About one week after we were featured in the Financial Post, I received a phone call that made my heart drop into my stomach. Basically, here’s the gist of what was said: “we searched for you yesterday and found your site ranked #1, but I’m searching now and I don’t see it anywhere in Google”.
OK, at first I didn’t panic, I just assumed it was Google showing a different personalized result. But after I searched on all of our top keywords and even validated through 3rd party rank checkers, I was aghast to realize that we were no longer #1. In fact, we were no longer in the index at all! (more…)
There is a lot of mystery surrounding meta tags and their affect on SEO. I guess it simply boils down to the fact that there has always been a lot of mystery around SEO in general, and meta tags were originally what ‘worked’ to get sites and pages ranked high in search engines.
In the beginning, search engines like Metacrawler and Search.com simply required that you place the proper meta keywords and description on your pages, and they’d reward you with high rankings. Of course, spammers quickly exploited this to get all of their pages ranked for whichever terms they wished - relevant or not. Then a couple guys built a search engine called Google, determining true relevancy by looking at all factors of on-page optimization (not just meta tags), as well as the anchor text in incoming links. Later on they dumped meta tags as ranking factors, and other search engines followed suit. Yes, it’s an over-simplification of the history, but it gets me to where we are now. (more…)
So, I’ve recently stumbled across a great new way of getting inbound links which I’m ready to share. Especially given the current controversy over paid links, this method of link acquisition has the following advantages:
It’s free, so therefore it’s in compliance with Google’s requirements
It’s free, so therefore a PR8 link will cost just as much as a PR2 link
You’re quite likely to get good traffic if you target the right sites
So, this entirely an experiment, I can’t verify how well it works, if at all. Today I read an article on Self Made Minds about getting links from authority sites. I decided I’m going to first try the CNN search link, and then spend a bit of time looking for some .edu sites that would actually link back to me.
Today I had the unpleasant experience of losing a prospective SEO client. Now, I would be understanding if it were lost to another reputable SEO company, with a comparably good service, and perhaps even a similar fee structure. However, it was to a web designer who claimed that they could “get them high rankings” within a few weeks (gulp!) by adding a few keywords to the site, and it would cost less than 10% of my estimate. (more…)
OK, I really wanted to call this post “Title tags - the most oft misused SEO factor”. But then I realized that more search using “how to” phrases when they’re looking for this kind of information. At the same time, I also realize that SEO-friendly is improperly structured - it should just be SEF (or Search Engine Friendly) title tags, but quite frankly SEO-friendly just looks better! And with those disclaimers out of the way, I present to you my findings :-).
One of the services I offer as part of my overall SEO solution is that of a site analysis. I look at the content, HTML coding and tag structure, and link structure throughout the site. I provide a report to each client on what they need to or should change, and often that report is much larger than they anticipated! On almost every single report I’ve delivered to date, the <title> tags have been in serious need of attention. (more…)
SEO is more or less the hot trend in online marketing right now. Businesses are now realizing that any money spent on a website is wasted if you don’t get traffic and business from it. Of course, the greatest sources of web traffic are the major search engines, and you need to be ranked high enough to be able to grab some of that traffic. This is the basic concept behind SEO (short for Search Engine Optimization).
There are two serious issues with SEO that are resulting in a lot of companies being burned on poor or fake SEO services. Considering these issues will enable you to understand how to evaluate an SEO company. (more…)
