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So you’ve decided to expand your business’ presence online. You’re adding a website, maybe looking into some PPC advertising, and after doing some research, you realize you need some SEO, or search engine optimization. All well and good, but there are several pitfalls newbies and even experienced SEO pros can fall into. One I’m going to discuss today is focusing your SEO too hard on Google alone.

Sure, Google is the unrivaled king of search engines. It generally accounts for around 66.7%, or two thirds, of ALL searches. And of that other third, of course, it turns out a large number are for, ironically, “Google.” But what often gets overlooked in all these subjective number comparisons is the sheer objective number of total queries. The United States generates around 16 BILLION search engine queries every month, so while other engines such as Bing and Yahoo are only combining for a paltry third of them, to ignore them in your SEO campaign is

Pay-Per-Click, or PPC, is a system of marketing where ads are inserted into a user’s online experience and an advertiser pays every time that ad is clicked. In some PPC scenarios, that amount is a flat rate set out in advance. However, the most common format, including that used by Google, is for the advertiser to bid on certain “keywords”, with ads shown on an auction basis. The highest bidder’s ad is shown first, followed by the next highest and so forth. Google’s PPC programs are called AdSense and AdWords. AdWords ads are displayed during a user’s search, while AdSense ads are displayed on an actual website. For the purposes of this article, we will be focusing primarily on AdWords accounts. Publishing an AdWords ad is easy. One must set up a Google account, then set up an AdWords account. One must then write an ad, following certain guidelines, and choose one or more “keywords” for the ad. “Keywords” are specific words or phrases that describe what kinds of searches an advertiser wishes to target. For instance, “pizza delivery in San Diego” is an example of a keyword phrase that a pizzeria in San Diego may wish to target. An advertiser then bids on their chosen keyword(s), enters a

I often work with WordPress sites doing SEO. I recently had an opportunity to build a site for a friend, Crystal Anne Artwork. My friend is an artist and being that the site is essentially all pictures and no text, an interesting problem presented itself. Without any text to work with, how would I accomplish the SEO?

After some research, a WordPress SEO plugin seemed to present the answer. Having never used one before, though, I was initially skeptical. Nonetheless, I thought it had very little potential downside and a large potential upside. At worst I would waste the time and effort of installing it and setting all the keywords and such, and I weighed that small downside against the potential upside, a boost in rankings. In the end, I decided it was an easy choice and that I would go ahead and install one.

There are a number of different WordPress SEO plugins offered. Yoast’s SEO plugin seems to

Once upon a rosy time not long ago, site rankings were king. That #1 spot on the search result rankings was as coveted as gold, sought after, fought for, envied, coveted, and dreamed about: a modern-day internet marketing analog to the Holy Grail. But with the advent of personalized search engine results, many have begun to question whether rankings matter as much as they used to, and further, some have begun to ask the question: When search engine results are personalized to every user, can there even be such a thing as a true #1 ranking anymore?

A lot of study and thought have been put into answering these questions, and while true believers may question their validity or refuse to accept the truth, the fact is that it appears that even with personalization turned on, SERP appear to vary little from one query to the next, regardless of what other queries have been made recently. Stephan Spencer at searchengineland.com has done some fairly extensive testing into this phenomenon, and reports his results here. In a nutshell, what he found was that regardless of what other recent searches may have been performed, for certain keywords site rankings adjusted very little. There may be some minor shifts in positions, but in general the same results appear, even in key

There is a war going on in the world of SEO. On one side stand proponents of content-based approaches. On the other is a group of technically-minded individuals propounding an approach based on code-based SEO strategies such as meta-tags and –titles. Who is right? The answer is complicated and technical, if there is even an answer at all, but to try and make it simpler, in short: neither…or both.

While most search engine companies will say that organic keyword usage and relevant content is the primary factor their algorithms use, it is abundantly clear through extensive testing (since those algorithms are kept as mysterious as possible) that other factors including number of links by reputable sites and coding-based meta approaches can also play a valuable role. While pingbacks are most often achieved by having good, relevant content (which, after all, is what causes folks to want to link to your site), how do those potential linkers find your content in the first place? It is clear that technical, coding-based solutions are an easy way to help juice up the ratings of your site initially, helping customers and consumers find your site so that they can spread the word.  They can also be that little extra edge your site may need to grab that next spot or maintain its ranking. Clearly, SEO is a veritable witches’ brew of modern day internet alchemy, a field that