I recently became the new owner of an iPad 3G and, despite my initial skepticism when the device was first announced, I actually really like it. Truth be told, I actually like it more than my Asus Netbook. That said, if it can’t help me actually get work done, then it really is a toy. So I brought it along for my recent trip to Search and Social summit in Tampa to put it to the test…

As I mentioned before, I’m a big fan of plugins. They help me manage and run WordPress more efficiently and GTD. I’ve got a list of SEO Plugins for WordPress, which is on living URL (hmm… 2008. Guess I need to update that…). Last week, I came across two new plugins that are different. I think they really help WordPress take a big step forward. One is from EzineArticles and the other is from Linkshare…

The following is a sponsored post.

For this post we’re going to be talking with Chase Granberry of AuthorityLabs.com. For my readers who don’t know you, can you tell me a little bit about yourself and some of your SEO related experience?

I’ve always been an Internet geek. I love the potential the web has to offer and really realized this potential when I was in college…

Today’s post is an answer to a question from Don:

How to best handle pagantion, use the same description meta tags? Use the same title tags just add page 2

First off, I’m going to answer this as user: avoid pagination if at all possible. Things like slide shows or lists where you show the 5, 10, 15 or even 100 items–just don’t dothem in multiple page format…

I was having a a few conversations on twitter last week. It was clear that more than one person needed a little bit more explanation about how to put some of the tips I mentioned into action, so here are 6 quick tips to help you improve your posts.

Pull Quotes

Blue Widgets solved all my problems… If you’ve read a magazine in the past 20 years, chances are good you’ve seen pull quotes in action…

Today’s post is an answer to a question I took a few weeks ago:

How to organize archives/categories on WordPress for news site/blog that publishes a lot of articles, around 30-50 daily.

your site’s link equity will determine your crawling depth and crawling frequency The first thing I want to bring up is that generally, if you’re publishing that volume of posts per day, your posts probably are date sensitive, so you don’t mind Google attaching a date to your posts…

While Facebook may be a hot marketing tool right now, there is danger in putting too much effort into making it the center of your marketing efforts.

In a recent post I spoke about publishing paths and tailoring your content and selectively publishing it to different websites. It can be dangerous, though, if you take it too far and focus only on building your content on one website (particularly one you don’t have absolute control over) because you leave yourself and your business open to whims and decisions of others…

In the past I’ve spoken about why I turned off blog comments, but it was mostly from a time/labor perspective. Now I have another reason, one that affects everyone from an SEO Perspective. In some cases. leaving comments on will negatively impact your rankings and traffic.In case you missed it, in yesterday’s post I spoke about how Google is being more aggressive in trying to figure out the proper date for a post and displaying it in the SERP’s…

In recent weeks I’ve noticed a disturbing new trend in Google SERP’s: Google has become much more aggressive at trying to reverse engineer the publication date of a post/page.First let’s be clear about what we’re discussing. In some cases, when you do a search, Google will show a date in the listing. See the example below:

Initially, Google only looked at the date that was near the H1/Title of the page and, if it found something, it used that as the date in the SERP’s…

Today’s post is answer to a question from Curedream:

Is there really any value in getting links from the Yahoo directory

I’m going to move that up a bit and tackle directories in general.  In my opinion, yes, there is value in getting your website listed in some directories–but not all. The trick is figuring out which ones matter most.

IMHO there are four directories that every website should try to be listed in: Yahoo, Business…

The following is a sponsored post.

When I announced I was doing sponsored posts/reviews again, one of the first people to contact me was Jim Boykin of  WeBuildPages. He let me know he was interested in getting a review of his link building services. To be honest, I had some concern about reviewing another SEO’s services. I told Jim that, if things didn’t work I didn’t want to give him a bad review and would just cancel the review…

Today’s post is a question from Max Capener, who wants to know what’s the best way to handle old sites that you buy?

Ok so that’s a question that has a lot of different aspects, and I’ll try to go over a few of them. First, let’s talk about why you bought the website. Was it the competition? Were you looking to re-purpose/redirect some link equity? Or is it just a good domain name? If it’s the competition, you have few options you can leave it in place and try and secure two spots in the SERP’s…

Today’s post is a question from Jason who asks the following question:

Are all links really the same? If a link statistically according to SEOMOZ or other tools, PR, trust, rank, etc, are the same, are they really the same in the eyes of Google?

The easy answer is no. The explanation is bit more involved. Any tool or service that is not put out by Google  is going to fall somewhere between a really good approximation and an educated guess because, at the very least, Google has access to a lot of information…

The following is a sponsored post

For this post we’re going to be talking to Nick Stamoulis of Brick Marketing, for my readers who might not know you can you tell us a little about yourself, and your company.

Thanks Michael, I really appreciate you taking the time to ask me these questions. I am the President and Founder of the full service boutique search engine marketing company, Brick Marketing and the writer of the Search Engine Optimization Journal…

For websites that are going to participate in social media in a big way along multiple channels, I find it helpful to set up what I call publishing paths. These publishing paths require you to think about your content before you publish it, what is the best channel for it, and how to cross promote it.Some publishers take a different approach. No matter where something is published, it gets cross promoted across all channels…

Sometime when you write a blog you need some ideas of what people want to hear you talk about or questions they want to have answered, and that’s what this post is about. Got a topic you want  applyto have covered here’s your chance. Got a question you need answered step u to p to the plate. Drop your thoughts in the comment box below and I’ll try answer them. Topics or subjects that will have wider appeal will have a greater shot at being answered than topics that aply only to your website … unless of course it’s really interesting…

Today’s post is another answer to a question–this time from Nathan Schubert, who wants to know what you should do with old links from directories and websites that still drive traffic if you’ve changed the content on your website.
OK. First off, you never want to have links to your site removed, even if it’s from a really bad website.  Truth be told, there are some things you need to watch out for, but (generally speaking) it’s really pretty hard for someone to screw you up by linking to you (I said hard–but not impossible)…

Anyone who’s been involved in web development for any length of time has likely encountered the Developers VS Users situation. It’s a mistake that can often lead to expensive problems down the road. So what exactly is the problem? And how can you spot it–and solve it–before it derails you project and causes you to make a costly mistake? Here’s how…

Most developers became developers because they want to work on and build cool stuff…

When your blog or website becomes successful and starts to get traffic, if you don’t make direct sales yourself or commissions via affiliate traffic, you almost always look for other revenue streams. The most common revenue stream is CPM based advertising or something like adsense. However, once many publishers start down that path, they almost always end up chasing off topic traffic…

Now, don’t get me wrong. Google Local and Google Maps are extremely valuable tools that I use a few times every week. But every so often they get something wrong–so wrong, in fact, that I’m not sure where the wires got crossed.

Let’s assume I wanted to stop by a local pub on a Saturday night. Maybe I’d want to check out the website first to see what was going on, so I’d type in the name and town [molly blooms amityville] and get this result:

For those of you who might not remember, I live in New York (more specifically on Long Island)…

I’d like to say thanks to the people who sponsored the blog this month. Without them, there wouldn’t be regular posts here.

Text Link Ads – New customers can get $100 in free text links.

CrazyEgg.com – Supplement your analytics with action information from click tracking heat maps.

BOTW.org – Get a premier listing in the Internet’s oldest directory…

The question for today’s post comes from Meg Geddes aka NetMeg. She wants to know more about setting up caching on WordPress.

Ok, let’s get the big question out of the way. What is caching and why do you want it? Basically, caching will store copies of pages that have already been served from your webserver so that they don’t have to be called from the database every time they are requested and don’t have to be parsed through the PHP engine…

Today’s post is question from Hicham Damahi of beezid.com/ who asks “How to handle expired product pages on a classified / auction site.” I’m going to expand the topic to cover expired product pages as well, since the concept it basically the same.

I touched on this briefly in my Shopping Cart SEO Tips post, but there are a couple of different conditions that require some finesse so let’s run through the most common cases:

Product Goes Temporarily Out of Stock: If a product goes out of stock temporarily, but you do expect to get it back in stock,  you’ll want to leave the page up from a search engine perspective…

Over the past two weeks we’ve taken a look at different aspects of copywriting, including aspects such as the value of good copy, outsourcing your content, and tools to make your content better. To round out the series I thought I’d touch on auto-generated content and how to make it better.

To be clear, using auto-generated text will fall into the gray-hat to black-hat side of the equation…

As you know I’m a big fan of the WordPress platform. Although it’s not the most optimal platform, there’s no question that it makes it easier to run a website. I was recently asked by Brian Clark of CopyBlogger to test a new service/plugin for WordPress, one that was designed to help you do a better job of optimizing your posts.

Scribe SEO is plugin that works with WordPress to analyze your posts, give you information about them, and make suggestions about improving your post from an SEO Perspective…

Earlier this week there was a post on SEOBullsh*t that talked about how WordPress was inadequate for anything more than a personal blog. Since I’m a big advocate of WordPress and use it more than any other platform, I thought I’d provide a little balance to the argument.

Let’s get to the core of the argument. Can WordPress scale to handle high volume sites with lots of traffic? I can say that, yes, it can … as long as you are careful about how you implement it…

There’s an old saying … You’ll never make the shot you don’t take. It’s in that spirit I’m announcing that, starting today, I’ll be experimenting with some new advertising here in the form of sponsored posts. I’m doing things with a different approach, so hopefully you’ll give me the opportunity to explain the program in more detail.

Disclosure: First off, I will disclose all sponsored posts at the top and bottom of the posts…

The following is a sponsored post and part of new advertising option I’ll be announcing later today.

For this post we’re going to be talking to Michael Streko Co-Founder of KnowEm.com. For my readers who might not know, you can you tell us a little about yourself, and some of your experience in search marketing.

Michael Streko: Sure Michael. I started in search marketing four years ago when I was told by the owner of the company I worked for to “Make our website be found on Google…

Like most people who work in the marketing space, I’ve been hearing more and more about “demand media” and “content farms” in recent months and how they are either the death of quality writers or the greatest thing since sliced bread. Rather than sit on the sidelines, I thought I’d give it a test drive before forming an opinion.

First things first, this is NOT A SPONSORED POST OR REVIEW…

Google has long been an advocate of “build great content”; however, in reality, it’s turning into “build great content … and if we like it we’ll take it from you, put it on our pages, and deprive you of that traffic. Without compensation.” Strong accusations, sure, but I’m willing to step up to the plate, put my money where my mouth is, and show you how it’s being done…