Blog Category: SEO and PPC

So you’ve read my last past on how I’m addicted to page speed testing. I had a consultation yesterday and was given another tool, Google’s tool for page speed testing. My home page got 84/100, and my blog got 72/100. Gotta work a little bit harder on that but not too shabby. Give a whirl, what’s your score?

Maybe you’ve heard it’s impossible to know what Google’s search engine algorithm is and how it is constantly evolving. This is true. However Google published it’s Webmaster Guidelines for small business owners and their website designers to follow. I think it’s important for small business owners to know about these guidelines, and talk to their web designers to make sure they are being followed.

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I recently had a problem with my Google search engine results and assumed I was under a penalty. Time to totally panic.

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Did your website traffic cease as of midnight April 15th? Mine did. And boy did I panic. I was still in the index, but even if you googled “aldebaran web design” you got no results. Panic. Panic. Panic.

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I often get clients asking questions about meta tags or some variation because someone has told them that these are really important things to have in their website. Hopefully this article will clear up the confusion a bit.

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An excellent TED Talk by Eli Pariser: Beware Online ‘Filter Bubbles’. One of the really surprising things he claims, is that even if you’re not logged into Google, the search results are still being filtered for you. He ran a quick experiment, to show how different people got wildly different results for the same word, at the same time on the same day.

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This is a picture taken of my hummingbird feeder that’s on my office window. Sometimes working from home gets lonely, and this little bird has been wonderfully entertaining. I think it’s a “she” and that she’s an Anna’s Hummingbird. It took many, many weeks to attract her to the feeder, and now that’s she’s visiting regularly, I’m working hard to keep the nectar fresh and environment welcoming, so she returns often. Which got me to thinking about how hummingbirds are a little like a search engine. Hang in there with me on this one…

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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).

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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!

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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.

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