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

27 Apr

Can You Lose Weight on Spam

By Scottie Claiborne

Search engine optimization is a lot like weight loss. You’ve got some things that are effective and some that are not, and it’s hard to trust the claims of one over the other. You want to believe the great-results-with-no-effort claims, and you hope they are true… but are they worth wasting your time and money on?

Fad Diets and Quick Tricks Spam

It seems every month there is a new fad in weight loss: protein-only, all the grapefruit you can eat, or high carb/low carb. All offer fast results if you’ll just stick with it. They usually do achieve some results; however, they aren’t lasting.… Read the rest

20 Apr

Google Link Filter

By James Peggie
April 20, 2005

Incoming links are important to the rankings of your website. Having a quantity of relevant incoming links increases your sites relevance and boosts rankings within Google and the other search engines.

Traditional SEO wisdom used to state – the more incoming links the better. However the new belief is that there is a preference for quality over quantity.

There is a growing consensus that within Google a “Sandbox” exists for new links. This is similar to the aging filter believed to exist for new sites – what has traditionally been known as the Google ‘Sandbox.’… Read the rest