Comments(0) A merry All Hallow’s Eve to ye all. I couldn’t manage a true Pierat costume, so I settled for a bonny good pirate costume instead. My daughter Hazel, 8, went as a bewitching devil. Ah, but the weekend’s festivities were but a precursor to the Beggar’s Night. A safe and mischievous All Hallow’s Eve to ye all.
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My latest article at Practical Ecommerce, read it in full here.
A site’s navigational links can help its search engine optimization. Links pass “link popularity,” little votes of value, from the linking page to the destination page. In addition, the link’s anchor text — the visible text portion of the link — passes a relevance signal. Relevance and value, or quality, are the foundation of SEO. A site’s navigation has the power to improve both.
My latest article at Ecommerce Developer, read it in full here.
In my ongoing efforts to work more closely with developers to achieve search engine optimization goals, I decided to poll a few of my developer friends anonymously to understand their side of the love, less-love relationship between search engine optimization and site development. Three primary trends quickly appeared.
My latest article at Practical Ecommerce, read it in full here.
Many organic search marketers focus on increasing rankings and traffic to a site. What happens to that traffic once it hits the site, they assume, is someone else’s problem. This is a wrong approach. Search marketing’s ultimate goal isn’t usually to drive more traffic; it’s to convert more sales. More traffic just creates more server load, which is worthless unless it’s converting. The easiest way to convert more organic search traffic is to convert more of the existing traffic.
For search-engine-optimization professionals, this is yet another occasion to turn to your developers and request their assistance.
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I’m going to take a break from blogging about SEO and Android and social media to talk about something that feeds my soul: gardening. All day long I sit at my computer and collect data, analyze data, write content, research links, and produce nothing physical. It takes a surprising toll on my sense of accomplishment, even when the results are great. Gardening helps fill that need for physical toil and reward.
I’m fortunate to live on an acre of land in Crystal Lake, IL, with lots of different areas of shade and sun, great soil and poor, so I have a lot of opportunities to create gardens that feature different types of plants. In my digital life I look for patterns and rules and guidelines to navigate the rocky waters of SEO. Well, it’s the same with gardening.
My latest article at Practical Ecommerce, read it in full here.
Working in the organic search industry, I’ve often had large search marketing clients who envied the success of their affiliates, which sometimes outperformed their own in-house search marketing efforts. But Carolyn Tang Kmet opened my eyes to the ways that search affiliates can actually be beneficial to smaller businesses that lack the resources to develop and manage marketing programs in-house.
I work with Kmet at Groupon — the daily deals site — where I’m a search-engine-optimization manager. She’s director of affiliate marketing for Groupon — the affiliate page is here — and the recipient of the Affiliate Summit Pinnacle Award for “Affiliate Manager of the Year 2010.”
My latest article at Ecommerce Developer, read it in full here.
As recently as 2007, search engine optimization experts were excited by the concept of PageRank or link sculpting, the practice of applying “rel=nofollow” tags to links of lesser value so that more link juice would flow to the other more valuable links. But now, in 2011, it doesn’t work the way most think it does, but there are more modern ways.
Let’s take a look at an example of the concept of PageRank sculpting so that everyone’s on the same page. In the original PageRank algorithm each page of content that Google has indexed had some amount of link popularity or PageRank based on how many inbound links it had. When that page linked to other pages, it passed its PageRank in more or less equal parts to the pages it linked to. In practice it’s a lot more complicated than this, and the algorithm has evolved dramatically over the last 13 years, but this is the basic gist. PageRank sculptors theorized that if they could restrict the flow of PageRank through some links, more PageRank would be forced through the other links — like opening and closing faucets to flow water to one area but not to another.
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Mittens, the youngest Web Piecat, encountered an SEO living in 1995. A heated discussion ensued. Mittens was rubbing used stocks on his face at the time, naturally. But the ancient SEO’s insistence on the value of meta keywords to organic search rankings made Mitty do the classic face palm, with socks. Dirty socks. Yeah, he likes them. Lots.
Go ahead and tell them, Mittens:
Comments(0) Sometimes SEO tactics are so blatantly and universally good or bad that even my cats know the right way to proceed. This column finally gives voice to their feline optimization talents.
Scooter: A mellow gray tabby best known for his clever multiphrase title tag optimizations. He epitomizes the slow and steady progress that is SEO. He’s loyal as the day is long with his old friends but tends to hide from new people, putting him at a disadvantage in the new world of search and social.
Cricket: A neurotic brown tortie/tabby mix best known for her focused “less is more” philosophy. She feels compelled to pluck extraneous repetitive fluff from pages of content much the same as she obsessively pulls the fur from her underbelly. Her OCD tendencies make her a rock star with search analytics and keyword research.
Mittens: A burly orange tabby equally likely to flop down on your lap like a purring boneless chicken as to bite you. He’s sadly afflicted with an obsession for chasing things, like mylar cat toys, little green pixels and algorithm changes. But he’s young. He’ll grow out of it. And in the meantime, his energy, outgoing nature and enthusiasm make him an excellent ethical link builder.
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While Google Analytics is indeed free and includes some great features, I have one giant red flag issue with it: sampled data, AKA Fast Access Mode.
My experences with Google Analytics have led me to become disenchated with the tool for large data sets. When you drill down to the critical intersection of SEO data — which URL drove visits & transactions for which keywords — the data is sampled to such an extent that it is useless to base decisions on.
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