Dave Davies

There are many different ways that a link can be built.  One that is often overlooked but which can have huge rewards is writing and submitting articles.  The reason article writing and submission is arguably one of the best of the link building methods is that it not only functions as a link building exercise but also a traffic source.  Honestly, can you think of a better use of your online marketing time than a tactic that provides for traffic and which can help improve your search engine visibility?  Neither can I.

First, let’s tackle competitive analysis. As an entrepreneur, you're no doubt familiar with some of the conventional wisdom about how to handle competitors. Do your research. Check public records and disclosures about big name firms in your industry. Assess your goals, branding plans, and future efforts in the context of the presumptive goals of your industry rivals. Understand why customers choose competitors over your firm -- both why they like your rivals and why they refuse to work with you.

The idea of net neutrality seems a simple one.  It is the idea that all those little 1s and 0s that float around (let’s call them web pages, downloads, videos and emails) should be treated equally and that under no circumstances should the ISPs be allowed to adjust, degrade or otherwise affect them other than to pass them to the requesting party.  Seems simple enough right?  So what’s the debate?

What could be more important to the engines than their percentage of the paid search arena.  Does Google really care about being the dominant search engine as far as organic search goes?  Let me put this a different way, if Google was standing in front of their shareholders – would they prefer to announce that they held 80% of all worldwide searches and reported revenues of $7.8 billion dollars for the quarter OR would the rather stand up and say they hold 20% of all worldwide searches and reported revenues of $8.7 billion dollars?  Organic results drive traffic which in turn results in clicks on paid ads.  From a business standpoint that's the only reason that organic search even matters.

Link building is an essential ingredient in ranking your website highly on the major search engines.  There, now that we've got that brilliant grasp of the obvious out of the way let's move on to what you can do to actually create them.  Before we launch into the nitty-gritty of link building, no beginners guide would be complete without a brief explanation as to why links are important and the different elements of them.  Being a beginners guide this won't be an entirely complete list but it will be enough to get you going on the right path.  Understanding what you're trying to do will help you do it better and more importantly, understanding the “why” of the situation will help you stretch your tactics outside of this and other articles on link building.

Starting an SEO company (correctly) is a lot harder than you might first think.  Let’s assume for a moment that you’re at the stage where you’re launching the company, whether that means you’ll be starting a full-scale SEO company or going it alone is up to you.  

There are two times in a site’s life when keyword research is conducted – when researching a site to rank in the organic results on the search engines and when researching keywords for a PPC campaign.  In our article today we’re going to focus on the former and save the research involved with PPC campaigns for step seven in this series.

As an SEO we get two kinds of sites; those that were designed in the past and where the designer is no longer involved, and the sites where the design is either ongoing or we are working with the web designers from the start. Both of these have their pros and cons as an SEO but there is a clear advantage of one over the other for the client.

The title of this article is designed to illustrate the point of this article.  Today we won’t be taking a look at black-hat search engine optimization tactics.  Admittedly, I’ve toyed with them in a “know your enemy” kind of way but I’m no expert on advanced cloaking techniques nor effective link sp@mming tactics.  What we’re going to cover here are the hidden (i.e. dark) areas of effective optimization strategy.

How a subject views a book page, a store display, an advertisement or other visual stimuli is measured using sophisticated tools that track eye scan, also called eye movement. These tools measure which design elements capture visitors’ attention and which don’t.

Anybody who monitors their rankings with the same vigor that we in the SEO community do will have noticed some fairly dramatic shifts in the algorithm starting last Thursday (July 5th) and continuing through the weekend. Many sites are rocketing into the top 10 which, of course, means that many sites are being dropped at the same time.

The article focuses on the introduction of personalized search results by Google, how this affects website owners and SEO's and outlines some actions that can be taken to help insure a website does well as personalization evolves..

This article talks about what you should look for in an SEO and what you might want to avoid.  

How many times a day do you run a search only to find that the top sites don’t yield the results you’re looking for? Sometimes this can be based solely on the type of search you’re running (i.e. there is a lot of information and it’s a broad field), sometimes it can be caused by those pesky SEO’s out there doing their job and other times it’s simply a matter of knowing how and where to search for what you’re looking to find.

As with virtually every aspect in SEO, there are multiple areas of this single field. If there were one hard-and-fast answer to link building we would all be ranking highly on Google and the top 10 would be a VERY crowded place. Fortunately this isn’t the case and the rankings are becoming more and more a Darwinist exercise in “survival of the fittest” (which is how it should be). Proper link building will help you be the fittest and, over time, influence engines.

Every now and then an event occurs that changes how the SEO community views the way websites are optimized and structures promotions. The purchase of the rights to the Orion Algorithm by Google and equally important, the interest that both Yahoo! and MSN took in the algorithm as they vied for ownership themselves, marks just such an event.

De-optimization is not so much the reduction of the ranking factors insomuch as it is a return to the original intent of a website which is to cater to the visitor. As the end goal of the search engines is to provide the best possible set of search results for a specific query it logically follows that websites should strive to attain an excellent visitor experience in order to attain and maintain high rankings.

This article is part four of a four part series on optimizing your website for the three major search engines. Part one, titled "SEO For MSN" covered optimizing your website to rank highly on MSN, while part two, titled "SEO For Yahoo!" covered optimizing your website to rank on Yahoo! and part three, titled "SEO For Google" covered how to rank highly on Google. In this article we will cover how to tie your optimization strategies together to attain the highest rankings possible on all three engines simultaneously.

Google is currently the largest of all the search engines with 42.7% of all online searches in March of 2006. For this reason people tend to view Google as the engine to rank on and it's definitely an important engine to optimizing your website for. So how is it done?

This article is part two of a four part series on optimizing your website for the the three major search engines. Part one, titled "SEO For MSN" covered optimizing your website to rank highly on MSN. In this article we will cover optimizing your website for Yahoo!