Meet the author: Jill Olkoski
Jill has a MA in Clinical Psychology, a BS in Computer Science, and a BS in Mechanical Engineering.
She currently owns Aldebaran Web Design in Edmonds (near Seattle WA) and enjoys educating her clients on topics related to small business website design.
In Jill's previous life, she spent 17 years in the engineering and quality organizations of a Fortune 100 tech company.
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?
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!
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.
Posted in SEO and PPC | Comments Off on Google Improves Indexing of Flash Websites
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.
Posted in SEO and PPC | Comments Off on SEO Basics from Google’s Matt Cutts
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?
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.
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 »
Posted in Blogs, SEO and PPC | Comments Off on Duplicate Content – Avoid Plagarism – Create Unique Content For Your Website
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 »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
I got a phone call today from a Google AdWords representative. Two weeks ago, I had submitted an email request for help, because a particular keyword had a “poor” quality score and I couldn’t figure out why. The online chat representative had recommended I break the ad groups into smaller pieces, which I did, but the keyword was still “poor” after a few days so I emailed in for more assistance. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in SEO and PPC | Comments Off on Google AdWords Has Great Customer Service
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. 
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.