One of the most consistent problems I see when conducting site reviews for clients is keyword self-cannibalization - the practice of heavily targeting the same keyword phrase on multiple pages of a site. In my opinion, sites are shooting themselves in the foot when they do this. Let's look at a few quick examples: ...
eKstreme has done some excellent work with his latest tool, recognizing a hot topic and underserved market, then delivering. The domain geolocator tool looks at the TLD extension, the hosting country (using an IP geolocation database) and the locations of inbound links for an impressive overview of the factors that might affect your domain's...
A year and a half ago, the major search engines got together and talked about the issue of blog spam. Ask didn't attend (although they received an invite), but Google, Microsoft & Yahoo! all sat down (with the creators of popular blog software packages) and found a way to help make links from anonymous sources on the web separa...
I just was reading an email newsletter from Yahoo Search Marketing. In that letter they remarked about the use of colors at the WD-40 website. I like the use of color there but I saw something that was almost a great SEO idea as well. Check out this page.... ...
Since folks are angling a bit for some hardcore SEO knowledge, I thought I'd take a stab at the thorny and often unproductive process of researching keywords in the long tail. The tail of search queries in a given industry is typically not visible via any of the major KW research programs or search engine ad databases (Overture, Google, MSN). In these instances, there is a research method to fi...
One of the best forum threads I've read in a long time is in progress at Cre8asite. Started by Kim Krause Berg herself, innocently enough with a post about women equalling men online in pure numbers (though it would appear from the latest eMarketer numbers that ...
Back to the basics for a minute - let's talk about how to create the ideal title tag. There are several best practices that, in my opinion, make a big difference for the major effects you're shooting for in title tag optimization (CTR in the SERPs, rankings at the search engines and value to users as navigational data). In the simplest situation, you've got 3 pieces of data to convey:...
When it comes to the search engines and country-specific content or searches, there are several obvious variables the engines use to determine the geography of a particular site or company: TLD (.com or .co.uk or .ca for example) Hosting (Is the site hosted in the UK, the US, Canada?) Inbound links (Are they primarily from US sites, UK ...
In the long tail of keyword searches, the great value comes from having hundreds or thousands of unique, valuable content pages written on a niche subject. The millions of completely unique search terms that hit the engines each day help to bring in traffic that a purely "designed" strategy could never receive. What's fascinating about the long tail targeting process is that i...
Mike Schinkel has an older, but golden post on the beauty of URLs. There's nothing revolutionary here, but since I've been seeing so many ugly URLs in the SERPs lately (have hyphens and subdomains made a comeback with BigDaddy or is it just me?), I have to step in. A few of his rules include: Well De...
At Michael's insistence, I'm going to try to put together a large list of terms and definitions relevant to SEO, web development and the Internet in general. The formats will look like (as ...
I'm dying to try out Dr. Garcia's new My Term Tracker tool (for Internet Explorer only as of now). It's only $39 a year for a license to use and it looks killer cool. The gist of the project is keyword research - finding term combinations to target in the SERPs. What's so cool about it is the ability to find dozens of ne...
The Pull Effect conversation at Cre8asite got me thinking in-depth about where the value of Mike Grehan's idea of a search "pull" will come from and how it can help affect marketers and sites in smaller niches. The notorious sandbox...
Lots of questions popping up lately about how to rank well on Google.co.uk vs. Google.com. Danny shared this nugget of gold at SEW today: google uk is going to favor uk based sites by default, even if you don't use the pages from the uk option. you want to do well ...