SEO

How to Deal with Expired Product or Auction Pages

Thumbnail image for How to Deal with Expired Product or Auction Pages

Today’s post is question from Hicham Damahi of beezid.com/ who asks “How to handle expired product pages on a classified / auction site.” I’m going to expand the topic to cover expired product pages as well, since the concept it basically the same.

Read the full article →

When To Pay Top Dollar for Copy

Thumbnail image for When To Pay Top Dollar for Copy

It took Leo Tolstoy six years to craft the 460,000-word War and Peace. A cheap copywriting service could churn out as many words for your website for just $9,200 (at 2 cents a word) over the course of a few weeks. Added to this, standards of literacy and attention spans on the web are plummeting. [...]

Read the full article →

Use Scribe SEO to Optimize Your WordPress Posts

Thumbnail image for Use Scribe SEO to Optimize Your WordPress Posts

As you know I’m a big fan of the WordPress platform. Although it’s not the most optimal platform, there’s no question that it makes it easier to run a website. I was recently asked by Brian Clark of CopyBlogger to review Scribe SEO a new service/plugin for WordPress, one that was designed to help you [...]

Read the full article →

Is WordPress Good or Bad for SEO

Thumbnail image for Is WordPress Good or Bad for SEO

  Earlier this week there was a post on SEOBullsh*t that talked about how WordPress was inadequate for anything more than a personal blog. Since I’m a big advocate of WordPress and use it more than any other platform, I thought I’d provide a little balance to the argument.

Read the full article →

The Tales Silently Told By The Cannons Of Titles

Thumbnail image for The Tales Silently Told By The Cannons Of Titles

What Bestselling Authors Know About Writing Titles They vary by genre, but the majority of bestselling authors and editors return to the same hooks time and again to routinely sell obscene amounts of books. On the recommendation of Clayton Makepeace, a celebrity in the web’s direct response copywriting world, I decided to visit a bookstore [...]

Read the full article →

Is Google Stealing Your Content and Hijacking Your Traffic

Thumbnail image for Is Google Stealing Your Content and Hijacking Your Traffic

Google has long been an advocate of “build great content”; however, in reality, it’s turning into “build great content … and if we like it we’ll take it from you, put it on our pages, and deprive you of that traffic. Without compensation.” Strong accusations, sure, but I’m willing to step up to the plate, [...]

Read the full article →

Is Your Schlock Writing Dismembering Infants?

Thumbnail image for Is Your Schlock Writing Dismembering Infants?

Schlock writing is bad. Schlock writing is bad because it is uninteresting. By uninteresting, I mean that writing in a schlocky manner is generic. Schlock writing is styleless and schlock is flat.

Read the full article →

How to Speed up WordPress

Tips for speeding up your wordpress installation.

At Pubcon this year Google announced page load time was going to become a ranking factor in 2010 (see video below). Shortly after this announcement, Google started showing load time data in webmaster central. Being a bit proactive, I decided to start looking at ways to speed up this site.

Read the full article →

Cleaning Up After Google’s URL Mess

Thumbnail image for Cleaning Up After Google’s URL Mess

Recently Google announced the release of their own URL shortening service, Goo.gl. If we put aside the data gathering aspects for a moment, this product is the third in a series of products that make the web a more difficult place to crawl. In this post we’ll follow a Goo.gl URL through its course and [...]

Read the full article →

Secure Pages, Shopping Carts and Duplicate Content

Thumbnail image for Secure Pages, Shopping Carts and Duplicate Content

Last week at SES Chicago, we were sitting in some site review panels and came across an identical problem on two completely different sites: duplicate content on both secure and non secure pages.

Read the full article →

Shopping Cart SEO Tips

Thumbnail image for Shopping Cart SEO Tips

When you run an online ecommerce store with a shopping cart, it’s quite easy for your architecture and URL’s to enter into territory that’s not friendly for search engines. Here are some basic tips I recommend for everyone working with an online shopping cart.

Read the full article →

How to Use Twitter Lists To Create Reputation Management Problems

Thumbnail image for How to Use Twitter Lists To Create Reputation Management Problems

When twitter lists first came out and I commented about how awesome they are, I also warned they had the potential to become a tool for evil and create reputation management problems. Since no one paid attention, I figured what better way to illustrate the problem than to see it in action?

Read the full article →

Why It’s Harder to Hide Things on The Internet

Thumbnail image for Why It’s Harder to Hide Things on The Internet

In recent years it has become increasingly more difficult to hide information (including data, pages, new domains, and entire websites) on the internet. In some cases, the discovery’s results can range from being mildly embarrassing to to completely giving away a business plan. In this post I’ll talk about some of those holes and how to protect [...]

Read the full article →

How Bing and the Wall Street Journal Could Screw Google

Thumbnail image for How Bing and the Wall Street Journal Could Screw Google

In the past week there’s been a lot talk about the Wall Street Journal threatening to pull its content from Google and why it’s a good idea or sheer lunacy.

Read the full article →

Bad Architecture and Band-Aid Solutions

Thumbnail image for Bad Architecture and Band-Aid Solutions

In the past few months all of the search engines, but especially Google have released or started supporting new ways of fixing site architecture issues. However IMHO these are band-aid solutions for bad site architecture, and not something you should rely on … at all.

Read the full article →

Wikipedia: The Guide To Complete Idiots

Thumbnail image for Wikipedia: The Guide To Complete Idiots

I was browsing around Wikipedia and couldn’t help but laugh at the stupidity of some of Wikipedia’s editors, or wonder how Google can love thieves like these… Wikipedia editors can’t spell, yet they want us to make a better ‘choise’ of words. So let me get this straight. The content was garbage, but you still [...]

Read the full article →

SEO Testing – Is Your Zipper Down

Thumbnail image for SEO Testing – Is Your Zipper Down

Today’s post deals with a much more harmless form of SEO Outting, accidental outting and invalidating testing. To teach this lesson I’m going to use a story …

Read the full article →

WordPress SEO: How to Create Living URL’s

Thumbnail image for WordPress SEO: How to Create Living URL’s

If you watched any of the congressional hearings about the newspaper industry where Marissa Mayer testified one of the concepts she brought up is Living URL’s. Danny Sullivan has an excellent write up on it on Search Engine Land. The basic concept is a story lives at a single URL and gets added to/edited/updated over [...]

Read the full article →

WordPress SEO: How to Choose a Permalink Structure

Thumbnail image for WordPress SEO: How to Choose a Permalink Structure

For this post we’re going to be taking  look at the optimal permalink and URL structures for wordpress. There are a lot of different options, and there isn’t a one size fits all answer, however there are definitely better and worse choices you can make.

Read the full article →

WordPress SEO: How to Use RSS and Scrapers to Build Links

Thumbnail image for WordPress SEO: How to Use RSS and Scrapers to Build Links

When you run wordpress or any other blog for that matter, chances are your blog is getting scraped, and re-used without your permission. In this post I’ll show you how you can use this to your advantage to build links with the anchor text of your choice.

Read the full article →