Help Make ‘The Best SEO News Site On The Planet’ Even Better!

SEO News

SEO News

Awhile back, I launched Coconut Headlines, a free news aggregator site (making available to everyone the same material I read to follow the world of SEO on a daily basis).

Naturally, over time, feeds change, break, or are discontinued – you may have noticed a few of these on the site in recent months.

I’ve done a bunch of work to update it, and all the existing feeds are now working.

What I could use some help on is, what sources should I consider adding?

Prominent ones that are already on my radar are:

  • Jason Acidre
  • Don Rhoades
  • Seer Interactive
  • State of Search
  • WireBuzz
  • Brick Marketing
  • Sean (the 1′s and 0′s guy)
  • Stuntdubl
  • Martinibuster

Please take a look and give me any feedback on any others I should be considering – and thanks!
www.coconutheadlines.com

Posted in Featured Article, Online Marketing Strategy, Uncategorized | 4 Comments

Thoughtful Commenting for SEO: The Complete Guide

Thinking about Outreach

“I Link…Therefore…”

Commenting in a thoughtful manner can be a great way to engage with your audience and peers, build links, and even garner click-through traffic.  I’m *not* talking here about spamming WordPress blogs with thousands of auto-generated comments using automated tools.  “Thoughtful” commenting, as I call it, adds value to the conversation, and makes the internet a better place, not a worse one.  This article will detail best practices for what can be perfectly legitimate marketing practice, done properly and with the right intentions. Full article»

Posted in Featured Article, Online Marketing Strategy, Search Engine Algorithms, SEO Content, SEO Linking | 11 Comments
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Website Redesign Considerations for SEO and PPC

Also...it goes without saying...don't use "frames" or anything "flash"-y

Also...of course...don't use "frames" or anything "flash"-y

Many of my clients tend to start out an engagement by making various website changes, and often they are even already in the middle of, or about to embark on, a complete website redesign.

There are numerous articles and books about how to optimize website designs, but for SEO and Paid Search, there seem to always be some issues that perenially come up (the “usual suspects”) – all  well worth highlighting.

Here is a standard, quick checklist I’ve developed for use with new and existing websites, to ensure the website is optimized for SEO and PPC purposes. Full article»

Posted in Featured Article, Online Marketing Strategy, SEO Architecture | 17 Comments

How to Set Up Your Very Own Cloud Windows Server for SEO

Provisioning a Server in Days of Yore

Provisioning a Server in The Good Old Days

SEO Tools, particularly website audit ones like Xenu Link Sleuth or PowerMapper SortSite, can sometimes take a long time to run when examining particularly large websites.  Occasionally you may even need to reboot your machine for some other reason, which then ruins some particular run of these tools, forcing you to start over.

I recently got frustrated with this (and my laptop hitting near-Fahrenheit-451*-levels when doing site audits) and began looking for cheap solutions for running Windows software remotely.

*R.I.P. Ray Bradbury!

Why Cheap “VPS” Services Seem Like a *Really* Bad Idea
My understanding of most VPS (virtual private server) services is, they aren’t necessarily virtual private servers in actuality – most are merely an *account* on a virtual private server, Full article»

Posted in Featured Article, SEO Architecture, Uncategorized | 6 Comments

Linking Strategies: The Complete Guide

No Links to Poor Richard's Almanac? Major Fail, Mr. Franklin!

No Links to Poor Richard's Almanac? Major Fail, Mr. Franklin!

There are many ways to go about getting links;  the different methods vary widely.  I recently helped some clients with their linking strategies, and when I did, I researched a wide range of approaches from the perspective of a number of characteristics.

This article presents a massive comparison chart that may even make you reconsider certain link building practices you might already be pursuing. Let’s get a few points straight first though. Full article»

Posted in Featured Article, Online Marketing Strategy, Search Engine Algorithms, SEO Linking | 29 Comments

Website Architecture for SEO: The Complete Guide

Optimization of Design Can Lead to *Big* Wins

Optimization of Design Led to a BIG Win

If you want to “Bring Back the SEO Cup”, you would do well to emulate the folks who designed and built the “Stars and Stripes” yacht back in 1986 and ensure that your website has a highly optimized design.

There are a number of SEO design principles for website architecture that have been extensively written on in the industry, including “Mapping Keywords to Content”, “Siloing”,  “Keeping Your Website Shallow”, “PageRank Sculpting”, and “Internal Anchor Text Sculpting”.  These principles are important because although you may not be able to control how much the outside world links to you, how your website is organized is completely under your own control, so you should take full advantage of your options in designing it.

This article will walk through the theoretical basis of each, so you can understand not only how to apply these principles, but *why* you should.

*Shout-out to my father, Dave Ives, who wrote an early Fast Fourier
Transform computer program that ended up being used to help optimize
the hydrodynamic design of the Stars and Stripes ’87 – great work Dad!

Full article»

Posted in Featured Article, Online Marketing Strategy, Search Engine Algorithms, SEO Architecture, SEO Content, SEO Linking | 16 Comments

How to Unoptimize Your Content for Maximum Rankings

Unoptimizing Thunderhead Mountain to Rank for "Crazy Horse"*

Unoptimizing Thunderhead Mountain to Rank for "Crazy Horse"

It’s often said that you should simply “write great content for your users” in order to do well from an SEO perspective.  I think it should be more correctly stated as:  “Write great content about a topic that your users care about and which few have done a good job addressing”.  There are many aspects of this definition that will be interesting to explore, but what we’re going to address in this article is how to write content “about a topic”.  I would argue that the most important step in content optimization is a final “unoptimization” step you should always perform before finalizing any document -  to ensure you’ve successfully made the document be *about* the topic you’re targeting. Full article»

Posted in Online Marketing Strategy, Search Engine Algorithms, SEO Content | 14 Comments

Google Crawling Behavior Exposed: 16 Different Googlebots?

Must!.....Document!.....Googles!.....Crawlers!

Must.....Document.....Google's.....Crawlers!

Of the major disciplines in SEO, architecture is perhaps the most important of all.  This is because if you don’t take into account Google crawling behavior and Google can’t properly spider your website and discover your content, then it won’t matter if it’s the right content, whether it’s optimized, or whether you have obtained any links to it.   It may as well not exist if Google can’t discover it.

You’re probably familiar with Google’s spider program, Googlebot, but there are many other ways that Google visits your website.  This posting will attempt to pull them all together, and raises some open questions about Google crawling behavior for the community because some aspects of Google’s numerous spiders are still relatively mysterious. Full article»

Posted in Featured Article, Online Marketing Strategy, Search Engine Algorithms, SEO Architecture | 10 Comments

Search Engine Tools:Some of the Best SEO Tools are Free…Take a Look!

These Tools Are The Greatest Invention Since This Thing

These Tools Are The Greatest Invention Since This Thing

Search Engine Tools are a dime a dozen, but most only do a very tiny micro-task; substantially useful tools are few and far between.  Here are my personal favorite free search optimization tools for SEO; some may be familiar but hopefully there’s a few surprises in here for you Full article»

Posted in Featured Article, Online Marketing Strategy, SEO Architecture, SEO Content, SEO Linking | 20 Comments

RI SEO Company Case Study for Rhode Island Search Engine Optimization

We Burned a British Ship *Before* the Tea Party, and refused to Sign the Constitution until the Bill of Rights Was Added

We Burned a British Ship *Before* the Boston Tea Party, and Refused to Sign the Constitution until the Bill of Rights was Added

For an SEO consultant in Rhode Island (just as for any business), it’s important to leverage all possible marketing channels to reach potential clients.  Word of mouth and references from website design firms and various website and internet solution providers can be key.  With this in mind, I recently met with a local RI marketer who may be able to help me with some SEO consulting references, and in the process, I might be able to help him with his clients in RI search optimize their websites.  He mentioned he has been doing a lot of on-page optimization for his firm’s marketing services, and even with little to no link building, they are ranking well and getting some good leads.

This prompted me to take a look at whether I rank for any terms people local to me care about, and I don’t.  In fact, I have to confess that, while one might think I must be doing all kinds of crazy things to optimize this blog Full article»

Posted in Featured Article, Online Marketing Strategy, Search Engine Algorithms | 9 Comments

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