibrations in Washington DC and in the course of investigating it, I found some amazing things I wanted to share with you small business website owners who are looking to hire someone to do SEO for your website.

Read the rest of this entry »

When is a link worthless from a search engine perspective? I was recently working on checking how many backlinks one of my clients had, and we found some surprising results. He’s a therapist in Seattle, and thought he had backlinks from several major online therapy directories that would contribute to his search engine ranking. What we found surprised him and just might surprise you.

Read the rest of this entry »

Every once in a while, a prospective client asks me if I’d create a bunch of domains that are in essense, fake, and have them direct traffic to their real domain. I always say no, because this is in direct violation of Google’s quality guidelines. If you’re thinking about doing this, or if you’ve found a competitor who does this and want to know what to do, please read on.

Read the rest of this entry »

I receive many inquiries from small business owners who have websites. Many times these folks are looking for website maintenance, or want more traffic from their websites. It only takes a few seconds to determine whether the person who designed their website had any interest in search engine optimization. Seriously, just a few seconds, and I’ll show you how.

Read the rest of this entry »

As we approach the holiday season, I thought it would be appropriate to give some tips on how to make sure you’re getting the most out of your online store in terms of search engine optimization, including some examples.

Read the rest of this entry »

I wanted to share with you another SEO (search engine optimization) and link building spam email one of my clients received and forwarded to me. If you remember my previous article about how to tell whether a company that sends you unsolicited email is virtuous, you should be able to decipher this one yourselves:

Read the rest of this entry »

When new websites are “born”, it make take a while for them to start getting search engine traffic. And you can’t get search traffic from a search engine until they have visited your website and “crawled” over it’s pages.  It’s important for new website owners to know how to tell if and when search engines, like Google, the most important search engine, has come and crawled around their website. But how do you tell when Google has visited your website?

Read the rest of this entry »

I often receive requests from people I don’t know asking me to exchange links. Exchange means that they’ll put a link on their website to me if I put a link on my website to them. Then we’d become one big happy link family. And the more links to your website, the better, right?

Well, it depends.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve ever used the Google keyword selection tool, you’ve seen those little green bars that represent how many other folks are searching for specific terms. And maybe like me, you’ve wondered, what the heck do these bars represent in terms of the number of searches? Till now, it was anyone’s guess. But now you can see exactly real numbers!

Read the rest of this entry »

You may have read my article on artists versus engineers and how poorly Flash websites perform in search engines. Well, Google has been working hard to improve it’s ability to read and index Flash websites and recently published an article in the Official Google Webmaster Central blog called “Improved Flash Indexing“.

If you have a Flash website, the article is worth reading. It appears that Google is improving it’s ability to discern text and follow links, but is still unable to “read” images. So if your website designer is using Flash, make sure they know the difference between text and images, and build your Flash website in the most search engine friendly fashion possible.

Or, you could simply avoid Flash altogether or use with great caution. I’ve chosen the former and some other internet marketing experts like Ian Lurie advise the latter . For most of my clientele, Flash is good for movies, but regular HTML, Javascript and a bit of PHP work just fine for everything else.

I had a client recently forward unsolicited emails she had recently received that claimed to offer SEO (Search Engine Optimization) services. I wanted to share these emails with you and to give you my comments on their legitimacy, or lack thereof. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a very short video on the basics of Search Engine Optimization from Matt Cutts, a very famous Google Engineer. Matt gives an brief overview of what’s important, and what’s not important. For those of you who know about SEO already, this won’t be new news, but for those of you who don’t know anything about SEO, it’s a nice introduction.

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?

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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
Read the rest of this entry »

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?!
Read the rest of this entry »