Technical SEO

Over the past year or so, Google has changed the rules of SEO pretty profoundly with a pair of black-and-white updates: first Panda, then Penguin. There’s a lot of buzz around Detroit about people’s sites suddenly plummeting down the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) because…

So I was talking with a new friend on the phone a few months ago, and we had a silly moment. I asked him where he grew up, and he said, “Detroit!” I got excited and said “Me, too! Which neighborhood?” He laughed at me…

This is pretty straightforward, but it’s an extraordinarily common misconception. People think of SEO, and they think of two things: keyword density and link building. Let’s just set on-page SEO aside for a few minutes, though, and concentrate on the ‘grunt work’ of SEO: the…

The general consensus among the 99% — that is, the 99% of businesses that aren’t household names — is that if you want to succeed on line, you have to kiss Google’s ring and hope that the ‘good tyrant’ of the ‘net gives you enough…

As I chat with my SEO and web design comrades around Detroit, every once in a while one of them will ask me: why do both SEO and web design? Isn’t there enough business in one or the other that you shouldn’t have to do…

Content is fast reaching the point where it’s a commodity on the web, like corn in the agricultural world: there are different kinds of corn, but pretty much everwhere you go, a given kind of corn sells in a pretty narrow price range. In a…

SEO requires content, and it’s pretty obvious that if making content, you should be doing as many different things with it as possible. One piece of content can and should: Rank highly on Google Help your linked page rank highly on Google Intrigue and educate…

A few months ago, when BuildMyRank and dozens of other similar networks were de-indexed by Google (translation: they don’t exist anymore as far as anyone is concerned), tens of thousands of people were devastated because the backlinks they had paid for vanished overnight. But for…

I chat quite regularly with a bunch of SEO guys from around Detroit. The vast majority of them are, more or less, like me: smart, hardworking people who have realized that they have, usually through a series of unrelated events, come into a pretty decent…