The latest SEO Industry news, notes, and chat.
Connect with the Author: Google+ | Twitter
Rick DeJarnette was the author and manager of the Official Bing Webmaster Center blog for two years. He then became an in-house SEO consultant for Bing’s content vertical teams (such as Bing Shopping, Bing Travel, etc.). Since then, Rick worked as an independent SEO doing numerous in-house projects involving website optimization, link building, social media strategy, PPC advertising and local search optimization, and founded his own blog, The SEO Ace. He is also a monthly blog contributor for Search Engine Land.
By the time you read this, I will no longer be working for Internet Marketing Ninjas (my last day was May 15th). It’s an odd thing for me to write. I was on top of the world last December when I spoke to IMN CEO Jim Boykin on the phone. After post-PubCon introductions, he and I exchanged many fast and furious emails, discussing the possibility of me joining his team,…
Internet Marketing Ninjas CEO Jim Boykin asked me to develop a post for his blog about viruses and malware. Now computer security is an old, familiar topic for me. Back in the day, I was a technical writer for Microsoft’s IT Group, where I created white papers and other documents on anti-malware products and strategies. Later, in 2009, when I authored the blog for Bing Webmaster Center, I used that…
It’s been just over two years now that Google announced that page load speed was added to their list of significant Page Rank criteria. The deal is simple: all other things being equal, the webpage that consistently loads more quickly will earn the page rank lift. Of course, there are many factors that can affect page load speed. Some things you can’t directly affect (other than selecting a different hosting…
The World Wide Web is a massive place and continues to grow at a phenomenal rate. According to Netcraft, a March 2012 survey revealed there are well over half a billion websites, 644,275,754 to be exact, and that figure represented a rise of 31.4 million (a 5.1% growth) from just the previous month! And that’s only counting websites. How many published webpages does that add up to? The projected numbers…
A wise man once told me, “Hard times do not build character. They reveal it.” Apparently that’s a twist on the original quote from John Wooden, a Hall of Fame basketball player and coach, who was referencing sports rather than hard times. Nevertheless, I love the quote, and it does apply to many more things in life beyond sports. In fact, I think it even applies to websites as well….
Image content is a powerful way to make an impression on a webpage. Instead of presenting a site full of dry, dull text-based content (of which I am frequently guilty!), the right image or graphic element can bring new life and visual interest excitement for readers. As I’ve said many times before, search engine crawlers love text-based content. It’s easiest for them to consume and parse for relevance. As smart…
Back a couple of months ago, I wrote a post For Internet Marketing Ninjas detailing how to set up Google authorship markup on your website. I’ve been writing about this topic since last summer, just after it was first announced, and I swear Google’s been running serpentine trail on this the whole time. It’s as if every time I go back and look at Google’s documentation on the topic, they’ve…
Several years ago when I started learning about search engine optimization (SEO) in detail, the emphasis was always fundamentally to improve a website for the human visitor. A site owner should strive to provide great content, make the content easily found, and in the spirit of the web, link out to other resources to further enhance the user’s experience in searching for information. This approach to site design obviously had…
The search engines regularly tell us that, with regard to our webpages earning optimum page rank, “content is king.” Well, if content really is a king, it must surely be a commonly disrespected, commoditized crown. Site owners, webmasters, and even some SEOs often give content little due respect, and worse yet, they often forget the reason why it’s so important. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people…
All SEOs and webmasters worth their salt know about and use Google Webmaster Tools. These free tools give webmasters and IT departments insights into what Google sees when it crawls registered sites, shows the scope of how a site is crawled and indexed, offers configuration settings to control how the site is managed, and even provides some helpful feedback on possible site improvements/error corrections. Given that Google owns approximately 66%…
As Ninja Karina recently noted in her mobile website blog post, mobile users now constitute 20% of the search market, and that figure is only likely to grow. So how can you take advantage of all of those potential customers walking about all around you with mini-sized but full-blown computers in their pockets? I’ve put together my favorite ideas for mobile marketing success. Let’s explore those in detail. Get users…