In the early days of the Internet, search engine optimization was a fairly simple affair. Webmasters (SEO professionals to you and I today) had a fairly straightforward job optimizing web sites. To rank for a keyword in a search engine, all that was required was to put them in the title, the keyword meta tag and mention it freely in the site content and hey presto! You were done. This however led to ‘keyword stuffing’ which was a technique of repeatedly using the keyword in the meta tag and hiding keywords behind images, in order to manipulate the search engines. Here is a short history of Search Engine Optimization. [Read more…]

As you may or may not know, I have been practicing search engine optimization since 1996. I have seen quite a few changes in the industry. There have been a lot of major changes, like when Google first showed up on the scene, using links as an SEO factor (we had previously been concentrating only on on-page factors such as meta tags), and we have had minor updates that have really only been “blips” on the radar. So, right now, in April 2011, what is the status of Search Engine Optimization? [Read more…]

Yesterday, here on my blog, I wrote a blog post about tracking your Google rankings. [Read more…]

If you are looking for a web site called “Cake Central”, then you probably don’t want to perform a Google search today. Apparently Google thinks that a web site called Beerby.com is ranking Cake Central, a popular wedding cake web site, first in the search results for this brand search. [Read more…]

When it comes to optimizing your web site for the search engines, search engine optimization, there are a lot of things that you can do that will hurt your search engine rankings. Many of these items are easily corrected, and some are not. Here are twenty five search engine optimization mistakes that you can easily fix right now. [Read more…]