A while back on Searching Solutions, we launched a free service that let people ask SEO questions for free.
Unfortunately, we let it lapse and enter obscurity. Oops! This is a great tool for when you get stuck on a certain topic like pay per click, meta data, canonical URL’s, dup content, rankings or whatever. Please feel free to ask. We are here to help!
No question is too basic. And if it’s too advanced, we’ll tell you, and refer you to someone smarter than we are!
Don’t miss out on this important resource…
So what are you waiting for? Ask away!
In this video, I talk about a couple of simple ways you can find out how popular a keyword phrase is, and the general level of competition. This is done through Google’s keyword research tool, and a simple check of the titles in the Google results for that query. By the way, here are a couple of sample search queries that may help you along the way:
Hope you enjoy the video!
Practical SEO Competitive Research from Justin Smith on Vimeo.
I had the great pleasure of being able to interview Lorelle VanFossen yesterday afternoon. For those of you that are not aware of her work, you can head on over to Lorelle on WordPress. She is considered to be one of the top blogging and WordPress experts in the world and can be regularly seen keynoting at large blogger conferences such as WordCamp, and SOBcon.
The podcast is quite long for an interview, so I won’t be able to transcribe the entire thing, but I will hit a few of the key points here.
“You can’t get anywhere without a plan; my tip is multi-fold…”
This is just a sample of some of the great tips Lorelle has to offer from her book: Blogging Tips - What bloggers won’t tel you about blogging. Make sure to check it out!
Thank you again Lorelle for your time. I am genuinely thankful for the time you gave for the interview.
Make sure to check out Lorelle on these sites as well:
** Woopra
** Blog Herald
Probably the most common request I get in the SEO field is: “Can you check my website for errors and problems?”. People often seem to be paranoid that there may be some feature of their websites causing the ranking to suffer, or that some secret piece of code is hurting their ranking ability. Usually this paranoia is unfounded, and they simply need better content, more links, etc.
But in some cases, I’ve found that there can be problems with sites that hurt the ranking. Usually these have to do with the ability of a search spider to crawl a site. I call this “Search Engine Friendliness”.
The most common errors that lead to search engine ranking problems are:
So how do you know if you have any of the above problems, and how do you check for common errors? Try these 5 steps:
I hope these 5 steps are useful. You may not need them very often, but when you do you’ll wish you would have bookmarked this post… ![]()
This is something I wish every web developer would read. It’s a simple document from Google that lists best SEO practices for onsite optimization. Nothing fancy, just some basic pointers for meta data, alt tags, heading tags, robot.txt, file structure, and alot more.
If you build websites or know someone that does, please share these links with them. I’m getting tired of explaining this stuff…
Ever had a search engine marketing or optimization question that you wish you could find a specific answer to? Google is usually a great help in this area, but sometimes you want to put skin on an answer and have a real person answer it.
That is the reason I’ve started the Searching Solutions Q & A. It is a free forum that allows you to post your SEO questions for free. Super easy.
So please, ask away! I can help you by answering your questions, and you can help me by helping me get new ideas for articles and help to build the content of my site.
To get started with your questions click Here:
Searching Solutions Search Marketing Q & A
People in the search marketing industry are so obsessed with search engines. All they can seem to talk about is how to please the search engines, get on their good sides, and kiss up to Matt Cutts in some way shape or form. But so many people never talk about the different reasons you might want to break off a relationship.
I thought it would be fun to take a look at a few ways you can break up with a search engine and manage your relationships.
Time to call it quits. Maybe you have a private member website, want privacy, or simply don’t want your site to be in the search engine results.
To cut off all communication and break the heart of that poor search engine robot, insert the following into the header section of your pages:
“It’s nothing personal, I still really like you, but we make better friends than lovers.” Maybe you don’t want the search engines to index your pages (maybe you’re trying to combat duplicate content?), but you still want them to follow your links and find other pages of your site.
Use this in the header section of your pages:
The search robot found out you were cheating and decided to pull your rankings. There’s nothing worse than a messy break up. Better make up as soon as possible. Leave behind your unfaithful ways and beg for forgiveness.
Sometimes it’s ok to see other people for a while. Maybe you have a reason to want to include Googlebot, but exclude Yahoo Slurp from your website. Or maybe you want to exclude a specialized bot like Linkscape, image search, etc.
The best way to allow and disallow certain robots is through robots.txt. Here is a link to a very thourough tutorial on the subject of creating and using a robots.txt file.
Let’s face it, you know you are in love. You’ve become obsessed with this relationship. All your friends tell you that you need to break it off. This confined intimacy is killing you, and you don’t even know it. You’ve become so dependent upon approval that your entire livelihood is wrapped up in it. You sit around at home wondering why she doesn’t call (err, crawl) as often as she used to.
Don’t get too obsessed with the search engines. You want a steady long lasting relationship, not a one night stand.
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Yes, this was more of a fun post, and I didn’t include alot of “details” about how to disallow certain robots, proper use of robots.txt, excluding certain directories, using webmaster tools, etc… so if you have any questions, please comment and I’ll answer any specific questions you have…