All of the articles contained in this category are about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), the practice of helping websites appear more prominently in search engines such as Google and Bing. Most of these articles are around the more technical parts of SEO, especially SEO for Wordpress, but you will also find articles about linkbuilding, social media for SEO, and Microsoft Excel for SEOs.
Do you ever say to yourself: “I really wish I had a spreadsheet that would give me awesome graphs about my link profile distribution”? No? Just me? I doubt it. Some days we need to have a quick way of visualizing our link profile to know where we stand. All linkbuilders and SEOs are looking […]
Today I want to talk about a simple tactic that you should try if you have been working on linkbuilding for a specific site for a while and have had some blog posts written about your site, without links. The Skinny At my old job, my coworker had been working on building links to the […]
Why do some SEOs spend so much time checking and worrying about global rankings? I read and hear constantly from different SEOs where their current pet terms are ranking, their badges of honor if you will. We go through insane efforts to depersonalize search results to check rankings and SERP displays. But why? Here’s […]
The good old title tag. The poor maligned title tag. The title tag has been taking a beating recently in the SEO world, and I feel bad for it. I want to further explain the little-loved lines of text that receive so much hate, yet have such a large effect on your rankings AND click […]
This post is another in the spirit of my Sitemaps post, where I explained how to create an XML sitemap for inclusion into Google and Bing Webmaster Tools. Today I want to talk about the robots.txt file, which is an extremely powerful and oft-misunderstood part of websites. I misunderstood it myself recently. Overview The robots.txt […]
Is SEO a team sport? SEOs are often known individually in the industry, not necessarily for who they work for (though it is great when the company pushes the SEO into the spotlight, and the SEO gives love back to the company). At the beginning of my SEO career, I assumed that everyone had skills […]
I’ve been asked a few times what blogs I have been reading to increase my knowledge of SEO. I’ve decided to put together a list here of blogs that I subscribe to via RSS. The Lucky 13 Blogs I Read via RSS SEOmoz: If you don’t know that SEOmoz has an incredible blog with the […]
Linkbuilding is a notoriously difficult task. Think about all of the sessions that take place at advanced seminars and you can easily tell that we all need new tactics and ideas for building links. In the past 2 months, I have gone to a conference dedicated to linkbuilding (#Linklove London), an event in Philadelphia put […]
I’m a search marketer. It’s what I do. I’m also a human being. It’s what I (as the philosophers like to say) be. I write this as both. The meta description, it seems, has long been a way that search engines have figured out what a website is about and they have used is information […]
Well everyone, we have a fun discovery on our hands. Yesterday about 3pm I noticed the title had changed. My friend Tom Harari linked to my recaps using the anchor text “John Doherty’s Epic Recap of the London #Linklove Conference”. This went live on Tuesday morning. Wednesday at 3pm, this is what I saw as […]
On Monday, my post entitled “How Distilled Stole My Page Title” went around the Twittersphere. It was interesting to see the feedback and there were a lot of comments from a lot of people I respect. Read the comments here. Now I run into an issue. I’ve never confronted something like this before, and I […]
Google changed my page title in favor of the anchor text from Distilled’s blog. Yesterday I was doing some research on my blog and trying to find it using different keywords, searching old-school (like a normal Web user) using Google.com. I’ve been hoping to get this site ranking high for “John Doherty”, as it’s my […]
I was trained as a web developer. Therefore, often many of the technical on-site details and issues get passed on to me, because I have the technical knowledge. Here’s a free tip: if you don’t know the answer and you don’t have anyone to ask, search for it. This happens with sitemaps around my office. […]
Today I’ve been thinking about brand SEO (again) and how branding your site may be good for SEO purposes as well, for ranking important keywords even. Most of my thinking has come about in the past week, after a webinar given by SEOmoz a week and a half ago. Today I also watched a WhiteBoard […]
Do you ever long for the days of 1950’s or 1960’s America, where most Americans lived in small towns, walked to the corner store for groceries, knew their neighbors across the white picket fence, and used word-of-mouth as their gauge for knowing where to eat and who to do business with? I think we’re heading […]
Well, today was an interesting day in my SEO world. After an eye appointment this morning (unrelated to SEO, obviously, though it did make seeing my screen a bit harder), I went into work and started firing off linkbuilding emails that were ready to go out. So far, so good (except I still had trouble […]
Today at work I began to have an epiphany. Does that sentence even make sense? I’m not really sure. Anyways, a coworker and I were talking about our projects going on outside of our “normal” SEO jobs. He is putting together a website for local music venues, where he hopes to eventually drive enough traffic […]
As this is my first post on Wordpress, I guess I should introduce myself. My name is John. This is my website.