SEO

When conducting SEO research for a client, I often examine incoming links to competitors' websites. Recently, a competitor rocketed to the top of the search rankings. I noticed links from over ten TypePad blogs to the competitor for several of their targeted search terms.

A new year is a great time to break out of old habits and establish new ones. At the January meeting of the DesignHammer hosted RTP Search Engine Optimization Meetup, the group discussed our resolutions for improving our search engine optimization efforts in 2012. Here are some of our top resolutions.

I had the pleasure of presenting at the January meeting of the NCTech4Good Meetup held at the offices of United Way of the Greater Triangle in Morrisville, NC. The talk covered similarities between Usability, Accessibility, and SEO, a topic I first addressed here in 2009. Since my initial blog post, I assembled a talk, which I have presented at multiple venues, inclusing BarCampRDU, Internet Summit in Raleigh, as well as Wake Technical Community College.

Several months ago, the New York Times featured a story that shed some light on the inner workings of Google in dealing with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) practices that contravene Google's accepted SEO guidelines. As I read the story about J. C. Penney's SEO and Google's reaction, I began to think about SEO practices not in technical terms, but in business terms.

WordPress as a platform is an elegant solution for content management. While it is generally search engine friendly, unfortunately it does not provide fine-grain control for search engine optimization (SEO) out of the box. All In One SEO Pack fills that void. For those who are just jumping in, here's some tips for using this excellent plugin.

How is Search Engine Optimization like attempting to outrun a rampaging bear? Take a deep breath, relax, and focus on the big picture, not the huge bear looming over you…

A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to guest lecture before the Web Design students at Wake Technical Community College on the similarities between Usability, Accessibility, and SEO, a topic I first addressed here in 2009. Since my initial blog post, I assembled a talk, which I presented at BarCampRDU, and at Internet Summit 2010 in Raleigh last November.

Each search engine uses a different algorithm—the software that determines which pages turn up for any search. That’s why results on Google are different from those of Bing, and other competing search engines. As a significant business asset, these algorithms are kept secret, though it is suspected they receive updates often. Generally, the updates are minor, and difficult for the average user to notice. Google rolled out an update last week, but this one was different, and people took notice.

Last year I started thinking about the similarities between Usability, Accessibility, and SEO, and posted the first of what I hoped to be a series of articles on the subject. Since then, I assembled a talk, which I presented at BarCampRDU in 2009 and 2010 and am preparing to give at Internet Summit 2010 in Raleigh this week. This post will provide some additional resources as well as a copy of my slides.

What could Usability, Accessibility, and SEO (search engine optimization) have in common? Besides industry jargon that website designers/developers need to know, they are in some ways three aspects of the same process.