“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. Read on »

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. Read on »

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!

Read on »

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 Read on »

SEO News

For some time now, I’ve been developing a personal news aggregation website focused completely on SEO.  I’ve decided to go ahead and make it available to the community at large.

Here’s the features:

Read on »

In ancient times, tens of years after the dawn of Google, lived a strange race of people...the SEOs. No one knows who they were, or what they were doing...but their legacy remains. Get out your stone calculators!

Doing some work for a client with a fairly new site recently, I noticed their home page has a toolbar PageRank of 7, and they achieved that almost entirely by having a site-wide link on a PageRank 9 website.  Finally, now that have I seen enough cases like this, I think it’s possible to estimate the answer to the question “How many links do I need?” for many situations.  This posting will detail the anecdotal data I’ve seen, and then give tables that can be used to estimate what a page’s toolbar PageRank will become if you obtain a link from a high-PageRank site, and also how many links of which type you need to move up one level of PageRank. Read on »

SEO Enlightenment

Create lots of optimized, keyword-targeted content on your website, make sure it can be spidered, and get numerous high-quality links to it.

Rankings Explained. Any Questions? *click to enlarge*

Last year, some people from the academic community who hadn’t been snatched up yet by Google or Bing did a really interesting study.   Rather than simply researching factor correlations to rankings, as SEOMoz does a great job of doing every so often, they used machine learning techniques to create their own search engine, and trained it to reproduce results similar to Google.  After the training process, they extracted the ranking factors from their trained engine and published them and presented on them at an industry conference.  They were able, for the queries they trained on, to correctly predict Read on »

Bruce Clay's SEOToolset *click to enlarge*

In our recent post, High-End SEO on a Low-End Budget, we briefly mentioned Bruce Clay’s SEOToolSet®.  This is a great subscription service that has been around for a long time and has recently gone through a major upgrade – here we’ll take some more time to run through the service in detail.

Bruce is one of the original SEOs from back in the day, and his company provides a wide variety of training classes, SEO services, and even access to its proprietary optimization toolset.  In a nutshell, this subscription service contains Read on »

SliQ Submitter Plus Directory Submission Software *click to enlarge*

Over the years I have gotten conflicting messages from various SEO experts on the topic of directory submissions, ranging from “They’ll help you!” to “They’ll hurt you!” to “They won’t make any difference at all!”.  The industry doesn’t seem to have a consensus on this topic.  I’m not talking about the few directories that are psuedo-blessed by Matt Cutts in his videos (like DMOZ and Yahoo! Directory), but the thousands of cheap or free directories that auto-submission software targets.  I’ve been using the birth of the “Coconut Headphones” website to monitor the growth of its link profile fairly closely, and since it’s just a blog site and not a source of revenue for me (i.e. I had nothing to lose), I decided to try out one of these directory submitters myself.  There are several out there Read on »