Traditionally, I see most SEM experts divide SEO into 2 types: on page and off page. I like to think of a 3rd category: site wide optimization. Here’s my top 10 tips to keep your entire site healthy. Don’t use JavaScript or css navigation. The SE’s can’t crawl it. Don’t use session id’s in your [...]

Nearly every SEM professional has a different opinion on PPC versus organic search. Personally, I believe natural search will bring you the best ROI long term. However, paid search has its advantages too. Below I’ll opine with my thoughts on each: Natural (organic) search advantages: It’s free (duh!) Natural search results are trusted more Natural [...]

I’m amazed everytime I get one of the those phony invoices from search engines submission companies. Just today I got one for a domain I manage (nice to know my registrar keeps our information private). For only $65, they offer to submit my domain  to 25 search engines yearly. Wow, what a deal. I hope [...]

I’ve spent hours scouring the web for the best article directory sites. After finding more than I knew what to do with, I wasted time submitting to most of them. As time wore on, I’ve come to realize there are really only a few that matter and that Google still likes. I’ve listed them below, [...]

Google’s love affair with links has forced many search marketers to focus most of their efforts on link building. However, many significant gains can still be made by properly executing on page SEO. Of course, gone are the days of meta tag stuffing or endless keyword repetition. But there still exist a few tactics that [...]

I’ve noticed a trend in the Google SERPs lately. Google seems to be integrating their different vertical engines such as Image and Blog search, into the normal search results. For certain search queries, you even see a few images appear above the webpage results. With this change in the way Google displays results, website owners must [...]

Lately, I’ve been quite disturbed reading articles and blog posts about negative SEO. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term “negative seo”, let me briefly discuss the topic. Negative SEO occurs when a malicious part (often a competitor) create hundreds of junk backlinks to your site in a short amount of time. [...]

As an SEO consultant, I’m always looking for new linking strategies. In this post, I’ll share my current favorite 3 sources of high quality backlinks. 1) Newsvine: Newsvine is well known as a news site similiar to Digg. However, some people don’t realize you can submit articles to Newsvine as well. The articles can contain [...]

Unfortunately, yes it can. Let me explain. Suppose your website is relatively new, and you currently only rank for a few terms, namely your brand name. After a year or so of optimizing your site for search engines, you notice that despite a huge increase in search traffic, your conversion rate is significantly lower than [...]

It’s an intriguing question. Is social media optimization (smo) today what SEO was a few years ago? Is it an infant giant ready to explode, or will it blow over? The question here is really whether or not the growth of social bookmarking and socialization sites will begin to compete with the SE’s. Although I [...]