Blog Category: SEO

WordPress in a really good user-friendly content management system, but out-of-the-box search engine optimization isn’t one of its strong points. So people either turn to plugins for WordPress SEO or learn to “tweak” the theme code. Here’s a few tips (and pitfalls to avoid!) that I’ve come up with on how to optimize your WordPress theme to rank higher on Google without using plugins. Open source of course. Share and Enjoy! READ MORE

Groupon is a fairly new internet based company that offers discount coupons for products and services by local businesses. Launched in November 2008, Groupon features a daily deal on things to do or buy in a variety of cities. In general, customers love Groupon, but businesses have had mixed results. READ MORE

One of the problems with SEO is “what exactly are you buying”. With a website it’s easy. You pay your money and you get your website. Same thing goes for a Promotional Video. But with SEO it’s not so clear. You know you want to rank higher on Google but how do you get there? One thing people have tried is “Performance-Based SEO”. The idea here is that you set a target goal such as: Reaching the first page for a given keyword (or group of keywords) and the SEOer gets paid only if the goal is reached.

Sounds great you say, what could go wrong? Well, judging by the feedback from some of the people who have tried it, a lot. READ MORE

Not too long ago if you did a search for say “A good dentist in the Portland metropolitan area”, Google would say something like “the following words have been omitted from your search: a, the”.

These kind of words are called “Stop Words” and all the text books on search algorithms will tell you that search engines like Google ignore stop words. READ MORE

An important number in search engine optimization is the Click through Rate (CTR) for each position on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

In a previous article, Click Through Rates. The AOL Data Revisited, we looked at one of the historically important sources of “click through” statistics: the 2006 AOL Data Logs. SEOers have long been interested in the large 71% drop in click-throughs, between the #1 and #2 positions and the impact this has on potential Web sales. This large drop has motivated companies to strive to obtain the #1 position.

But how accurate are the AOL numbers? Does the ROI justify the costs involved in reaching #1? One of the problems with the AOL numbers is that they assume that all searchers search the same way and have the same click through patterns. Analyzing the AOL data in greater detail shows that this assumption is incorrect, the search patterns can be quite different, and this throws all the numbers off. READ MORE