This post has been a long time coming - there's a definite need to address internal duplicate content issues in an intelligent, simple, illustrated manner. I'm hoping that you'll be able to show this to the boss (or, more likely, the engineering team) and help them achieve that critical "AHA!" moment required for all true progressive changes. Fundamentally at issue is the crea...
One of my favorite Canadians in search (there's so many, don't make me choose!), Andrew Goodman, pointed me to a post by Jamie Roche of iMedia Connection - A ReDesign Worthy of Google De-listing. Mr Roche (who works with the supafly ...
A writer at the blog, Half Sigma, recently authored a post entitled - Why a Career in Computer Programming Sucks. I haven't taken the bait on one of these in a while and figured I'd throw in my two cents on why this obviously intelligent, articulate and experienced fellow doesn't what the @#$%! he is talking about. Let's first review his primary arguments: 1. Programming experience...
If there's one issue that causes more contention, heartache and consulting time than any other (at least, recently), it's duplicate content. This scourge of the modern search engine has origins in the fairly benign realm of standard licensing and the occassional act of plagiarism. Over the last five years, however, spammers in desperate need of content began the now much-reviled process of...
It sounds bizarre, almost counterintuitive, but many of best minds in the world of SEO appear to be rallying around the idea that submitting an XML feed to Google Sitemaps and Yahoo! Site Explorer is actually a terrible idea....
Explanations of 15 CSS properties that aren't used much in web development these days.
Web design can be incredibly frustrating. You'd think that with all the infinite possibilities of what-goes-where it'd be pretty easy to land a design that works, yet somehow we've all been there: stuck working on a design that refuses to look right. These 8 tactics are what I use to get out of that sticky spot.
13 command line tricks for use by web developers and other *nix enthusiasts
NOTE: I updated this post on Oct. 4th, 2015. Amazing how much is still relevant 8 years after the initial publication! For 99% of the projects you might take on, a domain is already part of the equation. However, in some circumstances, you'll be called on to provide advice for naming a domain, either for a new blog, a company launch or even just a friend's we...
Chris Boggs called me today to chat and we got on the subject of clients who decide that a new domain is an imperative. Rather than stick to their tried and true, older, highly ranking domain, they need to launch new content at a new URL (or even split off content that had been on their old site to make it more marketable for a PR or ad team). ...
One of the more remarkable developments over the last few years in SEO has certainly been the intelligence increase of Google & Yahoo! (and MSN to a lesser degree). From 1997-2002, a page really needed to be "optimized" for search engines in ways that differed from how they were "designed" for visitors. Bravo! to the engines for closing this gap - now, it's our turn to i...
On occassion, I feel that my blog posts here may make it seem that I'm an insufferable know-it-all in the realm of SEO, which certainly isn't the case. To illustrate the point, I thought it would be revealing and worthy of discussion to bring up several questions to which I don't have good answers. Here goes: The Diminishing Value of Anchor TextThe theo...
In Rebecca's Fresh Egg Internship experience, she mentioned a disagreement that Ammon Johns (Internet Marketing legend and someone I consider a mentor) and I have on the issue of brand names in title tags. The dispute centers around how a company's brand name should be used in their title tags: Ammon's Strateg...
In the world of big brands and sites, SEO practices become part of a laundry list of developer tasks, often far beneath the threshold of serious attention. While folks in our industry have learned the detriment of ignoring the search engines' guidelines for crawling & ranking, in the world of the Fortune 1000's, there are hundreds of disbelievers. Thus, it's a great time to re-visit some co...