Monthly Archives: May 2005

21 May

Manage Your Search Engine Space – Online Reputation Management

Do a search on your favorite search engine for your company name. Look at the results. Hopefully your company web site is at the top of the pile. But what about the other 9 results in the top 10? What do they say about you? People searching for your company name will look at all of these results – not just your homepage. What do they say about your company? Is it all good, relevant, up-to-date information that the searcher is seeing? Are there any flame (bad) sites saying bad things about you or your company? Is there old information listed?… Read the rest

16 May

Ethics, Best Practices and SEO – A Crisis in the Profession? (part 2)

Bad SEO Can Get A Site Banned

The search engines say that any type of manipulation to get a site ranked is a threat against them and the relevancy of their results. Whitehat practitioners will say that they are not manipulating sites but rather fixing search engine obstacles within a web site. The need for their services is great as many web site designers do not know how to integrate search engine friendly designs.

Website Toast

Last year a prospective customer contacted me after being burned by a “rogue” SEO company who got their site (and others) banned from Google for spam tactics.… Read the rest

16 May

Ethics, Best Practices and SEO – A Crisis in the Profession?

Black Hats, White Hats, Gray Hats

There has been much debate recently on the practice of ethical Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The recent removal of a high profile SEO company from the Google results has plunged the industry into yet another debate on what is ethical and what is not in our profession.

I have been involved in the SEO industry for a few years now and the mention of the word ethics and best practices in what is still an unregulated industry creates a level of confusion the likes of which I have not observed in any other industry.… Read the rest

11 May

Optimizing Your B2B Marketing

Marketing your products or services to other businesses offers many different challenges that marketing directly to consumers. Here are some steps to help you optimize your B2B marketing efforts.

Understand your target market.

Make sure you clearly identify your audience and customers. Find out who are the key decision makers. You can waste a lot of time and effort by trying to sell to those who do not have the power to make buying decisions. Maximize your resources by targeting the true decisions makers. If you are not talking directly to the decision maker ensure that all information and collateral stands on its own with a clear message.… Read the rest

10 May

Indexing Obstacles for Dynamic Web Sites

URL Parameters, Session ID’s, Reserved Characters and Deep Nested web pages can make it harder for search engines to fully index your website. If your site uses any of the following you may find it hard to get indexed by the search engines:

Parameters

If your URL’s include parameters (end with ?a=1&b=2) then the search engines may not index these pages. This is because the spider can get caught in an infinite loop, indexing the same page hundreds of times with exactly the same content.

It used to be that no search engines would index pages with parameters. This is now much improved to how it used to be, however to ensure your site is indexed by all the search engine spiders always limit to a maximum of two parameters, but if possible use none.… Read the rest