Ben Finklea's blog

In today’s social-savvy society, the phrase “your reputation proceeds you” is limited to the few and famous no longer, as any and every interesting piece of content is instantly spread across the Web within minutes, literally.

If you are making your way up your industry ladder, you will most likely get ‘googled’ hundreds of times throughout your career during meetings, interviews, conventions, speaking engagements, or whenever you so happen to drop a business card on a new contact. You want to come out smelling like roses, don’t you?! Read more »

There is nothing more embarrassing in the world of SEO than duplicate content. If you are caught with duplicate content, it’s a one-way ticket to Internet detention in the eyes of Google. Sure, the first few times you walk away with a sore wrist and your content taken down. But if you continue to consciously duplicate your content, your website could be wiped away from Web existence. Now that’s heavy. Read more »

There are two major areas of discipline in search engine optimization: on-page SEO, which includes keyword usage on your website’s meta data and actual content, and off-page SEO, which is how you connect your website with the rest of the Web. This post deals with the latter, with a specific off-page SEO strategy that has proven its worth. Read more »

The Meta tags module is important to your site because it tells the search engines what the content you have is all about. That is right, it's pretty much data about data. And while this seems redundant, it is incredibly important for the overall optimization of your site.

The Controversial Childhood of Meta tags
Read more »

Just like websites of old, Drupal uses a query string to pull information from a database. Every blog post, comment, content, user entry, and so on is stored in tables on the server so you need a query string to go find the data and bring it back to the browser window.

One of the essential online elements that SEO tackles is creating URLs that are “clean” and indexed efficiently by the search engines. They are easy on the eyes and on the spiders that index your site. If you are not sure what a clean URL is, here is a quick definition: Read more »

One of the most debatable and misunderstood topics in SEO, that which can divide a country and sound the battle horns, is the role that copywriting plays in an SEO campaign. Is it truly necessary to write targeted SEO content? Are on- and off-page SEO copywriting techniques truly effective? Isn’t SEO copywriting just glorified spam? I can already hear swords being drawn...