Recently, The International Corporation for Assigned Names made one of the largest changes to The Internet Domain Name System. This new update allows domains, which formerly had to end with specific extensions after the “dot”, to create their own extension after the “dot”. For example, www.riseinteractive.com now has the ability to purchase www.riseinteractive.interactivemarketing (replacing the com with our word of choice). (more…)

PageRank sculpting is always a hot topic among members of the SEO universe, with hoards of Internet marketers on both sides of the fence. On the one hand, you’ll find SEO firms that insist that PageRank sculpting is the premier tool in making sure you achieve maximum visibility for the important pages of your website. On the other hand, many SEO professionals insist that a) the engines see through this tactic, b) this strategy yields limited results and c) other methods are much more impactful. In today’s blog, we’ll discuss PageRank sculpting in historical and recent context and provide some input moving forward. We are definitely interested to hear your opinions and results with PageRank sculpting! (more…)

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…)

When building out your website, 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…)

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…)

Let’s take a second and try and look at the internet from the search engines’ point of view. Why do the search engines provide us with this invaluable service of allowing us to search the internet? The answer, not surprisingly, is money. The more users that a search engine has, the more potential they have to make money. But how, and what does this have to do with search engine optimization?

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