Build xml sitemap

WordPress is a fantastic platform for building websites on-the-fly with little to no development time required to get up and running. In addition, WordPress has fantastic customizability ranging from being able to fully customize your theme, to finding plug-ins that have functionality to do just about anything you want. The list of what you can do to customize WordPress is endless and is generally limited only to your imagination. You can install a newsletter plug-in to manage your newsletter subscriptions. You can install analytics plug-ins that seamlessly integrate with WordPress and Google Analytics. Other WordPress plugins allow you to customize your SEO such as your title tags, meta descriptions, and meta keywords. Still, some plug-ins will also let you add noodp and noydir tags, and dive deep enough into their functionality to allow for full control over noindex/nofollow on individual pages. This should go without saying, but choosing a good domain name is half the battle toward … [Read more...] about How to Build a WordPress Site in 24 Hours

Search crawlers are becoming more and more effective every day in discovering new content pages on websites. But, that process of organic discovery can be slow and spotty, so it’s hardly any solace to sites that publish hundreds of new pages a day, or publish extremely time-sensitive content such as news articles, or publish a huge amount of specialized digital media content such as video. Even with the continuing improvements in organic search for discovering your content, it still takes time for search to find it all. It takes patience on your part, and in many cases, the content found in a crawl has inadequate context to the needed, relevant keywords that make it discoverable to searchers. Wouldn’t it be cool if a webmaster could just identify a list of content pages you wanted the search engines to crawl, telling them “these are the most important content pages on my site,” and in some cases, even offering a little bit of keyword context to it? Well, great … [Read more...] about A Primer On How To Get The Most Out Of Sitemaps

It’s been a few months since I have written for SEL. I had to take a short ‘sabbatical’ to hunker down and focus on a major phase of development and updates on our own site. It’s nice to get back to blogging but I have to admit that I feel a bit off the pace. Writing is like exercise; once you are out of practice the first time back takes longer and feels harder to produce content that you’re happy with. Before I started writing this post I did a sweep through the last few months of Local Search and SEO articles on SEL and on other prominent blogs. I reminded myself of just how much information there is out there and how much new data we churn out each month. SEOs are information junkies! The more insights, research, data and charts we can consume the better; we love this stuff. But this glut of information is overwhelming for business owners and even for some experienced SEOs to make sense of – myself included. Information is our greatest asset, but … [Read more...] about The Building Blocks Of Good Local SEO

No website is without linking related flaws. Whether it’s on-site or off, I can’t say that I’ve ever encountered a “perfect” website from a linking perspective. Some link building mistakes are unintentional and inconsequential, others are catastrophic. See When Link Rehabilitation Is A Viable Option. The idiom “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” is in full view all over the web. We’ve all seen sites making mistakes. My own site is a case study in poor link optimization. I’ve made mistakes many times over the years. I’ve killed off pages with Pagerank. I’ve orphaned pages accidentally. I have no xml sitemap. I don’t do the rich snippets thing, I’m missing alt text. One of my older articles that was out of date was sitting with a juicy link from Harvard Business School, and I didn’t know it, nor did I notice a Title tag replicated on several articles where I had lazily neglected to edit them. My … [Read more...] about Recovering From Link Building Mistakes

I recently read Is Most Of SEO Just A Boondoggle? and the subsequent comments and attacks on the author Jill Whalen, and it’s become my own tipping point. Enough is enough. Every word of that column was right on the money. It’s just rare (and welcomed) for a well known expert to state in a high profile venue like SEL what many of us privately know to be true. Those of us who have been doing what we do the longest are faced with a choice every time we write about our own industry. Do we ignore the elephant(s) in the room, or bring attention to not only the elephants, but the huge dumps they leave on the carpet? Through years of experience, success and failure, trial and error, some of us in the SEM industry know exactly when a tool, tactic, or piece of advice is total bullshit. Yet after all these years, we still have companies making a nice living selling tools, tactics, or advice which is just that: total BS. Why? Mostly because those of us who know how to spot the BS have … [Read more...] about Betting On The Link Building Boondoggle Bonanza