If you've looked into search engine optimization as a promotional technique for your website, you have likely come across the advice to make your website secure (having an https:// appear in front of your URLs instead of http://). Google has been very vocal in pushing for all websites to make the …
SEO Advice
Below you’ll find all of the posts filed under the SEO category. SEO isn’t an exact science no matter how many folks may try to convince you that they have all the answers… mainly because the engines keep their algorithms a secret.
Some parts of SEO are “evergreen” meaning that they are pretty standard, agreed upon and “non changing” in nature (like making use of title tags and that link building is important if you want to rank). However, many aspects of SEO are about theory and who can guess (from experience and testing) the best. And I do my best to put my experience and love of testing to use.
Google Search Console – a Beginner’s Guide to Finding Actionable SEO Tasks
Google Search Console (GSC) can be a helpful tool - providing you use it. This guide isn't meant for advanced users nor is it a comprehensive dive into every feature GSC has. I'm not looking to overwhelm you. Instead, we're going to go over eight simple GSC features that can provide you with …
How Bloggers Can Fix a Manual Penalty Caused by Compensated Content & Reviews
This past weekend Google sent out a round of manual penalty notices citing "unnatural outbound links" - later confirmed to be targeting sites publishing compensated content and reviews where the blogger is linking out to the brand or site that compensated them. If your site received the notice, …
A Call for a Search Discussion – How Google Works
If you follow me on Twitter, then you know I sometimes complain about the current state of the industry - most notably centered around what passes for research and discussion these days. It feels like people want to be handed the fish - with little interest in learning how the person with the fish …
What Happened When I Flipped a WordPress Based Site from http to https
In mid-July of 2015, I decided to flip the Sugarrae.com site to https using SSL. In the last eighteen+ months, Google has been pushing hard to "make SSL happen." They even said it might give you a bit of a rankings boost, no doubt knowing that tons of SEOs and business owners would begin flipping …
Affiliate Datafeeds and Duplicate Content in a Panda World
For those who aren't familiar, Panda is a Google search filter that (in part) penalizes sites that have a large amount of thin or duplicated content. Panda has been a harsh filter for those using datafeeds in general - be they a merchant or an affiliate. As affiliates, we (and every other competing …
What the Mainstream Media Doesn’t Get about Panda
It seems the mainstream media has finally caught up - not everyone who gets screwed by Google is a spammer getting his just deserts.MetaFilter has apparently been dying a slow and painful death as a result of the Google Panda updates. And, I'm sad to say a little part of me smiled.Am I happy …
Google Propaganda, SEO and Why Marketers Need to Wake Up
As the entire search world knows, Matt Cutts released a post last week - I'm paraphrasing - warning us that Google now considers "low-quality guest posting" to be spam under their guidelines and will begin to take action per those beliefs.I don't plan to revolve this post entirely around that …
Identifying the Money Keywords for Affiliate Marketing & SEO
Keyword targeting can make all the difference revenue wise when working on SEO for an affiliate site that relies on SEO as its primary marketing method. You have vanity terms, traffic terms, and then you have your "money" terms.Seeing results from SEO takes a lot of work and a lot of time. So …