Stolen or copied content can be a problem when it comes to your Web site’s search engine optimization. Recently we learned that our Omniture vs. Google Analytics blog post was copied and translated into Japanese. This made us ask what the ramifications of our stolen content could have to our site.

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97% of internet users are utilizing online media to search for local products. Internet users are turning to Google Places, Yahoo! Local, and Bing Local to find products/services closest to them. 1/5 of Google Web searches and more than 1/3 of their mobile search have a local component.

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When we audit a Web site for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) there are some basic things that we always look for. The following components must be taken into consideration: URL Structure, Site Map, Title Tags, Site Code, Content, and Back Links. All of these are interrelated and should be optimized together. (more…)

An effective SEO content strategy enables the search engines to identify the keywords your Web site is relevant to and should rank for. Therefore, it is extremely important to execute proven tactics to help the engines recognize and rank your site for your targeted keywords.  There are various steps, outlined below, that you should follow when optimizing content for the search engines. (more…)

When building out your Web site, it is particularly important to be sure the code is correct and well-formed. As discussed in the Introduction to URLs blog post, correctly structured code ensures Web pages can be indexed properly by search engines, which is vital to ranking at the top of the natural results.  For this reason, it is imperative to ensure your code structure is correctly developed to compliment and improve your SEO campaign. (more…)

Prior to this tutorial it is suggested that you read our Introduction to URLs tutorial. This reviews important aspects of URL’s and their structure, and will help you understand the basics of URLs in SEO.

Now that you are familiar with the various aspects of a URL, you should determine the best way to optimize a URL for the search engines.  First, we need to discuss three crucial points: (more…)

The content of URLs may often be overlooked; however, they have a lot of importance in search engine rankings. In a future tutorial we will explain how to fully optimize your URL’s, but beforehand we first must understand how a URL is organized and what it is made up of. This tutorial will introduce six key components of URLs and explain their meaning and use.  It is imperative to understand each and every element of a URL as it will further your knowledge of their importance to the SEO world. (more…)

Yet another aspect of SEO is creating a lot of buzz in the interactive world-URL canonicalization.  This is the process by which a set of Web addresses are adjusted to reflect one standard URL, making it possible to determine whether two different links are equivalent in relevance when returned in a search. (more…)

While there are many steps to properly optimize your site for the search engines, the first step is learning how to design a search engine friendly website. By designing a search engine friendly website, you are making it as easy as possible for the search engine spiders to read and index your web pages. If this step is overlooked your efforts will not be maximized, possibly meaning that the search engines can’t access and/or process your website. In addition to this preventative measure, designing a search engine friendly website can also help improve your rankings in search engines. There are, in general, six different steps you can take to creating a search engine friendly website. Let’s try to understand each of those steps more in-depth throughout this tutorial. (more…)

How do the search engines determine for any given query which websites to show, and how do they determine which order to show them in?  As we mentioned in our previous tutorial, we are interested in these two questions because the answer will provide us with the knowledge of what it is that we need to do in order to give our site the best chance possible of appearing in the search engines for relevant searches (and not just appearing, but appearing in the top spots).

There are, in general, two factors which the search engines take into consideration when determining their search results.  The first is the content of the actual website itself (in particular, the content of each and every page).  The second is the number and quality of links coming into the site in general, and each page on that site in particular.  These two elements are generally known as on-page factors (i.e., the content of the site) and off-page factors.  Let’s start with the on-page factors.

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