Category Archives for Search Engine Optimization
April 8, 2012 / Digital Marketing, Rockstar Blogging, Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice
For choosing your blog titles, here’s the advice I’m sure you’ve heard:
February 20, 2012 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice
If you research SEO, you will find that one recommendation is to build backlinks with relevant keyword rich anchor text. This touches on the topic of linkbuilding which is the activity of getting other websites to link to yours. Anchor text in the links with keywords gives Google another signal that your page is relevant to those keywords and should rank for search queries containing those keywords. Or so the story goes.
February 3, 2012 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice
Fair warning, this one is for the SEO geeks out there.
Checking indexation and for duplicate content issues on Bing is sometimes overlooked with all the focus on Google. But it’s always good to check once in a while to see how your site’s SEO is doing on Bing. Check out my basic overview of Bing Webmaster Tools if it is new for you.
In this case, I had a client that had a number of very similar pages that did not fully have the rel canonical tag fully applied as a solution. Based on Eric Enge’s interview with Duane Forrester, where Duane stated “If we are finding your pages, but not keeping them in the index, there is a reason for that.” I decided to see what Bing Webmaster’s Index Explorer had indexed as “quality content” as a data point.
January 7, 2012 / Search Engine Optimization, WordPress / by Kathy Alice
For quite a while I routinely recommended the All in SEO WordPress plugin, but that changed when Yoast introduced his WordPress plugin. I’ve used it on four WordPress sites and each time my appreciation of this wonderful plugin has grown. Not just for myself, but also because it helps my clients write more SEO optimized posts and pages.
I used to get frustrated after carefully explaining to new bloggers and site owners how to write SEO friendly permalinks, page titles and meta descriptions — and then watching them forget everything I told them by creating poorly optimized posts and pages. Now I can lead the horse to water, and he (or she) actually drinks it! Another great bonus about this plugin is that is it so comprehensive is that it does the job of several plugins. For example there is no need to install a sitemap plugin – Yoast’s plugin will take care of that too for you.
December 12, 2011 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice
Getting your site set up and verified with Google Webmaster Tools is one of the tasks that should be done with any new site. For one thing, if your site hasn’t been indexed yet by Google, it will be if you submit it to GWMT (Google Webmaster Tools). Second, as I have mentioned before, GWMT is a communication channel from Google to you about any problems that could hurt your site’s SEO.
One annoying thing, and many people miss this, is that you should verify both the ‘www’ and non ‘www’ versions of your site with Google Webmasters Tools, even if you have a 301 redirect (as you should) setup from one to the another.
August 31, 2011 / Search Engine Optimization, WordPress / by Kathy Alice
Although advances have been made in this area, you should assume that an image to a search engine looks like unreadable code. So what you need to do to surround the image with hints on what the image might be about. This gives you another opportunity to add your primary and secondary keywords to your page.
