Tweet – The Atlantic – The Guardian"The new scheme is being operated by Freedom Registry, the company which operates a similar .TK system for Tokelau – the tiny cluster of coral atolls in the South Pacific with a population of less than 2,000 – but which is now the most popular domain name in the world, with more active domain name registrations than Russia and China combined."Starting this July. Domainers, start your dictionaries.– Google Webmaster CentralMistake 1: rel=canonical to the first page of a paginated series Imagine that you have an...
Saturday, April 20, 2013
Tweet It is amazing how little some online marketers know about their landing pages. Like a tourist in a foreign country, a marketing newbie often gets a standard set of conversion optimization tips that normally include: "unclutter-unclutter-unclutter", "use compelling titles and images", etc.But is there more to these tips? Well, the more one learns about conversion optimization, the more one realizes it's a well without a bottom, and the ideas for things you can do with your website are endless.At the same time, it is important to know where...
Friday, April 19, 2013
Tweet With thousands of infographics posted on a daily basis, it can take a lot of work to get your latest creation the online attention it deserves. This can be problematic if you've invested the time, money and resources and the infographic fails in promotion. As the owner of both an infographic design agency and an infographic submission website, I've seen my share of promotion wins and promotion flops. While not all infographics have what it takes to make it in even the best of promotion circumstances, here are some tips for success:1. Choose...
Tweet Most people in SEO have been in this situation.You're on a call with a client, discussing changes that need to be made to the site to make it SEO-friendly, when you hear the words that make your blood run cold and your hand start to reach for aspirin."Wait, I need to talk to my developer."It doesn't need to be this way.Developers come in all shapes and sizes, and trust me – this isn't a post to rag on them (they're vitally important to the SEO process, too!). In an ideal world, the developer may be part of the same team as you, such as in...
Tweet You dream about building links purely on the awesomeness of your website. And maybe you've earned some. I have, and it feels great to be recognized. But let's be honest– not every website can bring something new and special to the marketplace that's going to earn purely organic recognition.SEOs crave natural links that are voluntarily given. Yet for all the talk of how quality content begets links, they rarely build themselves at a rate that actually impacts a site's search result placement. And that's especially true if the target site serves...
Tweet One of the greatest things about working in the Search Industry is the copious amount of data that we get to play with. I have a quantitative background with an undergrad in electrical engineering and in my former life was a forecast analyst. I love numbers and the ability to pull insights from data.A difficulty that most Canadian search professionals have is that given our proximity to the United States we rarely get access or insights into the Canadian market. Speaking to a local search professional, he exclaimed that his eyes glaze over...
Tweet So much talk abounds about content being king, especially since Google let loose its stampede of penguins and pandas across the flower gardens of the Internet (Can penguins really stampede?).That's all very fine if you run a news site or a blog site, and (predictably enough) so much of the how-to information being pushed on us comes from how-to-blog bloggers. But what if you run an ecommerce website, an online store? What on earth can you do for content to keep the stampeding penguins and pandas from stomping all over the proverbial flower...
Tweet I love using Firefox. I have experimented with many different web browsers in the past, but I always switch back to Firefox in the end. Using Google Chrome or Internet Explorer feels like trying on a shoe that is a few sizes too small. It just doesn't feel right for me.One of the main reasons why I love using Firefox is its extensive Add-Ons Collection. These nifty browser extensions greatly improve the efficiency of my web browsing experience. I enjoy the ability to replace a mundane web command with the ease of a simple mouse click. I also...
Tweet There have been 100's of blog posts discussing the importance of content as a ranking factor in the last couple of years following Google's release of the Panda update to their algorithm. However, the importance of content on long tail keyword focused web pages was really brought home to me the other day.I was reviewing the click thru rates to our site for various keyword queries. A result that really caught my attention was that queries for the term "Mac Duggal Size Chart" are only producing a 45% click thru rate to MacDuggal.com. This raised...
Thursday, April 18, 2013
Tweet It's coming; another new Google search algorithm to contend with. This time the 'Google Merchant Quality Algorithm', announced by Google's head of search spam Matt Cutts at this year's SXSW festival, aims to penalize low and poor quality merchants in local search results. With Google's increased focus on local search and its own Google + social network, local search results and reputation management have become vital for small and medium sized businesses alike. The old motto 'There's no such thing as bad publicity' may no longer...
From time to time (every day), the SEOs of this world get inundated with kind offers from prospective companies proposing to help them do their jobs by alleviating some of the tasks they must undertake in their daily grind. I’ve compiled some useful tips to help any budding spa-*cough* special ops email marketer put together [...]]]>View the original article h...
Holy sweet mother of God. There’s adjustments, and there’s EVICTIONS. Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to Google’s latest algo adjustment dubbed ‘Titanic.” Why “Titanic?” Because you’ll be searching for survivors, that’s why. Well, the official name has now been officially entitled “Penguin.” Our original “Titanic” moniker was at least related to [...]]]>View the original article h...
Google is an SEO’s god. It’s true and many SEO don’t know it. Google says add this text, or remove that tag and an SEO will race to see how fast he can please Google.Just a whisper of a new algo change will have SEO’s running to their computer to see if they can discover [...]]]>View the original article h...
This week, Matt Cutts posted a 12 second video answering the question “Do Images pass PageRank?” This 12 second video simply responds, ‘yes.’ Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve got legal, paid juice passing. This means that there is a white-hat way to flow juice while paying for it. So, yeah, it’s not a ‘paid link’ but [...]]]>View the original article h...
Wednesday, April 17, 2013
I often get asked, “What IS your goal, King?” “Domination to the point of demoralization,” is my answer. That’s when the bug-eyed, blank stare hits me. The concept of my strategy is so under-estimated, so feared, so rare, that no one hardly ever gets it that THAT is what I’m doing. Go fucking psycho [...]]]>View the original article h...
I have seen more than a few posts over the last fucking while with shit stating they had somehow (miraculously) recovered from the recent Google Penguin algorithm update. There are also a whack more of them talking about HOW to do so. Either way, I call BULLSHIT. Why? That’s fairly simple. Allow me to make [...]]]>View the original article h...
Partial knowledge is a dangerous thing. You have heard of Google’s Penguin update(s), maybe you have even gone as far as reading a few blog posts on the topic, not necessarily even the official version on Google’s blog or Matt Cutts’ take on it, enter the real world… You have a site to rank, what [...]]]>View the original article h...
Recently Google announced, as part of their monthly updates, a new method of semantic analysis they believe will help them in dealing with over aggressive search engine optimization practices. Code named ‘Orca‘ (project name; hide and seek) it will apparently be a companion to the now infamous Penguin and Panda updates many in the SEO [...]]]>View the original article h...
I recently read a post by Adam Audette that was genuinely excellent – it was about maximising your click through rate in organic SERPs, by having very well presented search snippets. I’m always keen on having well written titles and meta descriptions, and I find it surprising that snippets in search results are, for the most part, pretty terrible. Check out SEOptimise’s excellent post on title tags if you’re looking for ways to improve there.Patrick Altoft had an interesting tip about leaving the brand name out of the title tag – while this may...
Google’s Penguin update, and the unnatural link warnings they’ve been sending out through Webmaster Tools, shows that they’re now looking to penalise suspicious & paid links instead of just devaluing them.But the thing that really interests me is how Google determines which links are paid and which aren’t. If you’re an SEO, when you see a paid link, in most cases it’s generally pretty obvious if it’s unnatural or paid for – but it’s not as simple for a machine to detect.There’s been some speculation as to what kinds of signals Google is looking...
At the end of last year Danny Sullivan wrote an article for Search Engine Land titled “What Social Signals do Google & Bing Really Count?” which featured an interview between representatives from both search engines. The article confirmed that Google and Bing use Twitter and (possibly to a lesser extent) Facebook as another signal to determine where a site is able to rank in the regular search results.While a lot of SEOs had begun to suspect that tweeted links were influencing rankings, it was really good to see it actually confirmed.What...
As most SEOs know, the robots.txt file sits in the root of the site, and is a list of instructions for search engines (and other bots, if they adhere to it) to follow. You can use it to specify where your XML Sitemap is, as well as prevent Google and the other search engines from accessing pages that you choose to block.Every time Googlebot arrives at your site, it will first check to see if you have a robots.txt file. If the robots.txt file blocks any pages, Google won’t crawl them.For years, website owners and web developers have used the robots.txt...
As an SEO blog, this site tends to get a few visits from Google employees every now and then. I was looking through my Google Analytics stats the other day and noticed that, after writing my startup SEO advice post, I had a visit from Google Ireland that I couldn’t really explain.There was a visit from Google based in Dublin, with the screen resolution 800 x 1153. Looking further into it, whatever that device was runs Android (and Google Analytics reports Safari as the browser, although I’m pretty sure that’s because Android’s default browser...
The majority of SEOs (and possibly most site owners) know that the search engines heavily value links with optimised anchor text. A link with the text “cheap car insurance” will help you rank for “cheap car insurance”. That sounds obvious, although it’s also kind of sad, because that’s not really how normal people link.What’s less clear is just how much Google weights the anchor text in it’s algorithm compared to other search engines. Ordinarily it would be difficult to test this – you’d need to find a huge range of varied sites, all linked to...
Recently Google accused Bing of effectively copying their results by using toolbar data, and data from Internet Explorer if the suggested sites feature is enabled – you can read Google’s side of the story here, and the story of Bing’s response here.I’m not going to explain it all in too much detail because I think those two articles cover it quite well, but as a quick summary:1. Google suspected Bing of using some of Google’s data in Bing’s results2. Google set up a test to prove this – by allowing pages to rank for “synthetic queries” (Googlewhacks),...
Richard Baxter from SEO Gadget has released a keyword research tool that does some particularly clever things. I’ve been using it for a while now, and it’s clear that there’s been a very big focus on usability as well as a focus on it providing you with something that’s instantly actionable.The set-up process is very straight-forward. You first add your URL, and then sync it up with your Google Analytics account – this step is optional, you can skip the GA import and just copy and paste the keywords you want it to focus on (useful if you’re using...
