Search engines dislike duplicate content for a few reasons. One is that major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask aim to provide searchers with a diverse cross-section of unique content, and duplicate content often results in duplicate listings that impair the searcher’s experience. Another reason is that search engines don’t want to [...]
When it comes to website optimization, you can’t always take the obvious for granted. With the ability to create limitless versions of your web pages, you have an opportunity and a duty to your business to test everything, even that which seems obvious. Follow these guidelines for best results:
1. Make calls to action stand out
What’s [...]
While often very complex in their calculations and data processing, the critical operations performed by the major search engines in order to rank websites isn’t as lengthy as one might think. The processes they use to provide relevant results when a web search is undergone can best be described in the following four steps.
Send [...]
Just when you thought you might be starting to understand how search engines compile their organic rankings, you stumble upon a new factor in the algorithm. While latent semantic indexing (LSI) isn’t exactly a new practice, it has been getting more attention as of late so we thought we’d take a moment to shed some [...]
Think of it as an upgrade from the often pricey, frequently overlooked, and increasingly outdated YellowPages ad. Since many small companies do not have the resources to track clicks and would prefer to create sales leads in person or via telemarketing, local search engines offer a more practical option than Google’s AdWords and Yahoo’s AdSense.
Individuals [...]
Every new website is subject to the Google sandbox, otherwise known as age delaying. The sandbox is the virtual place Google puts new websites before it deems them eligible for decent search rankings. Although this age delay varies from site to site, on average new websites with new domains must wait six months before they [...]
There is a new concept being talked about in the web marketing industry. This new paradigm, dubbed the 80/20 rule of search, has sprung out of the realization that many of the earlier beliefs about search engine marketing are no longer true, or perhaps were never true in the first place.
When they were first [...]
Canonicalization is the process that search engines use to determine the best URL or website address when several different choices exist. This is a common issue that is predominantly related to home page files at the root level. For example, to a web user, the following URLs all appear to be the same:
www.yourdomain.com
yourdomain.com
www.yourdomain.com/index.shtml
yourdomain.com/default.asp
However, search [...]
If you’re a marketer, odds are you’ve been hearing a lot about SEO lately. But what exactly is it? And how does it work?
SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process of arranging a website’s content in a way that makes it a) easy for search engine “spiders” to read, and b) dense with [...]