Over on Search Engine Land, the perennial discussion of the benefits and disadvantages of using subdomains vs. directories has recently been reignited.
In his post, 5 Whopping Lies That Keep SEO At Status Quo, Ian Lurie, presents as his 4th most egregious lie:

“We Can Put The Blog On A Subdomain. It’s Fine.”

The conversation on this issue has been swinging back and forth for a long time, with people on both extremes and quite a number in the middle who claim that it doesn’t matter at all for SEO. which is also Google’s stated position.

Micheal Martinez, of the excellent SEO Theory blog responds in the comments that:

“You and [Rand] Fishkin are completely wrong on the subdomain issue. It’s a shame this kind of misinformation is still being shared on major SEO Websites like Search Engine Land.” (more…)

When Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded the Google search engine, their core insight was implemented as the PageRank algorithm. Put simply, PageRank determines where a page should rank in the SERPs based on the PageRank of incoming links from other sites — it’s a recursive algorithm.

The higher the PageRank, the greater the assumed authority of a particular site. That authority can then combine with a keyword analysis of a page. Then, they use this combination to devise a ranking of pages in response to a search query.

Thus, PageRank is a proxy measure of authority. Google’s algorithms, in their early days and even now for the most part, couldn’t determine a page’s authority for a specific search query by just looking at the content.

PageRank significantly improved upon previous methods, as early search engine users remember. However, it wasn’t perfect. This imperfection created opportunities for manipulating the system through various link-building tactics.

(more…)

Keywords are at the heart of any SEO strategy. They are the thread that links sites to customers via their search terms. Over the years, people have focused and speculated a huge amount about how precisely to use keywords in on-page content to signal relevance to search engines and to rank well.

Historically, people have talked about keywords a lot, often focusing on minute details like “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin”: where to place them in the content, how many words should separate them from the start of a page or heading, the ideal ratio of keywords to other text, and so on.

Some (not very good) SEOs strive to produce content that contains an exact percentage of keywords, often with the result of producing content that isn’t very readable to humans. And some stick to the old tactic of writing as many pages as possible stuffed with keyword variants and synonyms to cover all possible long-tail searches.

(more…)

There exists a misconception among many business owners that SEO is a process that once done is done forever. This can lead businesses to fail to extract the maximum benefit from their online presence. If we truly consider search engine optimization a continuous process, businesses might be losing out.

Their competitors likely have a more aggressive and nuanced approach. These competitors are refining and adjusting their strategies constantly. Consequently, the businesses with a less dynamic approach risk falling behind.

We’re going to take a look at three major reasons why business owners should consider SEO as an ongoing part of their marketing and promotion.

First we should define our terms. In this article we are conceiving of SEO as not just optimizing for keywords and traditional link building. Since the Panda and Penguin updates, high-quality content has become the bedrock of effective SEO strategy. SEO and content marketing go hand-in-hand.

(more…)

Monetizing can be a bit of a puzzler for bloggers. For those who blog for its own sake rather than for SEO or content marketing purposes, turning posts into money generally relies on an advertising model.

Advertising is how most commercially viable blogs fund themselves. Using AdSense, or some other third party advertising provider, they display advertising and hope to get a sufficient amount of clicks to generate a decent revenue.

Unfortunately click-through rates are pretty low, often as few as 1 in a 1000 visitors click, which means that even a very popular blog with visitors in the hundreds of thousands can fail to make a livable income from their work. (more…)