For a long time it was believed that how far out the domain expiration was affected a site’s ranking with Google. The thinking was that if you bought a domain for five years versus one, for example, that it showed you were serious about the site and therefore Google would give it preferential treatment. In…
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This is an old question, but one that people continue asking today. The short answer is “no”, but if you’re asking you probably want to know why. Probably 6-7 years ago I remember my first time really hearing that claim by a guy selling a network marketing product for marketing businesses online. Ironically his product did actually employ…
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A question that crops up a lot is how to deal with false Google Local reviews. For example, what if you receive a one-star review from someone who was never actually a customer? Or what if they were a customer but are blatantly giving false information? Surely there’s a process in place to prove it and…
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We suggest that our clients use managed WordPress hosting. Most managed hosts offer more robust security, specialize in WordPress and offer automatic site back-ups. The host we often recommend is WP Engine. They’re the host we use for our site and we’ve had great service, 100% up-time and no site hacks. But sometimes even the best hosts…
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SEO companies have been around long enough now that most people understand the basic concept. But if you ask most people what they think it’s about they’ll usually say the same thing: more traffic. Most SEO folks I’ve met simply re-affirm this. The trouble with traffic-focused SEO is that it ignores the most important thing…
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Graphical elements are good in a website. Photos show personality and let viewers get to know your business better. But skipping an important step between taking the photo and uploading it could hamstring your site’s ranking efforts. Make sure to resize your photos for web use! Your average 8-14 megapixel camera might take photos that are…
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You may have heard of robots.txt, but what is it exactly and what does it do? This file is something that web programs, called crawlers or bots, look at when they first examine your site. Google uses bots to explore and understand the websites around the world and make decisions about how to index them.…
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This is a common complaint with business owners trying their hands at online marketing. Maybe they’ve tried writing some SEO articles themselves, but just as often they’ve worked with some local SEO companies and haven’t seen the bang for the buck. If you’ve seen the ranking reports and can confirm your rankings for your keyword list…
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When Google announced its algorithm change in April that would favor mobile-friendly websites in search, a lot of people in the industry coined it “Mobilegeddon”. The thinking of course was that at that point if you didn’t have a mobile-friendly website it might mean the end for you in search results. That reaction proved to…
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Just as the color grey falls somewhere between black and white, the term grey hat seo indicates practices that fall somewhere between the boundaries of ethical SEO and purely spammy or malicious techniques. To better understand that as we go forward, let’s quickly summarize both ends of the spectrum. White hat SEO essentially means ethically…
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