Let me give you an example.

I spent at least a year building and rebuilding a site about "Display Graphics", for our family business (Canada Display Graphics). In my estimation, I had carefully thought it through, and had decided that "display graphics" was a pretty good description of what our company was doing.

But we had a major problem.

[...] Read more!

In a fluke, I was able to notice something about the way Google indexes content from web directories. Excluding your template, the most important line of code is the first title you add to your main body.

Search through Google and see for yourself!

Try searching for "something" in "yourcity","province/state" and look for a web business directory that you recognize. Once you find a directory, take a good look at the description of that particular listing (not the title). It may be a good idea to write it down. Once complete, click on the "cache" of that page within Google to highlight the content and view the web directory page.

[...] Read more!

If you own a website there are essentially three ways for a customer to get to your site. The first and most direct way is for them to type in your website address. The only problem with this is that people must already know your address in order to use it. You are not going to reach many potential customers that way.

== Link Popularity - Linkpopularity durch professionellen Linkaufbau - text links to get traffic and build your search engine ranking ==

The second method is for people to link to your site from another website. This is actually a great way of generating traffic to your site but the only problem is that other sites must grant you permission to post a link on their site. If you don't have much traffic already coming to your site, the odds are not great that another site will want to be an affiliate. The final method is for a customer to find your site through a search engine. Enter the world of search engine optimization.
[...] Read more!

Recent developments on the Google front have gotten web marketers and SEO specialists talking even more than usual. What they're talking about is the changing Search Engine Optimization landscape. Some of the traditional assumptions about what gets good Google ranking have been challenged by things Google has said over the last few months -- especially by the filing of their most recent patent.

[...] Read more!

This is a hotly debated topic. Some SEOs claim that sites with a static IP address rank higher while other SEOs claim that shared hosting is just fine... that it would be stupid for search engines to penalize shared hosting since we are running out of IP addresses and so many sites are currently using name based hosting.

First, let's define what we are talking about when we say "static IP" vs "name based" hosting. Here are some synonyms:

For "static hosting", the following all mean the same thing: static IP, dedicated IP, http/1.0, non-shared hosting. For "dynamic hosting", the following all mean the same thing: dynamic IP, name based hosting, http/1.1.

[...] Read more!

Search engines determine their rankings based on two things:
1) Is your site relevant? (Optimized for certain keywords)
2) Is your site important? (Many links back to your site from other sites)

Only when you address both of these considerations are you guaranteed of making an impact. Your degree of success depends on how hard you try and how many other people you're competing against (and how hard they're trying).

[...] Read more!

Which brings us to the second LAW OF THE WEB DESIGN UNIVERSE.

[...] Read more!

This is one of the controversial questions in many of the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) forums, yet it is very easy to answer for any particular search engine. This article conclusively answers that question for the leading search engine.

The methodology is really quite simple for this question. I gathered the results of the queries I naturally performed last month using the leading search engine and analyzed them. It was a simple matter of counting the number of listings that had the keyword in the domain vs. those that didn't. This data was tabulated against the ranking for the first 8 search engine listings.

[...] Read more!

This is another one of the controversial questions in many of the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) forums, yet it is very easy to answer for any particular search engine.

While popular belief seems to be that pages should be very short (less than 10K) to rank well with the leading search engine, this article conclusively answers that question -- with a completely different answer.

The methodology is really quite simple for this question. I gathered the results of the queries naturally performed last month by myself and three associates using Yahoo and Google. I then visited each page and wrote down the size of the body section of the page. Those sizes were then tabulated for the top 20 rankings and converted into a normalized "ranking correlation".

[...] Read more!

Lots of research has focused on inbound links to a site, but little has focused on the number of links actually on a page (outbound or to other parts of a site). Many SEO gurus have recently been talking about something they call "PR Leak" which seems to be a theory that the more outbound links you have, the more your page rank on Google "leaks" away. That concept isn't found in the academic papers published by the founders of Google, but does seem to be accepted by a majority of SEOs. I decided it was time to take a look at the number of links present on a page and how that number correlates with ranking.

[...] Read more!