I recently wrote a post explaining what SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is and gave you a very brief outline of how SEO is done. Today, I’d originally planned to talk about SEM, aka Search Engine Marketing but I received an email that I just had to share with you first.
The email, is from someone that I’ve never heard of, came completely unsolicited and is by definition spam. Here’s the text of the email for your perusal:
We would like to get your website on first page of Google.
All of …

Search Engine Optimization, also known as SEO, is essentially part art and part science. Let me give you my definition of it, and a brief description of how it’s done rather than regurgitating or simply posting someone else’s definition.
Before I go into my definition, I want to make sure that I mention what the search engine’s job is. The search engine’s job is to find the content that most closely matches and is most relevant to what the person sitting at the computer is searching is looking for.
How search engines …

That’s right folks, now you can get real time searches on Google itself. No more messing around with Twitter Search when trying to get the score of a game or when trying to get updates from someone attending a conference or when trying to get traffic updates.
What does “Real Time” mean?
Google is defining “Real Time” as “a few seconds ago.” So, as soon as something is published on twitter or anywhere else, it’ll show up in the search results. Google plans to add updates to the real time search results …

Podcasting FAQ
Another set of questions that I get from clients and potential clients relate to podcasts. Because of that, I’ve decided to create this little FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) about podcasting. As always, if you have more questions, leave them in the comments or contact me for a private consultation.
Q1. Who listens to podcasts? Isn’t it just kids in their parent’s basement with nothing else better to do?
A1. Everyone listens to podcasts, not just geeks and kids. Forrester research did a study about it, and so did Marketing Sherpa. …

Web analytics, or site statistics is a field that is shrouded in mystery to some people. There are lots of experts that make it seem like you need to have a PhD in computer science in order to get data from your website. Thankfully, you don’t need a PhD, nor a MS, all you need is some time and the right analytics package.
What’s the right package?
There is no cut and dry answer to this question. The right package is the one that gives you the information that you need and …

Seriously it does. My landing page sucks too, so you’re not alone. Actually, from what I’ve seen, a lot of landing pages out there on the internets suck.
What’s a landing page?
Just to make sure that we’re all on the same page, a landing page is the first page that people land on when they hit your website. For the majority of us, the landing page is our homepage, but technically whatever page a visitor first visits on your site is the landing page.
Why is a landing page important?
The biggest thing …

Here are some quick and dirty guidelines for picking out a domain name. This is part of a chapter in my upcoming booklet about setting up your website. Without further ado:
1. Do not pick a name with hyphens, underscores or dashes.
People don’t know the difference between them. Furthermore, imagine you’re in the elevator with someone, trying to tell someone your url (aka domain name) and you have to say “double u, double u, double u, dot the, hyphen, coffee, hyphen, guy, dot com.” Chances are really good that the …

There’s been a lot of talk online about duplicate content. Most of the talk centers around how you should avoid duplicate content and so on and so forth. I’ve done some testing and I can tell you that the duplicate content penalty, as a lot of us have understood it, is no longer an issue.
Depending on how long you’ve been online, you may have heard that Google only counts the first instance of content and not any subsequent instances of the same content. In other words, if I have an …

A while back, I came across a picture of Shoemoney with this check from Google Adsense for $152,000+. According to the post that Shoe wrote to accompany his picture with the check, Shoe was doing some arbitrage from different ad networks so his “take home” was probably a lot less than the face value of the check, but I digress.
I myself have received my very own check from Adsense. I was ecstatic when I got it. No, it was not for $152,000 it was for significantly less than that. A …

In my quest to find better keywords, I’ve tried many different keyword research tools. Up until recently, my favorite had been the Google keywords tool (GKT). The only problem with the GKT, is that sometimes, it just “pukes out” data.
Lots of data, but nothing that can really be used easily. Let’s walk through the steps:

You had to first search the GKT for keywords.
Export the keywords to a csv that you later imported into Excel or something spreadsheet program.
After exporting the csv and importing it to Excel, you had to eliminate …