Internet Marketing Blog

In a previous post on keyword competitiveness, we described a long list of factors that help determine how difficult it would be to achieve top search engine ranking on a keyword based upon competing websites. The process of thoroughly examining the situation is usually unrealistically involved, and the effort would not substantially change the tactics […]

Given enough time, personnel, and money it is theoretically possible to improve rankings on just about any keyword. However, few us have the luxury of unlimited resources. Under ordinary circumstances, we have to choose what keywords are likely to provide the most benefit for the least effort. This is where assessing competitiveness is so critical: […]

I spoke yesterday with Phil, the owner of an established web design and hosting firm. He told me bluntly “I don’t pay much attention to this SEO stuff.” Chuckling dismissively, he went on to recount stories of two clients he works with — mid-size firms — who have forked over thousands of dollars to SEO […]

A friend of mine recently told me about his experience with renaming pages on a site, how the traffic fell off from a drop in rankings, and how he recovered the traffic quickly using an XML sitemap.
Scott has been running AdSense ads on his site for some time. He decided to restructure the navigation to […]

If you have a large online catalog, you’re way ahead of many other sites that seek to implement effective on-site SEO techniques. Why? Because search engines love content, and your catalog probably contains a lot of it.
Here are some tips for search engine optimizing e-commerce websites:

Put your entire catalog online — All that keyword-rich content […]

Yahoo! is rolling out dynamic URL rewriting configuration to webmasters. What this means is that you can tell the search engine what dynamic URL parameters to ignore, such as sessions variables or tracking parameters that are useful for you but might appear to search engines as though there are many copies of a page at […]

We introduced BlogRush in a previous post, and now they have disclosed the source of some intermittent availability problems. In addition to hardware failures at their ISP, they have run into problems of abuse.  I suspect (hope?) they had some ideas about how their system could be manipulated early on; even if they didn’t they […]

We’re trying out BlogRush to see if it generates more traffic and links to this blog. (Note that this is a referral link.)
BlogRush is an interesting little tool that shows headlines from “related” blog posts alongside your own blog. All you need to do is sign up for an account and insert a little snippet […]

There is a rising debate regarding the use or omission of “www” for website addresses. For instance, should a company use “http://widgets.com” or “http://www.widgets.com”? The debate is debate is getting somewhat heated in some venues, and there is even an organization advocating the omission of “www”. We have a problem with this.
We don’t have […]

AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript + XML) is typically unfriendly to search engines, and thus may thwart SEO efforts.
AJAX is a set of techniques that allow websites to act more like client-side applications by fetching data and processing it locally based upon user actions. For instance, a web-based spreadsheet may allow the user to sort data by […]