I’m tired of self-proclaimed gurus.
In our field, there are an ever-increasing number of ‘experts’ and ‘gurus.’  A quick search on Linkedin shows 45,000 gurus and 450,000 experts overall, with a ridiculous concentration around SEO.  Employers are even seeking out this level of hubris by adding the term to their job listings.  The graph below shows [...]

We hear this question a lot.  Social Networking, especially Facebook and Twitter, are becoming mainstream, but.. how can my business use twitter?  I see three potential scenarios: to connect with a community, understand what people are saying about a brand, and for research to develop fresh and relevant content for SEO.  Each has particular measures [...]

As SEO-ers we hear “why” a lot. Why didn’t my page’s rank increase? Why should I target a more specific keyword? Why should I spend money on a PPC (Pay-Per-Click) campaign? Why are you so pretty?
Ok- not the last one but all of the others I have heard a million times over. I think many [...]

Ok, so my title is a bit hyperbolic. I could live without them (probably) but I don’t want to. I’m smart enough to know I don’t know everything, and when I am stuck or trying to find a different perspective, I usually turn to these blogs to inspire and educate. More than anything, my favorite [...]

Occams razor. There are many competing theories about how to achieve high search engine rank, but like William of Occam, I believe that when there are two competing theories that make exactly the same prediction, the simpler one is the better. Hence, body text optimization. It isn’t complicated and doesn’t require intense strategic planning- body [...]

Keyword research and targeting is one of the most important aspects of optimizing your website. The keyword terms/phrases you choose will be used in your title tag, H1 tag, URL, meta description tag, throughout the content of your site, and possibly in your domain name. The odd thing is, many websites ignore this most basic [...]

What the H1!? SEOmoz recently published their Biennial Ranking Factors for 2009, and H1 tags have taken quite the hit in terms of SEO ranking importance. For ages, SEO experts have stressed the importance of the H1 tags for search engine rank, but recently there has been a significant shift in this type of thinking [...]

XML Sitemaps are an extremely useful SEO tool. They connect search engines and websites to each other and make getting your site indexed less of a waiting game. XML Sitemaps are like genies who only grant wishes about the speed of website crawling and indexing- but they do grant it every time.
When you submit an [...]

It never fails to surprise me how many SEO professionals overlook the simple power of Robots.txt. It is a tiny thing that has a huge impact on your site- whether that impact is positive or negative is up to you.
Robots.txt is a file that search engine bots read before crawling your site. Bots use this [...]

404 errors, we have all come across them and yes, they can be very annoying. Sometimes you might not realize that your site is showing 404s- which is why we have SEO tools (nudge, nudge). SEO tools can alert you to any errors and advise you on why you have the 404, be it because [...]