We all use the internet every day, conducting searches, finding new sites, visiting our favorite haunts. That does make you knowledgeable. One thing you may not have thought of is that pretty much every site you visit follows certain conventions that allow you to get around, even if you haven’t been there before. For example, [...]
Archive by Author
How to Buy SEO
You’ve been told you need SEO… short for search engine optimizing, whatever that means. Maybe your I.T. guy or a knowledgeable marketing person has pointed out that you don’t have any search engine rankings for your particular business terms. You paid for a big glossy site; you expected people would find it and business would [...]
What to Ask Your SEO Specialist
You’ve heard about search engine optimizing being about making your site friendly for search engines. But what does that dumb phrase really mean, “friendly”? Friendly means a bunch of different things, but mostly it means functional. First your website should be architecturally impeccable so as to not cause any problems with a search engine indexing [...]
What to Ask When Designing a Website
If you don’t have a technology background, knowing what you need in a website can be a stressful thing. You can read articles online and try to prepare for your meeting with your web designer, but ultimately you and he both know that only one of you is really in charge of the material. So [...]
Why Ugly Sites are Successful
Have you ever noticed that Ma & Pa Kettle websites that were done on geocities during the bicentennial still rank? Have you ever bought something from a really hideous website with terrible graphics that looked like a school project by a 10 year old? The site was so primitive surely thieves ran it. Maybe you [...]
Social Media Taylor Guitar Success
For a grail story on how to use (exploit) social media, take the recent case of Dave Carroll, a musician who apparently had his guitar trashed by United Airlines on a flight in spring 2008. For 9 months, he dogged the airline to reimburse him for his guitar (a Taylor, which becomes important a little [...]
Deleting Link Spam
by Ellen on March 2, 2010 in Website Stuff
If you own a WordPress site, you know about link spam. That’s the comments you get on your posts which are designed simply to embed a link back to the commenter’s website to help them rank. Link spam is not just an annoyance, it has the potential to hurt your site’s rankings. Here we’ll take [...]