So, you’re considering building a new website. You have an idea for a product, you’re starting a new company, or you’ve been charged with taking your 2002 antiquated website and modernizing it. The challenges you’ll face are many. The list of consolidated resources are few. There are schools dedicated to helping people to develop a website but you simply don’t have the time to go back to school. There’s nothing to worry about. Pixaal has a checklist for you. Granted, it doesn’t actually show you how to do any of the things you need such as creating a site map or deciding what sort of buttons you need,…

Back in the days when Yahoo was fighting against Alta Vista, when Bing was still called Microsoft Live, and when Google was trying to get the big Y to buy them, onsite content and meta tags were search. It was a day of keyword stuff, of hidden text, and of content scraping that helped porn sites rank for the term “toys” while male enhancement drugs could be found on searches for “big fun”. Google emerged as the leader in part because of their pure design, but also because they started looking offsite for signals about search rankings. The days before Google’s innovation were the peak of onsite SEO. Google…

Forget the 800-lb gorilla. Google has billions of dollars more to worry about now that its shares have surpassed the $800 mark for the first time. According to Mercury News: The milestone comes more than five years after Google’s shares initially hit $700. Not long after breaking that barrier in October 2007, the economy collapsed into the worst recession since World War II and Google’s stock tumbled into a prolonged malaise that eventually led to a change in leadership. Things have changed lately. Google is hot. Their mobile is booming despite having challenges with Motorola. Their search…

Facebook graph search has the potential to be a great thing for Facebook and its users. Perhaps more importantly, this is the first major play that Facebook has made in a long time that has not been attacked as another attempt by Facebook to attack our user privacy. That didn’t stop the folks at Geek Culture from creating a comic about it.  …

Google Authorship has been around for a while. It has helped many bloggers and journalists stand out by having their images appear directly in search results next to the articles they publish. It highlights the number of people that have them in their Google+ circles and gives a link to other writings by the author. This is nothing new. Google AuthorRank has been given much speculation for about a year now. The idea is simple – Google will give higher rankings to those who have demonstrated expertise in a particular field. If someone is prolific at writing about a subject and their writing is well…

There was a time when the search engines rewarded content of all types. If a website syndicated content from elsewhere on the web and exposed it to their audience, it wasn’t as good as unique content but at least it didn’t hurt. Some of the content would be de-indexed as duplicate but the overall health of the domain itself was not harmed. Today, it’s harmful. Websites that are taking a lot of content from others and posting it on their own websites, even if they link to the original source, are finding that their overall rankings are dropping as a result. It’s one of many changes in the string of content…

The last time I was involved with search engine optimization, Alta Vista was a player. I was working on my own sites and making a killing by taking advantage of the new world of search engines. Yahoo was making its move to the top. Google wasn’t even a word at the time. Flash forward to 2007 and social media became my thing. I was able to drive great traffic with the social news sites and started really getting involved the marketing components in 2008. That’s when JD Rucker and I hooked up and started working the various social angles for clients, but he would always handle the search engine components….

The marketing adage “content is king” has been around for a long time. In 2013, it appears that both the search engines and social media sites are focusing on content as their driving forces, but in a different way than most understand. Things are changing in the world of internet marketing. Here’s what you need to know. Content was never really “king”. Though it made a nice talking point and allowed marketing companies an opportunity to charge for their labors, it was always a temporary fix. In search, it started off as extremely important for a little while until marketers started learning how…

A digital lifetime ago, the late Tupac pronounced his independence from peer criticism by conceding judgment to only his higher power.  I’ll contend that if Tupac were around today, he’d acknowledge the prominence of SEO and include Google in a 2012 remix of “Only God Can Judge Me.” As the latest version of Libertarianism spreads, authorities in many forms have been reduced: changing marriage rights through new legislation; access to football teams outside geographic markets with the NFL package on cable.  Radical times for sure. Yet nobody dare challenge the influence of Google…

Imagine a search engine that truly knew you. No, not in the way that Google or Bing personalize their search results based upon your history and preferences – what if a search engine could take the information that you give about yourself as well as the information that your friends and family put in and cater your search results around your most likely goals and desires from the search? Would you use it? If Marissa Mayer, CEO at Yahoo, has her way, that may be exactly what we see in the future. The plot for the social media giant to work very closely with the former search giant is a combination that should…