The Wrong Advices

Muhammad Saleem has written a guest post over at Copyblogger which discusses the importance of writing good headlines for both readers, search engines, and social sites.
He makes some excellent points in this article and I wanted to expand on two in particular. How headlines can affect RSS subscribers and search engines.
RSS Subscribers
Contrary to what [...]

Whenever you make optimization changes to your site you can never be 100% sure how they will affect your rank on a given search engine results page (SERP). Even the most minor changes can sometimes have a major impact with search engines - both positive and negative.
Being able to track your search engine rank not [...]

A few weeks ago I put together a quick SEO checklist and I’ve been meaning to expand on some of those points.
One issue in particular I’ve had to deal with recently is duplicate content.
I’ve been using the SEO in Firefox extension to check various stats about my site from time to time. It gives you a quick snapshot of [...]

I opened my feed reader today and found about ten posts mentioning that the PageRank update is in progress. It’s nice to finally have a number set in stone but the reality is nothing much is going to change as far as your search engine rank goes.
The PageRank value you see when you use an online PR [...]

What I’m going to show you is a simple method to target advertising at search engine visitors only.
Why would you do that?

You keep ads away from your regular readers as well as any targeted traffic you get - ie. visitors following a link from another blog.
You only show advertising to people who are the most likely to actually click [...]

SEO isn’t the mysterious and magical art some people make it out to be. It is rather straight forward and mostly involves just using some common sense.
Some of the following points are more important than others and I’ll be addressing each of them in separate posts.

The title of a post should always go before [...]

The worst mistake I’ve made with this blog was not choosing a more appropriate domain name.
These should be the steps when making that decision.

Select a niche or core topic for your site.
Clearly define the purpose and goals of your site.
Choose an appropriate domain name.

As you can see I missed the boat on steps 1 [...]

Why would you want to set up a redirect?

To preserve search engine ranking on a page which has moved.
If your website has moved to a new domain.
To redirect incoming visitors to www.yourdomain.com instead of yourdomain.com, or vice versa.

The last point is the one I want to address in a little more detail, as it [...]

I’ve had the chance to talk to quite a few fellow bloggers recently, some new to it, others more seasoned, and I’ve been really surprised to find that so many of them don’t know as much as they should about some important web fundamentals.
A lot of you may know these inside out, others may have heard them used but never [...]

The rel=”nofollow” tag is a HTML attribute that is used to tell search engines to assign no value to the link it is attached to.
How well you rank in search engines results pages is determined by the number and quality of links pointing to your site, so when the nofollow tag is used it [...]