Jill Whalen

We are being contacted more and more by companies asking if we will add to our websites and/or clients' websites a short paragraph of text that includes a link to one of their clients' sites  i.e., a text advertisement. These companies are offering a monthly payment for this text and link. So this seems like a good deal for the host/publishing site.

Is there any likely negative impact on the publishing site's SE rankings, Google ranking, etc., from doing this?

I've spent the last few weeks reviewing scads of websites for our new SEO Website Review clients and have noticed a lot of interesting things in the process. The sites have run the gamut from the "best I've ever seen" – to – "better off starting from scratch," with lots in between. Some were putting search engines before people, and others hadn't had a chance to even think about search engines yet.

I had previously thought about playing with SearchWiki a bit to see what it was all about for SEO purposes. The thing is, I don't particularly trust Google and was afraid that hundreds or even thousands of SEOs were probably already out there trying to scam the SearchWiki results by moving their clients' websites to the top of the list. I had no interest in flagging our sites as having been SEO'd. Why provide Google with that sort of signal?

Just as you need to prepare for a long trip with your child, you need to prepare your website before simply slapping it up on your server if you want it to behave as you would like it to. And second, just as ignoring a crying child doesn't make it stop crying (and typically just makes it cry louder), ignoring the cries of your website can be just as catastrophic.

Those who've been in the SEO biz for a number of years know how much more competitive it is these days compared to a few years ago. The number of web pages indexed by search engines has doubled, tripled, and quadrupled in past years. On top of that, a good portion of site owners and webmasters know just enough SEO to be dangerous. In the golden age of SEO, the vast majority of websites hadn't given a thought to the search engines, and when they did, it was only to place some keywords in their Meta tags. (Which, incidentally, didn't help then either.) Those were the days when anyone who knew even the slightest bit about SEO could easily rank highly in all the major search engines, with very little effort. Even competitive areas were doable with just a little more work than their non-competitive counterparts.

Is someone more likely to click on my organic or paid search result? Can Google penalize your site for purchasing links? 

I'll admit it. I used to be scared of social media. I didn't know what it was, nor did I want to. I'm rarely an early adopter of anything; in fact, some might call me a Luddite. (Yeah, I still use my 1994 HTML editor!) Let's just say that I resist change with every fiber of my being.

Sales are down for many businesses due to the slow economy. Business owners and CEOs are looking for that one thing that can pull them through the hard times and keep them afloat. When times get tough, many turn to SEO, hoping that it will be the ticket to increased sales. While SEO is almost always a good idea, if you're counting on it to save a failing business, you may want to rethink things.

I use Google Analytics all the time to see what keywords people are finding our clients' websites with, and I do the same for our own website. But I don't always think to use it for other information, like looking at where else (besides the search engines) traffic is coming from. After all, online marketing isn't just about search engine traffic.

When evaluating the value of a given link, does Google consider the PR of the web page the link is actually on, not the PR of the home page of the website?

Plagiarism as it relates to SEO (or the Internet in general) is not quite the same as copyright infringement. With copyright infringement, a person might take an entire article or other written work from someone and copy and paste it as is, claiming to be the author, or providing no author at all. Copyright infringement is a huge problem for anyone who publishes regularly online, and it is fairly easy to spot. You can paste a sentence from your article into Google (using quotes) and see what else shows up in the search results. Don't be surprised to see some versions of your work under someone else's name!

Are there any negative SEO implications to including a social bookmarking and sharing button to the more popular pages on your website to leverage some of the popularity of social networking?

I’ve been ensuring that each client has unique valuable and professionally edited content whenever possible on the rest of the site, but I’m afraid that if I make the portions of the site that use the semi-public data accessible to the search engines, they will find duplicate information on other sites and my client site(s) would not be indexed.

I would highly recommend not changing your URLs at all. It is a common misconception that keywords in URLs are somehow helpful to search engine rankings, when in reality, they have very little (if any) effect on
rankings.

The SEO world is abuzz today with Google's smack in the face to a number of websites that are selling obviously paid-for, keyword-rich text links.

As much as Google *pretends* to like SEOs by inviting us to parties at the Googleplex and posting on SEO forums, the bottom line is that they don't like us -- or rather, they don't like what we do. Google wants to find the best, most relevant sites for the search query at hand all by themselves. Perhaps someday they will actually be able to do that, but for now, they still need our help, whether they like it or not.

Last night was our third SEMNE event and we were humbled to have Dan Crow, director of crawl systems at Google, spilling the beans about how to get your site into Google.  He talked for a half hour or so, and then proceeded to answer audience questions for at least another hour.  As I sat there listening to him (yes, I actually listened to this one!), I was struck by what an awesome opportunity it was for everyone in that room to be provided with such important information -- straight from Google.  It was clear that the 100 or so people in the room agreed. In fact, at 7:30 on the dot, everyone spontaneously stopped their networking activities and simply took their seats without being asked to.  These folks definitely came to hear Google!

Someone emailed me with a list of quick questions about some SEO terminology they didn't understand.  I figured if one person was looking for these answers, many of you would be, too.

The time to be looking at SEO is definitely in the beginning stage of any design or redesign project. In this article Jill talks about some of the misconceptions and important factors for the search engines.

The title tag has been -- and probably will always be -- one of the most important factors in achieving high search engine rankings.  In fact, fixing
just the title tags of your pages can often generate quick and appreciable differences to your rankings.  And because the words in the title tag are
what appear in the clickable link on the search engine results page (SERP), changing them may result in more clickthroughs.