Buying Text Links - Is It Evil? Buying text links. It's all the rage. Is it evil? Is it good? Will it help your search engine rankings? Will it get you banned? Will it increase your PageRank? Will it increase your link popularity? Will it bring targeted traffic to your site? Should you do it? Should you hire a broker to do it? These are the questions on webmasters' and search marketers' minds. What follows is my...
SEO Consulting & Contracting The other day someone asked me what sort of information should be in an SEO contract. As I was writing my response, it occurred to me that there were probably a lot of small businesses and consultants who were wondering the same thing. Unfortunately, many people don't even use a contract, or worse, they may end up blindly signing a contract provided by the client. Ten years ago when I was just...
Google's Patent Implications You may have already heard or read about Google's latest patent application regarding "information retrieval based on historical data", but if you're like me, you probably didn't bother to read it all. Patents are not easy to read, that's for sure! I had skimmed it and glanced at a few forum posts and articles that discussed it, but until today, I hadn't actually read it completely. I wasn't surprised about the stuff...
Search Engines and The Meta Description Tag The keywords and phrases you use in your Meta description tag don't affect your page's ranking in the search engines (for the most part), but this tag can still come in handy in your overall SEO campaigns. What Is the Meta Description Tag? The Meta description tag is a snippet of HTML code that belongs inside the Head section of a Web page. It usually is placed after the Title...
Search Engine Marketing Issues - Link Popularity For years, "link popularity" and "Google PageRank" have been the talk of the town in the search engine optimization community. However, the definition of link popularity and how it differs from PageRank (PR), as well as how much effect these actually have on search engine rankings, is often misunderstood. What is Link Popularity? The theory goes something like this: The search engine Powers That Be have decided that if other sites...
Common-sense Search Engine Optimization For years, when people thought about search engine optimization, in all likelihood, gateway pages, doorway pages or informational pages probably came to mind. If you're a search engine optimization specialist, you've probably had clients requesting that you create these types of pages for them. They may believe the following statements to be true: * Every search engine has a different algorithm (formula) to determine the ranking of a Web page, and therefore none of...
What is it about the phrase "search engine optimization" that makes people go crazy? Is it because the phrase itself doesn't really make sense? As Bob Massa from SearchKing is fond of saying, we don't optimize search engines, we optimize Web pages. So perhaps that's part of the reason why people have a hard time agreeing on what SEO actually is. More likely it's because there are as many ways to optimize a site for...
All About Title Tags The title tag is one of the most important factors in achieving high search engine rankings. A title tag is essentially an HTML code snippet that creates the words that appear in the top bar of your Web browser. The HTML code for a title tag looks like this ("< " replaced with "["): [HEAD] [TITLE]XYZ Company Home Page[/TITLE] [/HEAD] The title tag belongs in the [HEAD] section of your source code, and is...
Loren Baker
+Ann Smarty
Alan Bleiweiss
David Harry
