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by Stoney deGeyter Yeah, yeah, the search engi­nes are get­ting smarter about du­pli­cate con­tent... blah, blah, blah. It's no longer the prob­lem it on­ce was... yada, yada, yada. Google will get it all sort­ed out for you. Whatevs. I don't care how smart the search engi­nes are, it's no ex­cuse for lazi­ness. Sure, a maid may clean up your liv­ing room for you, but that's no ex­cuse to ask them to wipe your..., er, mouth, too. The in­tel­li­gence of the search engi­nes is your fall back. Your (...)

by Mike Moran Not long ago, there was a lot of dis­cus­sion about whether Facebook was tak­ing over the hearts and minds of the next gen­er­a­tion, where Google has owned the pre­vi­ous one. Much dis­cus­sion en­sued about whether us­ing a search engine to find things would be easier than ask­ing your friends. As usu­al, the fu­ture is more com­plex than we imag­ine, be­cause we have all de­cid­ed that the an­swer be­tween text search and so­cial net­work­ing is...both. It re­minds me a lot of the de­bates of (...)

by Stoney deGeyter Here we are again, two years after What I Want for Christmas from the Search Engines: The Sequel and eight years since the orig­i­nal, What I Want for Christmas from the Search Engines. I'm back with a new Christmas wish list. I smell a fran­chise op­por­tu­ni­ty here! Let's start with some open items from the orig­i­nal wish-list and see how things are com­ing along from 2008: Build your own tech­nol­o­gy, don't just back­door an­oth­er search engine's re­sults in­to your own. (...)

by Stone Reuning Any web copy­writer tus­sles with the ques­tion on how long, or short, their head­line should be. Those of us in the busi­ness have been ask­ing the ques­tion for years - is there an ar­bi­trary length for grab­bing some­one's at­ten­tion and en­cour­ag­ing them to read fur­ther? Of course, this is what head­li­nes are sup­posed to do. They act as a quick syn­op­sis of what the read­er can find be­low. The chal­lenge of course is draw­ing some­one's in­ter­est enough for them to want more. In (...)

by Mike Moran Image by K. Todd Storch via Flickr No, I don't mean that search engine op­ti­miza­tion will hap­pen au­to­mat­i­cal­ly. I am ask­ing if you have con­sid­ered what the world will be like in the not-too-dis­tant fu­ture, when a big chunk of search­es will be ex­e­cut­ed from your cus­tomers' cars. Perhaps this strikes you as a bit too much Buck Rogers, but many peo­ple thought we wouldn't be search­ing for things from cell phones not too long ago. The tech­nol­o­gy is ar­riv­ing and it's not (...)

by Mike Moran I re­ceived an in­ter­est­ing ques­tion the others day from a stu­dent in a class that I am teach­ing on SEO. He's on the pro­cess of op­ti­miz­ing a land­ing page for the key­words "wa­ter­proof jack­et" (sin­gu­lar) and "wa­ter­proof jack­ets" (plu­ral), he is notic­ing that each key­word pro­duces dif­fer­ent or­gan­ic search re­sults across mul­ti­ple search engi­nes. His ques­tion is whether he should op­ti­mize his land­ing page for both of the­se key­words or just one of them? As you might sus­pect, (...)

by Stoney deGeyter There was no com­mer­cial in­ter­net in the 80's, but that doesn't mean that we can't reach in­to the re­cess­es of our past to see that, ev­ery­thing we know now about SEO, we al­ready knew back then. How? From the great­est, most mag­i­cal mu­sic of all time: 80's hair band glam rock! They just don't make mu­sic like this any­more, and it's a shame. The sweet sound of rock'n'roll has nev­er tast­ed bet­ter. All it takes is a re­flec­tive look at some of the­se song ti­tles to re­al­ize (...)

by Mike Moran Image by cir­cu­lat­ing via Flickr Last week, I asked the mu­si­cal ques­tion, "Are you keep­ing up with Google?" In that post, I tried to stim­u­late some think­ing around the idea that wait­ing for the rank­ing al­go­rithm to change is not the best time to be­gin do­ing some­thing new in re­spon­se. If you work that way, you are con­stant­ly feel­ing un­der the gun, like you can't keep up, and that you are al­ways falling be­hind. Instead, I tried to get you to think about do­ing what is best (...)

by Stone Reuning Anyone whose run a blog knows you get lit­er­al­ly hun­dreds of use­less com­ments from peo­ple just look­ing for a quick link. It's easy to ig­nore the­se and many new­er ver­sions of WordPress and other blog­ging plat­forms do a pret­ty good job of weed­ing out those "spam­mers." With this in mind, it's al­most coun­ter­in­tu­itive to think you can ob­tain or­gan­ic links through blog com­ments. But you can ob­tain links to your site through com­ment­ing on other peo­ple's blogs if you do (...)

by Stoney deGeyter I was think­ing the other day about how in­flu­enc­ing search engi­nes is like in­flu­enc­ing peo­ple. Short of brute force and ab­so­lute con­trol, you can't force any­one to do your bid­ding. With search engi­nes, you might make a spam brute force at­tack, but that will be short lived. And ab­so­lute con­trol? Well, no one has that, not even Google engi­neers, un­less they all got to­geth­er in a drunk­en binge and de­cid­ed to re­pro­gram the al­go­rithm col­lec­tive­ly. Brute force and (...)

by Mike Moran Image by steve­g­arfield via Flickr It was on­ly re­cent­ly that a num­ber of crit­ics were talk­ing about how Google is stand­ing still and Bing is the re­al in­no­va­tor in the search space. I think that Google Instant has qui­et­ed those crit­ics, at least for now. Love it or hate it, Google Instant cer­tain­ly is in­no­va­tive and it is not the on­ly thing go­ing on at the Googleplex. We pre­viewed it a few weeks ago, but it is hap­pen­ing for re­al now: Your page de­sign mat­ters for your (...)

by Stoney deGeyter There are a lot of dif­fer­ent ways to say the same thing. Anyone who has per­formed key­word re­search knows that peo­ple search for a lot of the same things us­ing very dif­fer­ent phras­es and ter­mi­nol­o­gy. For ex­am­ple, if you're look­ing to build your on­line busi­ness, you could search for: in­ter­net mar­ket­ing, web­site mar­ket­ing, on­line mar­ket­ing, web­site pro­mo­tion, search engine op­ti­miza­tion, search engine mar­ket­ing, SEO, and a dozen other vari­a­tions. Or if you're a (...)

by Stoney deGeyter Operating an on­line busi­ness has a lot of ad­van­tages over brick and mor­tar shops. But, con­trary to what many be­lieve, be­ing on­line is not the holy grail of busi­ness suc­cess. Brick and mor­tar stores have been suc­cess­ful, to vary­ing de­grees, for mil­len­nia. Comparatively, the web is bare­ly a twinkly in Al Gore's eye. Unfortunately, many would-be busi­ness own­ers plunge ahead in this new mar­ket­place as if it were some mag­ic beans that will sud­den­ly grow in­to a giant (...)

by Mike Moran Image by ki­rainet via Flickr No mat­ter who you are, at some point it is nat­u­ral to throw your arms up in frus­tra­tion and ask, "What does Google want from me?" For most of us, no mat­ter how much we know about SEO and no mat­ter what we do, we even­tu­al­ly feel like we've hit a wall. We just can't seem to (pick one) raise our rank­ing for that key­word, get more search traf­fic, sell more to searchers, or fill in the blank here. And it is nat­u­ral to start think­ing about how (...)

by Stoney deGeyter The 12-Step Program, de­vel­oped by AA, has been used by count­less in­di­vid­u­als and copied by many or­ga­ni­za­tions to help peo­ple get their lives on track. Here, we pre­sent the 12-Step Program for busi­ness own­ers when deal­ing with their on­line mar­ket­ing cam­paigns. Step 1: Admit you are pow­er­less with­out SEO and that your on­line mar­ket­ing has be­come un­man­age­able. Step 2: Believe that a pow­er greater than your­self is need­ed to op­ti­mize your web­site for rank­ings and (...)

by Stone Reuning There are many rea­sons why it's good to de­vel­op con­tent for your web­site. It gives the search engi­nes more rea­sons to rank your site high. It in­forms po­ten­tial cus­tomers, an­swers their ques­tions and al­lays their fears about order­ing prod­ucts and ser­vices from you on­line. And with the ev­er in­creas­ing im­por­tance of so­cial me­dia, de­vel­op­ing con­tent that's suit­able for dis­tri­bu­tion through Facebook and other chan­nels is an­oth­er rea­son why it's good. When prepar­ing (...)

by Stoney deGeyter I've nev­er re­al­ly been an al­go­rithm chaser. As an SEO, I un­der­stand the need to keep up with what's go­ing on with the ma­jor search engi­nes as a pre­req­ui­site to be­ing able to per­form solid op­ti­miza­tion strate­gies. However, there is a point where you start get­ting di­min­ish­ing re­turns from chas­ing ev­ery nu­ance in the search engine al­go­rithms vs. build­ing a solid, well-op­ti­mized web­site that per­forms well for both search engi­nes and vis­i­tors com­ing through search. (...)

by Miriam Ellis You may not be see­ing it in Firefox yet, but fire up your Google Chrome browser, and you'd bet­ter be sit­ting down for this one be­cause the new in­te­grat­ed Google Local re­sults are dizzy­ing­ly dif­fer­ent and ready to rock the SERPs. My Canuck friends to the North aren't see­ing this yet, and the roll­out isn't com­plete in all browsers in the USA, but the im­pli­ca­tions of this to­tal­ly new lay­out, if set in stone, are go­ing to ef­fect ev­ery lo­cal busi­ness on the map. The first (...)

by Stoney deGeyter Over the last dozen plus years, un­scrupu­lous SEO's have given the en­tire search engine op­ti­miza­tion in­dus­try a bad rep. It seems like ev­ery few months some high pro­file per­son in the Internet world says some­thing about how SEO is snake oil, send­ing rip­ples through­out the SEO com­mu­ni­ty. To be fair, some of the com­plaints about SEOs are de­served. Not for the en­tire SEO com­mu­ni­ty, but for a small seg­ment of "SEO providers." Unfortunately, like sleezy lawyers, it (...)

by Mike Moran Image via Wikipedia Up un­til now, the ap­pear­ance of your Web pages had noth­ing to do with your suc­cess in or­gan­ic search, but that time might be com­ing to and end. Lots of stuff mat­ters, of course, rang­ing from page ti­tles to in­bound links to dozens of other fac­tors in each search engine's rank­ing al­go­rithm. Also im­por­tant is the ti­tle and the snip­pet that helps searchers de­cide which search re­sult to click on. Once clicked, your vi­su­al de­sign mat­ters a great deal as (...)