Search Engine Optimization

Category: Search Engine Optimization

- SEO Worst Practices
- February 22, 2012 - Posted by Rick DeJarnette to Search Engine Optimization
- SEOs love to talk and write about industry best practices, as well they should. To best serve their clients, following industry-established SEO best practices should always be the goal. But what about those shady types on the fringes of the SEO community who advocate, hmmm, let’s call it a less reputable route? Not surprisingly, these SEO are also typically the same ones who claim they can absolutely get you to be the #1 spot in the...

- Using and Optimizing Images: Search and Social Optimization Cheat Sheets
- February 20, 2012 - Posted by Ann Smarty to Search Engine Optimization
- If you are running a website, there are most likely going to be plenty of images there. While image-specific SEO is very-well explained in a few detailed guides, let’s try to create a very simple and easily-organized guide to using images properly: 1. Free Images You *Can* Use First things first: let’s see where you can find free-to-use images online. That’s a popular misconception that you can actually use any image you find online as long as you...

- A Love Letter to the Site: Command
- February 15, 2012 - Posted by Ninja Jen Van Iderstyne to Search Engine Optimization
- We have a lot of tools here at Internet Marketing Ninjas. I mean A LOT. We have tools that crawl sites, compare competitors and create charts and tables full of useful data. I’m such an isolated geek – I actually called someone a “tool” the other day, forgetting that, in some circles, that’s actually an insult. But honestly, the tools our reporting team gets to work with are so awesome and comprehensive that occasionally it...

- Online Shopping Trends Tell Tales
- February 10, 2012 - Posted by Ninja Jen Van Iderstyne to Search Engine Optimization
- Earlier this week, ComScore released their latest report on online spending in 2011. And the general trend is: it’s up. The fact that Internet spending is continuing its skyward trajectory holds several implications for online businesses, both obvious and subtle. Search Engine Journal summarized the findings like this: “Online shoppers spent a record breaking $161.5 billion in 2011. This 13% increase over 2010 was assisted by several top-performing product categories, which each experienced a minimum of 18%...

- Internal Site Search: How To Diagnose Problems & Maximize Conversions Today
- February 8, 2012 - Posted by Ninja Bonnie to Search Engine Optimization
- If your online store product catalog includes hundreds or more product SKU’s, visitors may be finding it difficult to meet their navigational needs. Although this is most commonly seen on sites belonging to multichannel retailers, any large e-commerce site can encounter this problem. According Dave Yang in his article titled Site Search Increases Conversion Rates, Average Order Value and Loyalty, “Quality e-commerce site search has been known to dramatically increase conversion rates.” Mr Yang goes on...

- Super Cool Data Visualizing Tool Views for Exploratory SEO Analysis
- February 3, 2012 - Posted by Ninja Bonnie to Search Engine Optimization
- I’m a big fan of data visualization tools. Most of the time clients don’t want to look at ugly spreadsheets nor do they want to see big data pukes. Information must be obvious and instantly actionable. Another advantage of data visualization tools, although admittedly you don’t have the flexibility to merge in different kinds of data like you would when you create charts in Excel, is that data visualization tool views are push button quick....

- Did Siri Really Kill SEO?
- January 30, 2012 - Posted by Rick DeJarnette to Search Engine Optimization
- When Apple released the iPhone 4S in November of 2011, one of the biggest splashes was made by its new intelligent speech-recognition user interface, known as Siri. It was only a beta product, imperfect, but it was still impressive in its functionality. It required no “learning” process to use. It simply worked out of the box. More or less. Some folks dismissed Siri as a mere party trick feature. Others, including some in the search engine...

- Click-through rate of top 10 search results in Google
- January 24, 2012 - Posted by Rick DeJarnette to Search Engine Optimization
- Who wants to be listed as the Number 1 link in the Google search engine results pages (SERPs)? (I assume you all do; otherwise, why are you reading this blog?) We all invest lots of time and money to achieve this often elusive goal. But why? The theory is that you typically get a dramatically higher click-through rate (CTR) in position 1 compared to links in lesser positions. At least, that is the common perception. There...

- Ann Smarty Joins Internet Marketing Ninjas!
- January 19, 2012 - Posted by Jim Boykin to Search Engine Optimization
- In October of this past year I had the luck to be able to visit Kharkov, Ukraine to speak at Optimization 2011. While there I was lucky enough to be able to hang out with one of my very favorite SEO’s in the world, Ann Smarty. The following month Ann and her husband were able to come over to the USA to visit me and the office of the Ninjas. Now I’ve met a lot...

- The Ultimate How-To Guide on 301 Redirects
- January 18, 2012 - Posted by Rick DeJarnette to Search Engine Optimization
- Many of our clients comment on our site review reports on subjects like canonicalization, site migration, architecture changes, or page updates. Specifically when we advise implementing 301 redirects to optimize and maintain the value of a specific URL in search engines, inevitably they reply with the following question: “How do you implement a 301 redirect?” As long as you have access to the root directory of your web site on your web server, it’s not hard...