The holiday season is upon us and with it, lots of opportunity for increased traffic, visits, clicks and conversions.  In the world of ecommerce, it’s not just about the goods you have to offer or the free shipping that comes with every purchase (although that is a good idea around the holidays).  This is an important time not only to give and receive cheer, but also to employ some SEO to take advantage of the shopping spree many are about to embark on.  In an effort to spread some holiday joy, here are 10 tips on how to optimize your website and business for the holidays. (more…)

When individuals became aware of the new ranking factor, “Panda update 2.2”, many became confused and apprehensive that it may be an algorithm update.  Some feared that their website would drop in the rankings on Google, but others hoped that theirs could rise.   Above all this speculation, one thing has been verified: Panda is a new ranking factor, not a completely new algorithm. (more…)

For many SEO-ers, video and dynamic content has always been a pain in the neck. Many sites contain videos, Flash, and JavaSCript content that is virtually unreadable by the search engines. For the most part, improving this content for search consists of transcribing the videos and replacing the Flash with other content, both timely and not optimal solutions. This, however, will soon be changing for the better. (more…)

Google has been living off Caffeine since the middle of last month. On June 8 they launched their new system for indexing content on the Internet. The old system used to index every couple of weeks, but now it is almost indexing in real time. That’s why the name Caffeine was such an appropriate fit.  ”Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it’s the largest collection of web content we’ve offered. Whether it’s a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before,” Google said in a recent blog posting.

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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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YouTube is the 3^rd most popular website on the Internet behind Google and Facebook (from Alexa Top 500 Global Sites). What does that mean? People are regularly uploading, searching for and watching videos on the Web. Here are some essential tips to help you maximize your efforts towards your video content so you too can tap into the millions of people who are turning to videos to gain information.

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When we audit a website 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…)

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…)