Technical SEO

Back-to-school SEO

It's that time of year again when the kids head back to school and the air begins to hint at the coming of fall. I'm sure the first few days of school are spent doing a little refresh to get all the kids back up to speed after the summer months.

Of course SEOs don't get summer breaks and the learning doesn't ever really stop or even slow down. But that doesn't mean that a little SEO refresher every now and again isn't useful or is any less valuable.

Here are 10 important elements … Read more

Working with spiders

Web site owners and SEOs alike often feel at odds with the search engines, but times are changing. This was often the case in the past when the engines made updates and changes to their algorithms that seemed to send Web sites into a SERP tailspin, leaving everyone scrambling to regain their precious page-one positions. The engines were also a lot less forthcoming with information and guidance, perhaps taking the view that giving this information gave too much power to the spammers and phishers.

While this view was understandable on the surface, it didn't float all that well in … Read more

Don't 'Print This'

Printing Web pages can often be an exercise in frustration. It's amazing how the most important information often gets cut off along the right side of the page.

Web designers and makers of content management systems (CMS) have tried to ease that pain by creating printer-friendly versions of pages to make sure that site visitors get the goods.

Unfortunately, printer-friendly doesn't always equate to search engine-friendly. These printer-friendly pages often result in creating duplicate content, possibly even a complete duplication of the entire Web site. Web site owners have been relieved to learn that duplicate content isn't seen as a penalty by search engines; … Read more

A don't-leave-home-without SEO tool

When you work in, on, or around the Web, you tend to collect tools. A site here, a toolbar there...you really can't help it. Here's a total must-have for your SEO toolbox...but don't tell the developers and designers.

The Web Developer extension from Chris Pederick is a hugely popular and useful tool for Web developers and designers everywhere. But this browser add-on is an equal-opportunity tool that should be in every SEO's toolbox as well for quick snapshot views and reviews of sites. It will require the use of one of the following browsers, … Read more

Sage Advice to Webmasters and SEOs from a Google Support Engineer

Recently I had the chance to sit down with Maile Ohye from Google in this podcast interview (6 MB, 25 minutes). Maile is a Senior Support Engineer on Google's Webmaster Central team. I got to know her at the AMA Hot Topic: Search Engine Marketing conference, where we were both speakers. Maile not only supports webmasters and users, but also implements changes within Google's code based on feedback from newsgroups like Google Webmaster Help, forums like Webmaster World, and blogs like Google, I Suggest.

The recently revised and expanded Google Webmaster Guidelines was a hot topic in this … Read more

Underscores are now word separators, proclaims Google

I got to enjoy Matt Cutts live and in person on Saturday speaking to the WordPress bloggers and fans at WordCamp 2007. Matt was in top form, witty as ever. The session was blogged by numerous folks. The sessions were all recorded, so, we hope, we should see a video of Matt's session surface online pretty soon. Matt said he'd probably be posting his Powerpoint to his blog, assuming he gets approval from Google's PR department.

One key development that Matt shared with the audience was that underscores in URLs are now (or at least very soon … Read more

Flash alternatives blessed by Google

Flash has long been a stumbling block in getting found in the search engines. Googlebot just doesn't cope well with content and links embedded within Flash. And if the following e-mail that I received from a Google engineer last year is any indication, Google isn't likely to make significant improvements on how it crawls, indexes and ranks Flash files anytime soon:

"re: Flash, I can tell you, based upon philosophies here, that we aren't likely to do any kind of mapping of Flash to non-Flash URLs. While our spidering practices may change in the future, we … Read more

Embargo Lifted: Secrets from SMX Now Unleashed

Danny Sullivan's excellent SMX Advanced conference took place last month. Plenty of good stuff was shared. Unfortunately the very best stuff -- the true secrets -- were embargoed. Until this week, that is! The "Give It Up" panel session exploded into the blogosphere; a few examples include Lisa Barone (thanks Lisa for declaring me the "Give It Up Most Valuable Player"!), Jim Hedger, Tamar Weinberg and Jordan McCollum.

One the secrets I shared in the session I wrote up into an article, published today on Search Engine Land: Deconstructing Grouped Google Results. In the article … Read more

Even Google.com Could Use Some SEO

In chairing the AMA's Hot Topic: Search Engine Marketing conference on Friday, I had the pleasure of hearing the presentation of Trevor Foucher, Software Engineer at Google. Not only did Trevor explain the value of Google Webmaster Central as well as some webmaster do's and don'ts, he also gave us attendees an inside glimpse of Google.com -- through statistics provided in Google Webmaster Central to verified sites, and Google.com was a verified site! So we got to see, for example, that Webmaster Central reports 19,818,383 total links to www.google.com and 1,… Read more