Search Engine Optimization

You may have heard rumors near the water cooler of how some websites got the top. You may have even heard whispers of “black hats” sneaking swiftly onto the front page, without so much as a long-term strategy. Google hears rumors. Google finds black hats. There is no way to cheat your way to the top. There is, however, a sure-fire way to get ranked on Google. Heck, they even said so themselves at PubCon South 2009, giving these five ways to optimize your site:

1. URL Structure/Architecture of Website Read more »

With several hundred million searches each day, everyone wants their website to be at the top of Google. Not surprisingly, search engine optimization, also known as SEO, is a popular internet marketing strategy.

Google and other search engines use a complicated algorithm that evaluates a website based on traffic, keywords, content, inbound links and other known and unknown factors. Search engines must constantly evolve to ensure the results they return are the most relevant.  Read more »

The days of black hat SEO are behind us. Methods like keyword stuffing and spamdexing are still used, but are a surefire way to get you banned from the search engines. White hat, or organic search engine optimization, is the only way to go. If you are looking to improve your website’s visibility, there a several small adjustments that can make a big difference in your search engine ranking.

There are two areas of focus: on-page and off-page. In the context of this article, think of on-page as anything the website user can see, and off-page refers to something not visible to the user.  Read more »

What size files should your web pages be? A good rule is to try to keep the page size under 100K. This isn't always possible depending on the media you are hosting on the page but the search engines definitely prefer smaller pages. In general, try to keep most of your pages under 40K and you will keep the search engines happy when they index your site.

Google's Matt Cutts announced at Pubcon this week that Google will soon be treating subdomains (www.volacci.com vs podcast.volacci.com) as being part of the same website for the search results. Previously, they treated subdomains just like separate websites. If there were 2 or 3 subdomains that showed up for a search results then they would all show up in the Google results. Not anymore! (well...soon) Read more »

When you're choosing how to spend your search engine marketing dollars you have two choices: Natural Search Engine Optimization or Paid Search Advertising. While both methods produce results for your business, there are some key differences:  Read more »