Virtual-Environments

As you well know, it's extremely important to have the proper site architecture, technical requirements, and site infrastructure which is important for the search engines. With that said, I've found that most web developers are just that – web programmers who may not know the full effect of their core SEO strategies or marketing strategies. Most web programmers that I've worked with understand their jobs and their roles in the company very well and quite simply are unaware of the latest SEO trends or search algorithms and how they play a vital role to the search engine rankings of my client's website. Being able to work directly with these technical savvy professionals is a core requirement for any SEO firm or consultant that you bring on to help you with SEO. Keep these ideas in mind when trying to communicate with these types of people.  Read more...

Google, Yahoo!, and Bing all have heavy duty ways to crawl each and every website on the internet. This is a huge job and it takes up tons of resources – which is why they don't ever want to make sure that they don't "over" crawl any one website. They simply don't want to over burden their already resource intensive crawls. For that reason, most search engines only spend a limited amount of time crawling any one website. Here are some factors that can influence your crawl allocation:  Read more...

Could you imagine what it would be like if you could make Google bow to your every whim and desire? What if you could be at the top of the search engines for every search term that you wanted to be on top for – without spending a dime on PPC? You could rule the business and informational world! Alas, we all bow down to Mother Google and Queen Yahoo!, but there are some ways that we can direct the search giants (including Bing) in how they view your website and what functions to perform while visiting. This article will discuss the fine points of your robots.txt file, your robots meta tag, and even the new nofollow HTML attribute.  Read more...

Although extremely hard to pronounce, canonicalization is a hot topic right now. Google's latest and greatest idea, canonicalization is the process of consolidating all duplicate URLs to one original canonical version. If there are a lot of URLs that lead to pretty much the same page, you're going to make the search engines work extra hard and spend a lot more time crawling all the different URLs. Often times, this means that they'll miss the important pages of your website because your crawl time is limited or too slow.

Here are some times when canonicalization is an issue:  Read more...

You may have already heard that site speed is now a factor in your website's search engine rankings – especially for Google. In this article, I'm going to attempt to identify the who, what, when, where, why, and how to improve for your website. Wish me luck!

1. Why, Google, WHY?!

First of all, Google is on a kick to make the internet faster – which I think is great! With ISPs providing faster download and upload speeds, computers becoming faster and more powerful, and searchers becoming more impatient – who really wants to have a website that is slow and bulky? No one.  Read more...