Google Releases Official SEO Starter Guide
November 13, 2008 | Barry Wise | Search Engine Optimization
19 Comments
Yesterday I noticed a tweet from Matt Cutts announcing the release of Google’s official Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. (Perhaps they released it this week in the middle of Pubcon for a reason, while all the SEOs are out in Vegas?)
As expected, there was really no ground breaking news here – they didn’t release a 3 step guide to getting the #1 result in Google. But what is interesting is they supported basically all the arguments SEOs have figured out on their own about the Google algorythm – and more importantly (for me at least), everything I’ve been blogging about. It’s good to be told you’re doing something right every once in a while :)
Marketing Your Online Presence: Banner Ads or Text Links
November 12, 2008 | Barry Wise | Search Engine Optimization
15 Comments
In case you didn’t know it, the days of traditional banner advertising on websites with high volume traffic solely for the sake of getting traffic are pretty much over. That’s right, I said it – there’s just no ROI in banner ads. Conversions are low, prices are still inflated, and there is little or no SEO benefit. Most website visitors are just too sensitized as to what an advertisement looks like and click on them with less and less frequency. Sure, there are some modern variations besides the typical 468 x 60 top of page banner, such as dancing animations, small square blog banners, etc., and they do perform a little better. But for the most part people simply don’t like graphic banner ads.
SEO Search Engine Friendly URLs with ASP.NET and IIS
November 3, 2008 | Barry Wise | Code Samples, Search Engine Optimization
12 Comments
I decided it was about time for another code update, and since there are plenty of SEO tips for PHP hackers and Wordpress users, I’m going to help out the ASP.NET programmers out there still in the dark about SEO problems with their code. The concept is useful for anyone; but the code is specifically for a function I programmed in VB.NET.
Why SEO Needs Your Web Content
October 24, 2008 | Barry Wise | Search Engine Optimization, Web Design
17 Comments
A client recently approached me to discuss redesigning their website, optimizing it to rank well in Google, and contracting me for some basic marketing and promotion. Now, this has happened to me a few times, so I don’t want to single out any one client (and I wouldn’t mention them by name even if you asked me). But their thought process was, well, we’ve got about 100 or so pages indexed right now, but we want to get rid of them and pare that down to just a half dozen or so really sales-driven content pages.
My question, of course, was Why?
Photos from the Hunt: Steeplechase Horse Racing in Far Hills, NJ
October 19, 2008 | Barry Wise | News
6 Comments
We had an early start this year. I was on the Morristown train by 8:30 yesterday morning along with a few thousand other early party-goers, heading to the Steepchase Horse Race in Far Hills, NJ. Better known simply as The Hunt (aka the Hunt for beer, the Hunt for a ride home, the Hunt for pretty much anything except class, dignity and sobriety), this is a massive tailgate party for what I’m told is a horse race which goes on all around the infield festivities. Everyone from Northern New Jersey (or, as it seems, everyone who is anyone) is probably aware of the Hunt party at Moorland Farms in Far Hills, NJ.
A Case for Using NoFollow in Your Internal Link Structure
October 15, 2008 | Barry Wise | Search Engine Optimization
4 Comments
A while back I mentioned how much better the web would be if all of us small blog owners banded together in the “dofollow” movement and removed the nofollow attribute from our comments and links to other websites. The theory I espouse is that major commercial websites (like wikipedia.org) have enough links coming to them, we don’t need to give them any more; however, smaller blog-style sites need all the help they can get. So use nofollow links to link out to the big boys and dofollow links to the rest of the unwashed masses.
I still think that’s a good theory and a great way to run your blog, but it doesn’t necessarily work with a decent-sized informational or service website. If you’ve got anywhere between a couple hundred to a couple hundred thousand pages indexed (or hoping to be indexed) in your website, then you’re going to need to consider a proper internal link structure. Hopefully this was put into practice when you originally designed the site and mapped out the site architecture. You did do that, didn’t you?
SEO Canonical URLs And 301 Redirects In Windows IIS 6, IIS 7
October 9, 2008 | Barry Wise | Code Samples, Search Engine Optimization
21 Comments
Some readers have emailed me asking why I’m only writing about canonical URL and redirect issues for the apache/linux platform and haven’t given any advice on how to fix these issues on Microsoft Windows IIS/ASP.NET servers. So in the interest of equal time, I figure I had better present fixes for both old and new versions of IIS. In IIS 6 it can be corrected with global.asax, but with IIS 7 Microsoft added URL redirect support to the web.config file. First a URL redirect fix for the older versions of ASP.NET on IIS 6:
SEO Issues with Duplicate Content: Htaccess, Robots and URLs – Part 2
October 6, 2008 | Barry Wise | Code Samples, Search Engine Optimization
3 Comments
This is Part 2 of a series on SEO and duplicate content issues. In the first part I discussed using your Apache .htaccess file with 301 redirects on Linux servers to fix canonical URL problems.
OK, now that I’ve answered the question of canonical URLs, let’s get back to that pesky duplicate content issue. Hacking your .htaccess file solved one problem, but what if you have different URLs which all point to the same content? Something like this …
