The following post is part of a series on How to Silo Your Website. You should review, How to Silo Your Website the Masthead, How to Silo Your Website the Breadcrumb, How to Silo Your Website the Content. For this part, we’ll be taking a look at the sidebar.

You want to keep the sidebar content dynamic …IMHO the sidebar is the second most abused and misused part of a website (the footer is the most abused which we’ll talk about in a later article)…

One of the problems I encounter on large client websites–or with clients who constantly add or update existing content–is getting this content into the index as quickly as possible. One of the tactics I recommend is using the homepage.

When I talk about adding dynamic content I mean in the main content section …I can think of only three or four websites I have ever worked on where the homepage wasn’t the most frequently crawled page on the entire website (the outlier cases were viral microsites, in case you were wondering)…

This is a post that may anger you and piss you off, but hopefully it makes you think a little. But I think a lot of the people in the SEO community are short sighted and are willing to sacrifice themselves and the community as whole if they see the chance to get a link or exposure. Much like the scorpion in the tale of the frog and the scorpion, they can’t help themselves even when it means their own self destruction…

The following is part of the series How To Silo Your Website. Be sure you have read parts one and two: How To Silo Your Website: The Masthead and How to Silo Your Website: The Breeadcrumb. In this part, we will be taking a look at the content area.

This isn’t so much about conserving pagerank or link equity, but more about funneling it where you want it to go …When I talk about the content, I mean the part of your website template where the information is…

One of the mistakes I feel many people make is that they write articles or posts chasing very broad topics. IMHO it’s much better to write narrowly focused posts, pages, or articles and tie it together later on. This is a concept I call head and tail content that I touched on in my How I Manage a WordPress Website.

In my experience converting long tail phrases is easier, especially if they answer a question or solve a problem …So what is an example of content that IMHO is too broad? Something like “how to plan a Disney World Vacation…

In Part 1 we looked at How To Silo Your Website: The Masthead. In this article, we’ll be taking the next step and looking at the breadcrumb.

Adding extra layers to crawl through never works to your advantage … ever …For those of you who don’t know, the breadcrumb is the small text usually found under the title on the page (not the HTML title). The breadcrumb shows where you are in the website hierarchy AND (this is the important part) it is hyperlinked to pass internal anchor text…

A few weeks ago Matt Mullenweg of WordPress threatened to take Thesis Developer Chris Pearson to court over his not supporting the GPL Licence. Fortunately they where able to works things out a lawsuit was averted and everything got back to normal … except that Matt Mullenweg might have started to use the commercial resources of Automatic (the parent company of WordPress.com) to convert users away from Thesis, and he’s pulled Chris Pearson’s free thesis theme cutline from the wordpress archives …

Up until a few days ago several high profile blogs like LaughingSquid…

One of the more powerful tools an SEO can use when setting up or fixing an existing website is siloing or themeing. However, when I mention this to beginner or intermediate SEO’s, they are often confused about how and where to start. In this multi-part series, I’ll be giving you some examples of how I use the technique.

Sometimes it’s helpful to imagine what you would want your site links to look like in the SERPS …Let’s take a step back and understand what siloing is…

The following is a sponsored post.

For this post I’m going to be taking a look a third party video player from Vzaar.com. As Google continues to emphasize videos with universal search, not including them part of your overall search marketing strategy is probably not a smart move. In the past Google would only show video results from high reliability websites like Youtube, MetaCafe and Video Jug…

For today’s post were going to be talking to Loren Feldman of 1938 Media. Hi Loren for my readers who might not know you can you tell us a little about yourself, your company, and what you do.

I make videos for companies and people. I also make them for my website.

Many people who read my blog know you best for your satirical puppet video about the tech industry and it’s celebrities, like this video of Mark Zuckerberg of facebook

Click here to view the embedded video…

I recently came across an article in paper magazine by Jaron Lanier which helped me discover his new book “You are Not a Gadget.” While I do read a lot of good books, this is really one of the few great books I have read in a while. I liked this book so much I have recommended it to some of my friends. For those of you who may not know him, Jaron Lanier is an old school technologist involved in computing and artificial intelligence programming and systems when I was barely old enough to drive a car…

While UGC and Reviews can often be a mixed blessing, as long as Google continues to reward rich snippets with enhanced visual listings, it’s probably a good idea to try to make reviews part of your website strategy.For those of you who haven’t seen rich snippets and reviews in action, here’s a sample of what they currently look like

To qualify for this program you have to have reviews, format your data using microformats, and submit your website for inclusion in the rich snippet program…

About a month ago I went to a client meeting where they had a glass whiteboard in the conference room. This was the first one I had ever seen and I remarked how cool it was. The folks at Clarus GlassBoards were monitoring for keywords on twitter, and reached out to me about sending a sample for review purposes.

Glass Whiteboard from Clarus

Now if you’ve never seen a glass whiteboard it’s a pretty substantial item, a lot more sturdy and durable than your ordinary dry erase board…

As the web matures and begins to displace, replace, or work with established news, information, and entertainment sources, the advertising that pays for this content to get created is going to change as well. When you combine this with the growth of smart phones like the blackberry, android, and iphone and appliances like the ipad, advertising will soon be faced with new obstacles.… Publishers need to adapt and overcome … and they need to do it quickly if they plan to survive … The problems advertising faces are coming from multiple fronts…

One of the things I often say that most bloggers get wrong is they sacrifice keyword focus for being clever, cute, or entertaining. Yes, it is important that you make your blog posts as interesting as possible; but you should never ignore the opportunity to tie into commercial concepts. Since I often get criticized for telling you what you do wrong but not how to do it right, here are some examples about how to write interesting blog posts that are more keyword focused…

For a moment, I’d like you to think back to high school. Remember how there was always that one kid who would raise their hand and ask the question “Will that be on the test?” Now, thanks to Personalized Google News, we have the answer.

… If Google News was limiting the news sources I read I never would have seen that article or had that idea …Last week Google announced they will be bringing personalization to Google news…

Anyone over the age of 30 who spends any amount of time online has to be aware of the gradual erosion of online privacy and how we are slowly moving to a point where our online life has become opted-in by default.

… sacrifice your privacy on the altar faster than an Aztec Priest could ever rip out your still-beating heart … A disturbing trend among people in the valley and other technology centric locations is the subjugation or near-complete surrender of one’s work, one’s copyright, intellectual property, and sometimes complete self to the great computer singularity (a concept I am shamelessly stealing from Jaron Lanier)…

Last week I was having a discussion on Twitter about whether or not  some links were bought. Quite a few people were confused about how you can use link buying to your advantage when you buy links to a website you don’t own (aka a third party). I thought I’d do a little ed-ju-macating and share some tips and tricks.

First off, standard link buying disclaimer: Buying links is against Google’s guidelines…

When I got my iPad, some of the things I wanted to know were how much could I actually get done on an iPad and in what situations could it replace my laptop. Here are the programs and apps that I use to help me get things done.

Here’s a screen shot of the programs I use

Google Apps for Domains Email and Calendar
I use the built-in mail and calendar functions, but each has its own problems…

Clay Shirky has a new book out called “Cognitive Surplus” in which he examines how the internet is changing us as a society from consumers and how we are using our newly found surplus of time, energy, and brain power to create, share, and connect with each other.

… Although so much of what kids are doing online may look trivial and frivolous, what they are doing is building the capacity to connect, to communicate, and ultimately to mobilize …

Clay Shirkey

 In the spirit of full disclosure, I want to say that I was given a complimentary review copy of the book, but this in no way influenced my opinion of the book…