As more businesses, small and large, bring their products and services to the web, there is a growing concern about duplicate content. Duplicate content penalties can wreak havoc with your search engine rankings. There are many theories about how to avoid it, but for smaller website owners, some of these solutions require large budgets. The…
robots.txt: People Don't Always Want Search Engines to Crawl Their Content
What goes through your mind when you read about the silly lawsuits against Google accessing portions of your website? What do you think when you visit the Internet Wayback Machine and find hundreds of pages of your site in its full form (almost)? Most of you wonder what is going on in the minds of…
My First #1 Google Ranking
Kevin Gibbons tagged me with an interesting little meme he started and since he’s a loyal reader of 10e20, here goes: My first job right out of college, I went to work for a web design start-up. It was started by 4 guys with a lot of money and absolutely no clue about web design…
10 Helpful Hints for Creating Strong Web Site Content
Creating strong web site content is an anchor for long term site success and optimization. What do I mean by content? Content is essentially interesting, original articles about your business and industry. What do I mean by “interesting”? Your content must be original and unique so that site visitors to want to read and learn…
Google Wants YOU (to report paid links)
Remember that Uncle Sam poster where his finger points directly at you no matter where you are standing? Well it looks like Google is taking over for ol’ Sammy and pointing it’s omnipotent finger at every person on the net who is buying links. What am I talking about? This weekend Google engineer Matt Cutts,…
Content is King, and Why This is True for Search
Fresh content is a very important asset for the growth and popularity of your site. There are many reasons why this is important. First and foremost, having fresh content benefits your link juice. The more you write, the more opportunity you have to be linked to. I wouldn’t say to take the Twitter approach, however.…
The Most Overlooked & Affordable Keyword Research Method
Proper keyword research is the foundation of a successful search marketing campaign. Work with the wrong keywords and you can run your campaign into the ground resulting in negative campaign ROI (Return on Investment) – or worse yet LOI (Loss on Investment). For marketers conducting keyword research, some of the following questions arise: Should you…
Why the Age of Your Domain Name is Important for SEO
If there’s one request that I always cringe at, it’s to disable a site because a customer decides that it is in his best financial interest to “close shop.” Later, if we own the domain name and get notifications about its upcoming expiration date, the customer may already be long gone and is not reachable…