NEW! Raven by TapClicks - SEO + SEM Tools with Deeper Competitive Insights
NEW! Raven by TapClicks - SEO + SEM Tools with Deeper Competitive Insights
We write tips for digital marketers and we create beginner through advanced guides for search engine optimization. Improve your SEO and Content Marketing game.
I was on a great Twitter Marketing panel with Dave Snyder, Lee Odden and Dan Zarrella at PubCon South 2009. My presentation focused on how to get started on Twitter, and how to best engage it to market your business. This article includes the notes and links that were in my presentation. Enjoy! Getting Started […]
So Jeremy has tagged me and now I get to tell people things they shouldn’t know about me. Before I get into my 7 things about yours truly, I would like to preface with, “I understand if you don’t find anything I’m about to say the least bit interesting.” I can say that with confidence, […]
Jeremy Rivera recently brought David Harry’s article on reciprocal linking to my attention. David makes the case that reciprocal linking is pointless and points to patents by Yahoo! to help make his point. The main goal of the patent is to automatically identify (over done) reciprocal links that may be orchestrated to inflate ones rankings […]
Twitter is notorious for having their servers go down and for having a limited feature set. So how in the world did they outlast Pownce and drive them to their extinction? Pownce had everything going for it. It had a slicker UI, an AIR app, and better uptime than Twitter. It was also a collaboration […]
Return on Investment (ROI) is what every client wants from a search marketing agency. It’s an easy thing to calculate if you’re doing Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising. If your revenue is higher than your spend, PPC management fees and cost of goods, then your client is getting a return on their investment. Although it’s simple to […]
Over at SEO Black Hat, QuadsZilla demonstrates correlation between traffic, specifically Google traffic, and bounce rate, claiming that bounce rate is being used to determine quality and factoring into rankings. Except his or her graphs show direct, rather than inverse, relationships between traffic and bounce rate. In other words, in those graphs, on days when […]
In the past few years, archetypes for search engine optimizers have emerged. They include a three point spectrum that includes “White Hat,” “Gray Hat” and “Black Hat.” SEO hats, like most labels, were designed to pigeonhole and simplify what a person does. However, as the practice of SEO had matured and search engines like Google […]
Stop words are words that search engines, like Google, traditionally ignore in searches. For that reason, they’ve been shunned by SEO specialists in regards to how they name domain names, page titles and other keyword-centric onsite SEO elements. However, that strategy has been changing lately, because search algorithms are starting to include stop words in […]
There are many reasons to link out from your website. Sometimes it’s to link to a trusted partner or to a sister website. If you’re a search engine optimizer, you link out because it helps your website perform better on search engines (I’m not talking about link exchanges). However, there are still many websites, especially […]
Oh sweet “nofollow!” I use you on my blog to keep my link juice from spilling out onto the shady, dark world of the Internet underbellies. I even use you to sculpt my sites, hoping to wrangle PageRank and content into my own little silo of SERP love. Yet you are fickle and have proven […]
There’s a belief among many search engine optimizers that links from college websites (aka EDU links) carry more link juice than typical COM, NET and ORG TLD links. Because of that belief, many SEO specialists spend a ridiculous amount of time and energy trying to build up links on any page that resides on an […]
There’s an ongoing obsession with tracking search engine result pages (SERPs). Both seasoned search marketing specialists and know-enough-to-be-dangerous webmasters can’t get enough of them. So what’s so special about these stats and why do people track them? Why Track SERPs? There are generally three reasons why people track SERPs: Research, Trends and Performance. Research tracking […]
Why is the Raven blog a “Do Follow” blog? The short and simple answer has to do with rewarding our blog community. There’s too many high quality comments that don’t deserve to have their links “no followed” in the comments. Running a “Do Follow” blog does take more effort. You have to be more vigilant […]
Promoting a locale-based website can require different and somewhat modified search marketing techniques. For example, if you’re marketing a website with a national or global audience, you may focus on building links from other websites that have a similar audience. However, for websites that have a local audience, it’s generally best to focus on websites […]
Like most code based SEO enhancements, optimizing an image with text involves utilizing existing accessibility options already built into HTML. For example, adding the text in an image to the ALT attribute into the IMG element will help users with certain disabilities (or users with a text browser, like Lynx) and also provide more copy […]
I’ve never liked the idea of renting links. Text Link Ads, one of the pioneers in link selling, continues to use misleading terminology in their marketing through their use of the term “Buy Links.” The problem is that you’re not buying links, you’re renting them. Not only that, you’re renting them at the detriment to […]
As most SEO specialists know, Matt Cutts — aka Google Search King — hates paid links. In fact, he has an all out war against link brokers like PayPerPost and Text Link Ads. Unlike other search marketing conferences, PubCon is known for teaching the darker side of SEO and SEM. It’s been called the DEF […]
Blogging has proven itself to be more than just a way to speak your mind online. As companies like Weblogs, Inc and 9rules can attest to, it can also be a lucrative business. Even better, you don’t have to be a large company with several blogs to make money — Darren Rowse of ProBlogger is […]
The idea of Negative SEO — any type of SEO technique used to hurt a competitor — has long been a subject that seasoned SEO specialists like to keep quiet about. It’s not because they use those techniques, it’s because it’s so easy to do and they don’t want anyone to know about it. Unfortunately, […]
Stephan Spencer, from CNET’s News Blog, posted an informative entry about changes that are taking place with Google’s search engine. Of particular interest was the news from Matt Cutts regarding underscores in URLs. Traditionally, underscores were treated differently from hyphens. Hyphens have long been the preferred method for dividing keywords up in a link. Whereas, […]
