SEO Best Practices

SEO Brand Marketing Specialist

Five years ago, when Search Engine Optimization was still young and Bruce Clay’s famous Tech Tips page was still little known, the idea of hiring an in-house Search Engine Optimizer was far and none. With more Internet adoption year after year, thousands of companies either have someone learning in-house or they are outsourcing to reputable [...]

Steve’s Top Wordpress SEO Plugins

So you’ve installed Wordpress, and have gone through all the best practices for optimizing Wordpress for higher placement in the search engine results. What’s next? Keeping current, which is why we’re sharing Steve’s top Wordpress SEO plugins to insure your plugin list is up-to-date with ours.
Wordpress SEO Plugins & Tools – August 30, 2009

All in [...]

Top SEO Ranking Factors

This year, two amazing things happened in the Search Marketing industry, which opened the doors to knowledge webmasters and website owners have had to pay thousands of dollars to SEO Experts for. These two studies, created by icons in Search, can be called the Fundamentals of Local and Organic Search for 2009 and should be [...]

Building an SEO Content Tracking Spreadsheet

So you’ve done all of your keyword research and have picked out the 30-500 pages of content you’d like to write over the next couple of years based on keywords that generate leads and sales, but none that generate ambiguous traffic, right? So what’s next?
The next step in the Search Engine Optimization process is creating [...]

How to Do a 301 Redirect in .htaccess

Redirection plays an important part in on-page search engine optimization, both at the website-level and at the web page-level. Having duplicate content on your website or possibly even on a different domain, could impact the power of the page hosting the content you want to appear at the top of Google, Yahoo! or MSN.
Redirecting [...]

SEO-Friendly Shopping Cart

Best SEO-Friendly Shopping Cart from Steve Wiideman on Vimeo.
This post was written for businesses who sell multiple products online. Our team of SEM Experts, has evaluated a number of SEO-friendly shopping cart solutions, including:

SEO-Cart
Ektron
Volusion
Site-Search-Architect
Zen-Cart
and many others

We looked at criteria such as search engine-friendly URLs, integrated page-level best practices (titles, meta descriptions, headings, image nomenclature, file [...]

Notifying Google of Website Maintenance

A good friend of mine who runs a web development blog recently sent me a great link to a post that describes the technical solution for notifying Google of website maintenance, which is important because if the Googlebot crawls through a link to a page on your website and gets a 404 error, it could [...]

CTR and Title Tag Principles

One of the principles I discussed above involves the number of times your website appears for a given search term and number of clicks to your website(called an impression). The ratio of clicks divided by impressions is referred to as Click-Through Rate, or CTR.
If searchers find your listing in the organic search results and choose [...]

Organic Search Engine Optimization

You must be thinking “what the heck does organic have to do with SEO?”. The term organic (or natural) when it comes to search engine optimization refers to listings in the search results that nobody can control except for the search engine itself. With Local SEO, you can be the only provider in a given [...]

Google Local Listings for Multiple Cities

Our friends over at SearchEngineLand.com offered a great tutorial on how to get multiple listings and ranking within the 10-Box of the local search engine results as well as in Google Maps, Yahoo! Local and other local searches.
The three principles to muliple local listings are simple:

Get a physical address and (if applicable) phone number [...]