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- Update the Copyright Year on Your WebsiteJanuary 5
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Posted by interactivevoices
First of all, Happy New Year! With the new year comes some annual maintenance that every webmaster should be conscious of. Here's a quick tip from my list of annual website maintenance. - Build Trust. Having your website reflect current and accurate information helps build trust. Yes, even the year beside your copyright notice makes a subtle, perhaps sub-conscious, impact on your visitors.
- Be Relevant. Your website visitors expect you to be on top of the latest developments in the business and technology world.
- Show You Care. For those websites that can make the change quickly, it shows your visitors that you care. Take a moment now to update your website's copyright year... or email your webmaster if they take care of this for you.
Search Engines Update Their Copyright Year
Let's take a look at how the search engines have done, shall we? Google
- Do Sitemaps Affect Crawlers?January 5
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Posted by chenry
Like any other person out there, I fall into habits, good and bad. Recently while working on a client’s website, I created a Sitemap and submitted it to the search engines, like I always do. I started to think if this really helps the site out and what’s the effect when I submit a Sitemap on the site.
I approached one of my clients who has a semi popular blog and uses WordPress and the Google XML Sitemaps Generator plugin for WordPress. I asked for permission to install my tracking script on their site to track the whereabouts of the bots. For those of you who don’t know what the Google XML Sitemaps Generator is, every time you edit or create a post on WordPress it creates a new sitemap and submits it to the major search engines.
My client is good at posting new content to their blog, usually around 2 or 3 posts a week. The script that I installed on their website was written in PHP and tracked every time a bot accessed the Sitemap, every time the Sitemap was submitted, and every page it crawled on the website. The script stored this information in a MySQL database along with a timestamp, IP address, and the user agent. I also modified the Sitemap generator to insert a timestamp every time the sitemap was submitted to the search e
- It's All in the NameDecember 17 2008
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Posted by IgniteMedia
Why is it that SEO is so hard to sell or explain? This question is something that pops up in blogs and in general conversation almost daily in our industry. Could it be that it’s the name that scares people off? I mean let’s look at what SEO is at the very basic level:
- Research and analysis of words/phrases
- Content writing and/or enhancing
- Website structuring/planning
- Implementation of conversion elements (e.g., 800 numbers, buy now buttons, etc)
- Traffic based statistical analysis
If you said to any business person that you do any single item from that list, there would be a very high likelihood that they would understand. It might take one extra sentence for some people to get it, but for the most part nothing in that list is foreign to most people. So why is it that when we lump all of these things together and call it SEO, people start scratching their heads and asking why they would need that? All you’ve done is made a category out of a group of action items and suddenly it’s voodoo to them.
Perhaps SEO is a mis
- The New Easiest Trick to Increase ConversionsDecember 16 2008
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Posted by brettster
Way too often load time is ignored due to the presumption that everyone else has broadband. Guess what - not everyone does, and those dial-uppers and smart-phone users are leaving your site, ASAP! Kinda makes you wanna just smush 'em, right? No, no, not your users. Your lard-tard images!
Smush-it, a new tool by a couple people at Yahoo!, dropped my site's image file size by 40k at no quality loss. Heck, I just ran it on SEOmoz.org and this site could cut down 59.19 KB! FOR FREE!
Download the Firefox add-on and get smushin' today: http://www.smushit.com/
P.S. If your time on page decreases because people don't wait around as long for things to load - don't blame me! ;)
P.P.S: To SEOmoz - Your biggest problem is due to a 47.27KB background PNG: http://www.seomoz.org/css/v4/images/pro-toolbar_bg.png
- 8 Arguments to Convince Jaded SEO Clients That You Are TrustworthyDecember 15 2008
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Posted by Alhan Keser
One of our sales people asked me recently, “What do I say to clients who don’t trust SEO’s?” For those potential clients who are jaded, who have been scammed by various companies claiming to do search engine optimization, it is difficult to talk to them about ‘improving their rankings’. They have heard that line many times before, often spoken with a thick, foreign accent.
I found that the best way to convince a client that you aren’t just another scam was, obviously, to focus on building credibility instead of going over the details of exactly what you will do for them. You can get into details later. Here are few things that can make you stand out from the competition as an ethical SEO:
- “We use professional methods of link building.” As opposed to spamming or submitting to thousands of worthless directories, tell your potential clients that you will get valuable and relevant websites to link to their website. Show them examples of bloggers that mention a client’s website and show them credible sources that link to your past clients.
- “We do SEO in a way that will grow your business.” Tell your potential clients that you spend weeks simply researching the right keywords to target, that you run an AdWords campaign to see how those keywords perform, and that the point of SEO is to help grow their business through search, not just get them