Jill Whalen

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.

There are so many SEO/SEM firms cropping up that talk a good game but don't deliver results. This is in part because there's so much information that is freely available about search engine optimization. On the surface, SEO sounds easy -- and it really is -- once you've had a number of sites to experiment with. What's even easier than SEO, however, is discussing SEO as if you know what you're actually doing (when you don’t)!

There is no doubt in my mind that the company needs someone skilled in web marketing to help us grow in positioning, traffic, and conversion but I do not know if I need A) a team of people or B) 1 person on staff who is like a junior SEO person while the strategist SEO person is working behind the scenes.

In search marketing, trust issues are further magnified by the fact that the industry is still in its infancy and there are no set rules or regulations. Let's face it, you'd be hard pressed to get a handful of SEO consultants to agree on a definition of SEO. Even amongst SEOs wearing the same hat color, there is often a giant chasm that divides us.

Remember that time after optimizing your first website when you checked your search engine rankings and actually saw your site show up in the top of the results? Was that not the coolest feeling in the world? Part of what makes SEO so much fun is getting to tangibly see the fruits of your labor -- right there in the search results pages (SERPs). Whether you run automated ranking reports (responsibly through the search engines' APIs of course!) or just do some spot checks by hand, achieving the goals you set for your campaign totally rocks!

Like most questions in SEO these days, the answer of course is a big, fat "It depends." Not all template sites are created equal, with some being okay and others being much less than okay. Most of the template real estate sites I've seen in the past are not very search-engine- (or crawler-) friendly. A good percentage of them simply frame some standard content and listings that are provided by a real estate marketing service.

Write great, professional marketing copy while keeping your keyword phrases in mind. If they stick out like a sore thumb, all you've done is written spammy, keyword-stuffed content, and who wants their company associated with that?

Are mirror sites a good idea? What if have two instances of your site and suddenly both instances were dropped by Google? Jill Whalen discuss these issues in this SEO Q&A article.

The other day someone asked me what sort of information should be in an SEO contract. As I was writing my response, it occurred to me that there were probably a lot of small businesses and consultants who were wondering the same thing. Unfortunately, many people don't even use a contract, or worse, they may end up blindly signing a contract provided by the client.

There are plenty of companies that will say they can do whatever you want them to do. You want to be #1 for spring? Sure, no problem. They will happily take your money, do some work, and promptly get no results. Don't blame them though -- they were just telling you what you wanted to hear.

Having a website that gets found in Google, Yahoo, and MSN, etc. isn't hard to do, but it can be difficult to know where to begin. Here are my latest and greatest tips to get you started.

It's critical to keep in mind that the search engines often judge how important any given page within a website is by how it is linked to within the site itself, as well as by external sites. Other sites often link to home pages as a recommended resource.