Headlines – Begin the Conversation

This is the first part of a four part series on the value and construction of compelling headlines.

When it comes to generating sales you must at some point engage the customer in a conversation. Now, on a website, that conversation may at first seem like it’s one sided – your website talks and the visitor listens. If you’re thinking this way then I’m sure your website is driving away people that want or even need your product, but are unable to engage in a successful conversation. Read More

One of my favorite places to eat is Rain Forrest Café. The food is nothing special and is overpriced. In fact, each year before I take my family there to eat a small part of me thinks I am about to waste good money on a very average meal. And then I remember why we go… Read More

Recently we received a question about URL structure that was really wrapped around a larger question. The real issue was one of, “if everyone is doing it there must be an SEO benefit”. Here is our response about “everyone is doing it” as it relates to SEO:

1. I remember when we could repeat keywords over and over on a webpage and rank for that phrase on AltaVista. It was easy. You would just make the keyword density as high as you could and you would do very well…. Everyone did it. One day it suddenly ended… along with AltaVista.
2. Prior to 2002 it was very popular to put long lists of keywords into the keyword and description tags. Everyone that wanted to rank started doing it and life was good. You want to rank? Just jam your meta tags full of keywords and you were halfway there. One day, Google turned a dial on their algorithm that eliminated the meta tags from influencing the search ranking and overnight tens of thousands of sites died – well, at least they lost their search engine traffic. Read More

Avoid Search Engine Penalties

Any time there is a major change in the search engines, specifically Google, there is always a loud cry afterward that Google has banned undeserving websites. The fact is most sites are never banned and they are usually not even penalized. Too often webmasters confuse a change in the algorithm as some sort of penalty when it is just business as usual. You don’t have to do anything wrong on your website or even make changes to your website to be caught up in search engine algorithm changes. It’s the proverbial – it rains on both sinners and saints kind of thing. Read More

3 Easy Tests to See if Google Banned Your Website

I have been asked to look at countless websites where the owner felt Google had banned them.  There are many things that webmasters do that can, will and do cause a ban, but most times I look at a site it has not been banned.

Here are three easy tests you can do to see if Google has banned your site: Read More

Building a Quality Website

(for both search engines and visitors)

The major search engines are constantly changing the importance (or lack thereof) of different elements they use to rank sites. Sometimes things change so rapidly it’s hard for the average Internet marketer to keep up with what’s going on. Here are 5 quick tips to build a quality website that will stand the test of time. The search landscape was littered with the wreckage of hundreds of thousands of sites that were recently depressed by the Google “Panda” update. None of my sites were impacted by Panda – here are a few reasons why: Read More

Could this happen to you?

A Lake Oswego Oregon real estate company is furious after they claim someone stole their domain name. What was once their virtual property and was prominently displayed on their business cards, brochures, letterhead and all other advertising materials – was not going to a website calling them crooks! Read More