Digital Marketing Helps Small Businesses Compete With Big Brands Online

Picture of small boxer to illustrate how SEO helps small brands compete

Digital Marketing Challenges Digital marketing can be a confusing and challenging environment for the small business owner. There are only 10 (and sometimes only 7) positions on the first page of Google and when you type in search terms relevant to your business, you might find that big brands with big marketing budgets are occupying and competing … [Read more...]

Recapturing Link Juice Using Webmaster Tools and Majestic SEO

Just Juice

I can't tell you how many times I've evaluated prospect clients websites and found a mass of wasted SEO GOLD in the form of incoming links landing in 404 pages. It's just not all that common for your average webmaster to think in terms of Recapturing Link Juice, so unless you've hired an experienced SEO some time in the recent past, it's likely … [Read more...]

Let Google Format Your Titles and Meta Descriptions for Conversion

Google search results screen with title tag and meta description tag boldfacing highlighted

Let's say you're searching for something specific. For example, let's say you want to celebrate your love of both cycling and Colorado on your next bicycle club ride.  You don't have much time, after all, you're late for work...but this will just take a second.  You need to make every click count.  You enter "colorado cycling jersey" to Google … [Read more...]

eCommerce SEO Tips for 2012: Link Building

E-Commerce Link Building

We reached out to one of the industry's experts to ask him his thoughts on link building for e-commerce sites in 2012. I also included one of my own tips that I think will be very helpful to you. Enjoy! Link Building for eCommerce Sites Q. Are there any particular nontraditional methods of link building that you're finding to be effective? Dan … [Read more...]

How to Get High Quality Links Through Product Reviews

Shopping Cart Icon

E-Commerce sites have great leverage for acquiring links because of their ability to exchange product for reviews. Google isn't going to see anything unnatural about it, bloggers are happy because they get free product, and your site gets great backlinks that give an SEO benefit and often times instant traffic. Running Ads vs. Giving Away Product: … [Read more...]

Duplicate Content and The Fabled WWW Resolve Issue

301 Redirect Illustration

.htaccess, 301 Redirects and the Subtleties of Syntax By now who doesn’t know that duplicate content is a bad thing for SEO?  And although the universe of people who have heard of the famous “www resolve” issue is a smaller group, it’s still undoubtedly the vast majority of professional SEO consultants. Why a Single Web Page Can Look Like … [Read more...]

SEO Basic Tip #10 – Find and Eliminate Duplicate Title Tags

picture of alfonso bedoya from Treasure of the Sierra Madre

Find Duplicate Tags Using Google Webmaster Tools Sometimes this is easy, sometimes not so much.  The first and foremost rule of SEO is to make sure each of your unique pages has a unique title tag.  That's because the first and foremost rule of Google (or at least sometimes it seems that way) is to avoid the dreaded "duplicate content" … [Read more...]

SEO Basic Tip #9 – Pay it Forward

Tina on her horse Milagro

My wife Tina has a favorite phrase that came out of working with horses.  "You get more on the give than you do on the take."  It's a homespun way of saying that, beyond being the right thing to do, giving will serve you better than taking.  SEO is no exception to that rule. This isn't about mechanics.  It's more about metaphysics.  I don't … [Read more...]

SEO Basic Tip #8 – Audit Your Links and Look for Wasted Opportunities

Close-up of basketball player dunking a ball

This one will be easy.  Maybe that's why so few people do it.  I think it's ironic that the stuff that we don't do is the very easy stuff and the very hard stuff.  The very hard stuff, yeah, I get that.  Maybe I get the procrastination on the easy stuff too; it just can't be very effective if it isn't at least a little hard, right?  But enough … [Read more...]

SEO Basic Tip #7 – Make Sure Your Pages Load Quickly

flaming wheel illustrating the concept of speed

Repeat after me: "Feed Google's Need for Speed" What do you do when you click on a link, your browser starts to load the page you want to see, and then, nothing happens.  You wait.  After a few seconds you see some text.  Then an image or two.  By this time you wonder why you clicked on that link in the first place, and you hit the most used … [Read more...]