Page Speed is Not Just for SEO Yet More Important than Ever for SEO Nearly every audit I perform, I find weakness in page speeds. Twenty, thirty or forty second average load times. Even when I audit a site and find the “30 day average” is under five seconds for most pages, the moment I Read more »
Indexing and Crawling — Hints vs. Directives
A word or 300 about using “noindex,follow” and other indexing signal factors… Questions have been asked from people in the SEO community steadily over the years about using “noindex,follow”, or “canonical tags pointing to other pages”, as ways to get Google to act a certain way. It’s a subject that’s come up from time Read more »
How I Got Here — This SEO Audit Life
Jacob Punton asked me this over on Facebook today: “Alan, do you just work on audits? Or do you do implementation as well? I would love for you to set up a course on how you gain so many clients for audits 🙂 would be happy to pay too” His questions arose after I posted Read more »
Advanced SEO — Reducing Category & Faceted Navigation Clutter
While the actual numbers are different on each site, all too often I see sites where the volume of indexed pages becomes exponentially greater than the total number of products offered. For Ecommerce sites, it gets out of control, and becomes a crisis situation. Actual SKU Count: 9,000 Indexed Pages: 45,000 Actual SKU Count: Read more »
Multimedia and the Thin Content Issue
One issue that comes of frequently in my forensic audit work (especially on news and informational sites) is how multimedia pages all too often have little to no content in the form of descriptive, crawlable HTML text. Examples of such pages most often include videos, infographics, photo galleries, and interactive charts. Publishers all too often, Read more »
Conversion Rates Matter More than Visits
Sure, it’s helpful quite often, to get increases to site visits through better SEO. (And this post doesn’t advocate to NOT want that.…) More visits are what everyone initially thinks of SEO as being about most of the time when they first get past higher rankings… What if I told you it’s worthless in many Read more »
Google Penguin Update! Stahp Already!
Here we are, another day, another client email asking my thoughts on whether Google might be rolling out Penguin… Why did this, otherwise highly intelligent, quite capable client ask? Because sites he generally trusts for information about SEO have once again recently posted nonsense about Google being ready or likely to be rolling out Penguin. Read more »
Industry Interview — Jeremy Knauff — Spartan Media
If you don’t know Jeremy Knauff, or his company Spartan Media, I thought it would be a good thing to interview him and share that here. Jeremy is someone I admire both because he really cares about the work he and his agency do, and because of his experience in the Marines. He is a Read more »