October 2007

Site search optimization

Posted by Michael Martinez on October 17, 2007 in Advanced SEO

Site search is the 3rdGen Web navigation tool of choice. If you’re planning a large content Web site with at least 100 pages you really need to implement a site search feature from the beginning, and you need to make it as accessible as possible.
Site search is not easy to implement, much less [...]

20 Hard Core SEO Tips

Posted by Michael Martinez on October 16, 2007 in Search Engine Optimization

For those of you loyal readers who wish I would just take a break from the theoretical musings, here is the type of list of SEO tips I rarely give out. You may have seen some or all of these ideas before but I’ll explain some of the benefits for each tip below.

20 Hard [...]

SERPology - The Psychology of Search Optimization

Posted by Michael Martinez on October 16, 2007 in SEO Theory

A working definition for psychology is “the study of the behavior of animals”. Some people distinguish between animal and human psychology but what I’m really interested in is “the study of the behavior of search results”.
A search result is neither an animal nor a human. It has no mind of its own but [...]

How to construct a valid SEO test

Posted by Michael Martinez on October 15, 2007 in SEO Theory

Every now and then I read about an SEO test some blogger has conducted. SEO bloggers who announce tests usually don’t say much about how they devised their tests or what they were testing. To be scientifically valid a test needs several key ingredients. As a rule, SEO tests tend to be [...]

SEO Technique: Creating Copy Blocks

Posted by Michael Martinez on October 11, 2007 in Search Engine Optimization

Let’s take a look at four examples of copy blocks.

PageRank flow

PageRank flow You determine PageRank flow through your internal links. Think of your Web site as a complex set of boxes with holes them. The boxes are all attached to each other in an Escher-like combination. Your PageRank is water and you [...]

SEO Technique: Optimizing through copy blocks

Posted by Michael Martinez on October 11, 2007 in Search Engine Optimization

I don’t often share specific SEO tips and techniques because their usefulness doesn’t last very long, they may not work for everyone, and people sometimes take my ideas and turn them into spam techniques. While I cannot stop anyone from scripting specific ideas, the search engines do look for emerging patterns in Web page [...]

Advanced SEO: The 4-step campaign process

Posted by Michael Martinez on October 10, 2007 in Advanced SEO

Target your query
Plan your campaign
Assemble the troops
Charge ‘em and they scatter!

Advanced search engine optimization begins and ends in your sleep. You wake up with a goal in mind and you go to sleep secure in the knowledge that you have set your forces into motion to achieve that goal.
It’s that simple.

Target your query

You want [...]

Building self-promotional bridges that don’t burn

Posted by Michael Martinez on October 8, 2007 in Intermediate SEO

Xenite.Org has recently been adding content that promotes other Web sites to new sections. Over the past month we’ve put up a site about huckleberry products, a site about the writers group the Compuserve IMPs, and a site about the upcoming “Pirates of Venus” movie based on the Edgar Rice Burroughs books in the [...]

Measuring the quality of a Web page

Posted by Michael Martinez on October 8, 2007 in Content Theory

At the risk of losing PPC marketers who have to think in terms of search engine guidelines, let’s talk about page quality. There are many different page characteristics we can use to determine the quality of a page. There are also different types of quality or different qualities that can and should be [...]

Two Minute SEO

Posted by Michael Martinez on October 5, 2007 in SEO Theory

If there was only one thing you could change about a Web site, which would you pick: the title tag or the URL?
I would go for the title tag. URLs don’t matter as much as titles.
If there was only one off-page thing you could change about a Web site, which would you choose: double [...]

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