Will and I have a recurring argument about what should and shouldn't be in a site review. My argument has been, and remains that before you can do a proper site review you need to do keyword research, in order to validate that the site architecture is correct. I have been doing a fair few site reviews recently and one thing has stuck out. Yes, almost every site I've ever loo...
Tonight I'm continuing with our headsmacking tips theme (see #1 from June) with a piece of SEO advice that's been around the industry for longer than Google but still doesn't get the traction it deserves. When it comes to top-level menu navigation, most of us are thinking about which b...
This one keeps popping up, so I'm taking a short blog post to address it as quickly and efficiently as possible (mostly because I have an SEOmoz board meeting tomorrow, so I need my zzzs). Many SEOs ask themselves how many individual word and phrases are ideal to target together on a single URL. The tough part is - there's no hard and fast answer. The number can be as low as 1 and ...
<p>Conventional wisdom among experienced SEOs is that there is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty. In general principle, this notion is true, but there are exceptions to this rule. In other words, duplicate content penalties do exist for certain scenarios, and that is what we are going to discuss in this post.</p><h3>The Conventional Wisdom</h3><p&g...
Before I was inundated with the responsibilities of running a company and managing a few hundred emails a day, I used to spend a lot of time testing theories about how the search engines handled certain elements on a site or page. I'd test the engines to find answers to questions like: Does a keyword perform better or worse if it's higher up in the code of a page? (yep)...
N.B. This post is intended for relatively new SEOs with smaller sites. Intermediate and advanced SEOs probably already know most of this information, and I do not claim to have experience with sites numbering thousands of pages, for which different strategies are surely more effective. Some of you may know that I run an NCAA bas...
One of the recommendations we often make to our clients is to ensure proper structure of 404 pages. We generally urge that at least one or more of the following be included on a site's 404 page:
Just a quick tip tonight, since technically I'm supposed to be on vacation. One great way to help improve some of your rankings on a blog, content site or virtually any domain with lots of pages on similar topics is to eliminate the keyword cannibalization by 301'ing multiple pages relevant to a query/keyword to the highest ranking page. Here's a quick example: For the query - SEO Prici...
As many of our readers here have no doubt seen, SEOmoz was the first participant in Roberta Rosenberg's Laning Page Makeover Clinic. Scott's been hard at work today generating a landing page that helps to meet these criteria and with a bit of luck, we can use Roberta's assistance to ramp up premium me...
I'm back home from a day's trip to San Francisco. Despite the 3:30am wakeup time, it was a good day - 8 hours of talking SEO with some very smart, talented people. One of the many subjects we discussed was passing link equity and I think there are valuable lessons to be learned for everyone in the search marketing (and web development) space. Let's start with a look at the typical patte...
Back to basics time this Friday, and this time, it's all about the only meta tag that still has relevance; the meta description tag. Meta descriptions have three primary uses: To describe the content of the page accurately and succinctly To serve as a short, text "advertisement" to click on your results in the search results To display ta...
Although this will seem, to many of you, a very generic list of SEO on-site tips, you may be surprised to see how many SEO consultants and web developers overlook or forget these basic steps when launching a new site. These twenty- four On-site search engine optimisation checkups/tips can assure that any link building / link baiting efforts that will be made will give great results.
Dearest Digg, I couldn't help but notice your site has a small technical issue. It's no biggie, but I think fixing it could save you some money. I'm all about saving people money, just the other day I handed out coupons for a free trial-sized bag of hydrogenized bean-lard-mulch. I know, I'm practically a saint. I noticed ...
It's been a while since I provided some straightforward, back to basics style advice and there can be little doubt that the title tag is worthy of attention for beginners and experts alike. And so I present... How to Make the Best Title Tag Possible: Brand your trafficUse the title of your site or brand at the beginning or...