The title of this article is designed to illustrate the point of this article. Today we won’t be taking a look at black-hat search engine optimization tactics. Admittedly, I’ve toyed with them in a “know your enemy” kind of way but I’m no expert on advanced cloaking techniques nor effective link sp@mming tactics. What we’re going to cover here are the hidden (i.e. dark) areas of effective optimization...
Read MoreLink building is an essential ingredient in ranking your website highly on the major search engines. There, now that we’ve got that brilliant grasp of the obvious out of the way let’s move on to what you can do to actually create them. Before we launch into the nitty-gritty of link building, no beginners guide would be complete without a brief explanation as to why links are important and the different elements of them. Being a...
Read MoreBy Jill Whalen The keywords and phrases you use in your Meta description tag may not affect your page’s ranking in the search engines, but this tag can still come in handy in your overall SEO and social media marketing campaigns. What Is the Meta Description Tag? It’s a snippet of HTML code that belongs inside the <Head> </Head> section of a web page. It is usually placed after the Title tag and before the Meta...
Read MoreBy Jill Whalen As much as Google *pretends* to like SEOs by inviting us to parties at the Googleplex and posting on SEO forums, the bottom line is that they don’t like us — or rather, they don’t like what we do. Google wants to find the best, most relevant sites for the search query at hand all by themselves. Perhaps someday they will actually be able to do that, but for now, they still need our help, whether they like it or...
Read MoreRechecked for Accuracy Jan. 2012 By Jill Whalen What Is a Title Tag? The title tag has been – and probably will always be – one of the most important factors in achieving high search engine rankings. In fact, fixing just the title tags of your pages can often generate quick and appreciable differences to your rankings. And because the words in the title tag are what appear in the clickable link on the search engine results page (SERP),...
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