Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category

The time to claim your web identity is now. Online reputation management cannot start soon enough. Purchase a YourFirstNameLastName.com or YourBusinessName.com domain, register relevant Facebook and Twitter accounts, and start filling those services with accurate information that you want to spread. Without a proper domain with your name in it and the relevant social accounts, reputation management may turn into

Putting your contact information out there and inviting sales questions and customer service can feel unimportant — or downright scary. But making contact information visible on your website can get you more leads and improve your sales, conversions and search engine rankings. You don’t have to just take my word for it, though. Display your contact info – or make

A website’s title tags are very important for several reasons: The title tag shows up in search results as the blue link, and a good one helps the site get more clicks and visitors from search results. Title tags are a crucial SEO element that can help the website show up higher when people search for the words in it.

Don’t let fancy moves ruin your SEO Website designers often employ technologies like Flash, JavaScript, Ajax, and Silverlight to make their sites attractive, fast, and easy to use. While there are great reasons to use these technologies, they can create problems when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO). Web page content that’s wrapped in a fancy package can be difficult –

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but an image on your website won’t be worth anything to search engines or a vision-impaired person if it doesn’t have alt text. What is Alt Text? Alt text (short for “alternative text”) gives people and search engines a way to “read” images or audio clips on a website. Technically speaking, alt text is

Make sure your important pages can rank A great page on your website will never rank well in search results – and be discovered by more people – if the search engines don’t know it’s there in the first place. First, some background: Search engines use computer programs called “crawlers” (or “spiders” or “robots”) to discover web pages and add

Build search optimization into your site Even really good web designers can make structural, coding or design decisions that pose real problems for search engines. There’s so much detail involved in website creation, sometimes a design decision that’s great for users can have a big, unintended negative effect on your search rankings. It’s a real loss to your business if

Repair broken links for good SEO Most people redesign their websites every couple of years. Maybe it’s a cosmetic makeover, maybe it’s to enhance search engine optimization (SEO), or maybe the site has grown and really needs re-organizing. Whatever the reason, rewriting web page URLs means breaking links to those pages, whether the links are from other sites or other

The page title is one of the most important ways that search engines determine what a web page is about. That means you should make sure each web page on your site has its own unique title, one that accurately reflects its content and purpose. And each page title should include the most important keyword or keyword phrase for that page: the words

  Don’t split your link juice Most websites have a home page with something like index.php or default.aspx at the end of its URL – for example, MyWebsite.com/index.php There are sound technical reasons for that, which I’ll explain below. But just like your underwear, you really shouldn’t be showing that level of detail to the public. Even worse than an

Subdomains confuse search engines & searchers Did you know that if you own www.mywebsite.com, you also own: blog.mywebsite.com store.mywebsite.com and anythingelse.mywebsite.com? Each of these is a subdomain of mywebsite.com. You might think – and many web designers do think – that subdomains are a nice way to organize your website. People often put the company blog on blog.mywebsite.com, the product