Archive by Author
Meta tagging your websites
Posted on 02. Feb, 2010 by Marc McDermott.
I’d like to talk a little about writing quality sets of title, Meta, and header tags and some general principles to abide by. In this example, let’s take a look at a personal injury lawyer website and produce one set of data for the homepage.
Before actually writing these tags, it’s important to understand the primary role they play in your SEO campaign. The title tag is one of the most important components of a webpage in which to tell Google,…
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Semantic Search for SEO
Posted on 23. Dec, 2009 by Marc McDermott.
It seems that a lot of SEO’s and webmasters these days continue to ignore the concept of semantic search. What is semantic search exactly? The good folks over at SEOmoz describe semantic search as:
…semantic search is defined by the ability of the search engine to cognitively recognise and index content based on the actual sentence structure and meaning (or, in other words, the ability of the search engine to actually READ your content).
In layman’s terms, it’s an attempt for a search engine…
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Wordcamp SEO Review
Posted on 15. Nov, 2009 by Marc McDermott.
Yesterday’s Wordcamp NYC blogger track seminar did appear to be a total wash for those veterans of wordpress. A total wash indeed until the 4:15 SEO blog review with Corey Eulas. With an otherwise unruly crowd, Corey did a fantastic job of using his SEO knowledge and experience to silence the crowd despite a few bad self-proclaimed SEO experts in attendance.
I’ve been to a lot of SEO conferences, and I do not recall any where members of the crowd challenged a…
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Tip of the week – knowem.com
Posted on 10. Oct, 2009 by Marc McDermott.
So we want to hop on the social media train, but do not really have a clear understanding of how to do so. Whether you’re marketing your own brand name, it is vital to obtain the vanity url for your brand on all the major social media and social bookmarking sites.
First of all, let me quickly explain what a vanity URL is. Put simply, it is a custom url for a profile/page that includes either your keywords or brand…
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TLD Duplicate content and multisite issues
Posted on 30. Aug, 2009 by Marc McDermott.
This week’s blog involves a common question about multisite and duplicate content issues related to sites with several TLD’s (ie .com, .co.uk, etc)
The most common scenario is an e-commerce website that exists in multiple languages and/or currencies. If my target markets are both the United States and United Kingdom for example, I may or may not opt for the .com and .co.uk versions of my domain. So the question is, in it’s raw form, will Google treat these sites as…
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Of Google Caffeine and small business SEO
Posted on 22. Aug, 2009 by Marc McDermott.
For those who haven’t already heard, Google is currently working on beta stages of their new search algorithm, Caffeine. P relaunch user testing can be conducted here.
So what does this mean for the small business SEO campaign? Not much more than we ethical, white hat SEO’s already know to be honest. A few big changes I see coming are:
- More ranking weight for social networking sites.
- Back link thematic quality truly surpassing quantity.
- Direct correlations between analytic data and rankings.
I believe social networking…
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Google’s Matt Cutts confirms my arguement on footer links
Posted on 21. Aug, 2009 by Marc McDermott.
Last month I wrote an article entitled, “Does google treat links in footers differently than links surrounded by text?”
This question has been a very common theme lately amongst SEO’s, and there seemed to be an ongoing debate of how these links are treated. Matt Cutts of Google finally settles this debate, reinforcing my original arguement.
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Autobiography posted
Posted on 01. Aug, 2009 by Marc McDermott.
I was finally able to sit down and write a brief autobiography for the about page on this website. As it turns, it is harder than it seems to squeeze the past decade onto one page
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Does google treat links in footers differently than links surrounded by text?
Posted on 20. Jul, 2009 by Marc McDermott.
A lot of people ask me about the value of external links placed in sidebars or footers as opposed to the value if placed contextually within a website. To touch on the sidebar link inquiry first, the thing that pops into my mind immediately is the infamous ‘Blogroll’ element. It is my strong opinion that a blogroll/sidebar link does not translate nearly as much value as one would within your page content. The same applies to footer/navigation links; for the…
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Search Engine Strategies (SES) NYC March 09
Posted on 09. Jul, 2009 by Marc McDermott.
While I certainly intended to post this immediately following the seminar in March, I have since found this misplaced document!
My first SES session focused on duplicate content and multi site issues. While we are all aware of the dangers/ineffectiveness of duplicate content, both for users and search engines, there were a few interesting thoughts I took away from the session.
One of the major things talked about was website shingles/boiler plates. Simply put, these are elements such as navigation, headers, footers,…