While keyword density is important (regardless of what you’ve heard to the contrary), it’s not enough to simply say the keyword you want to rank for many times, or even better, the the proper number of times.
Keyword Density tools like Bruce Clay’s can help you figure out how to do that, but it’s important to be engaging to your end-users, and to look natural to search engine algorithms.   Peppering related keywords into your writing can help with both of these goals Read on »

Alien Bodies In Cold Storage at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway?

It can be hard to keep up with everything going on in the world of Search Engine Optimiization, there are so many great sources to keep track of…Matt Cutts, Bruce Clay, the SEOMoz guys, and so on…fortunately there is a single great source that pulls all of these sources together.  And, no, it’s not the Roswell Daily Record…although some of the material in the SEO community certainly qualifies as “consipracy-theory” fodder.

The ultimate source of SEO News, better than any I have seen anywhere else on the planet, is Read on »

I fight for the users!

I’ve seen a number of postings about Google sitelinks, how you can influence them, how Google likely decides whether to assign sitelinks to a website’s entry in the SERPs, etc.  Ultimately these Sitelinks are, I think, a terrible thing  for Internet Marketers, and the LAST thing you should do is try and influence Google to add them for your site; here’s why.

If your website has come up in a search, then the name of your website is either a brand term, or Read on »

There have been  comparatively few articles written in the mainstream SEO blogs about creating content based on formulas – the only folks that seem to cover this topic tend to be from the seedy underside of affiliate marketing, under the term “article spinning”.  David Leonhardt’s recent article (more reputable I think), gives some good examples of what the practice entails.

There are various tools available for “spinning” content, but depending on the business Read on »

Scotty Setting Up Alternate Content For Romulanbot

I am not a fan of the million tiny SEO tools which barely do anything, that can be found on site after site, but every so often someone puts something out that does some heavy lifting and is extremely useful.  Every so often when I come across a great free SEO tool that’s worth looking at I’ll do a rundown here.

One old-school, great SEO tool that has been around for awhile is Rex Swain’s HTTP Viewer.

It allows you to examine a single page’s HTTP header (or headers, if it redirects in a chain), and see what is returned Read on »

Houston, We Have a Problem!

I was examining backlinks for a website today and noticed that it had two backlinks from the same page (names obscured to protect the innocent):

http://www.foo.com/index.html

http://foo.com/index.html

That’s neither here nor there for the site I was looking at, but it indicates a huge problem for the “foo.com” site where the backlinks are coming from.

A user can type in either Read on »

Lunar "Site Map".... *** Click here for larger size ***

With all of the other products besides its search engine that Google has branched out into, some aspects of SEO are actually important to Google itself, ironically.    It may be surprising to some that Google itself has a sitemap so that search engine spiders can properly index their empire, located at http://www.google.com/sitemap.xml

It’s fun from time to time to check this out and see what Google is up to.   Surprisingly, there is a TON of junk in there – Firefox plug-ins that no longer exists, products that Google has discontinued, individual entries calling out various JPG images which seems really odd, and so on – in fact, a number of Read on »