jatiN mahindrA doT coM

Meta Descriptions Affect Google Rankings Again

It’s been a few months since I last posted on my blog. That period was a bit hectic for me; I established my own company Stradiji.  Basically we provide SEO, Social Media, and Business Blogging services. I will later address it in a seperate issue. I would like to talk about meta descriptions and their increasing importance in 2010. What Is a Meta Description? It is the text snippets of the...

How To Write For Search Engines Without Knowing SEO

You want to write smarter web copy to attract better organic search engine results. You want to know how to write blog posts and website copy that is optimized and makes it easier for prospective customers to find you. You want to be a good at SEO copywriting. But the layers of technology knowledge you assume you need are intimidating. So where do you begin? Here’s a quick way...

When Not To Use Canonical Tags With Pagination

When Google announced support for the canonical tag just about a year ago, webmasters were excited for the possibilities of a serving a 301 redirect to spiders but not users. But when should you not use it? A Google Webmaster Help thread has Google’s JohnMu explaining some situations as to when you should or should not use it. In summary, think of the canonical tag as a real 301 redirect for...

Corporate Blog Success Starts And Ends With Business Metrics

The social media purists will tell you that a corporate blog serves as a community hub for your brand. They say it gives your customers a connection point to your company and engenders a sense of community. In some cases that’s true, but you’re going to see me exploring corporate blogging a lot more this year to follow up on a theory that your “community” or “audience”...

What Inbound Marketing Is And Why You Should Have It

I spend zero dollars marketing my business. “Marketing” in its traditional sense includes advertising, baiting media outlets with press releases and, to paraphrase David Meerman Scott, buy, beg and borrow for leads and attention. The way people find out about my business is through two primary mechanisms: Word-of-Mouth recommendations and finding me through search engine results. Word-of-Mouth,...

Disabling Right Clicking Should Not Hurt Your Google Ranking & SEO

A new HighRankings Forum thread asks if there is any downside in terms of SEO for using JavaScript that disables the ability to right-click on the page. The thread asks: One of my company’s sites has right-click functions disabled (yes, I realize this doesn’t really stop people from stealing content – it wasn’t my choice). I’ve noticed when I use a spider emulator (seo-browser.com)...

Can Search Engine Optimization Survive Google?

The search engine landscape is ever changing. We covered that. However, while there are multiple players involved in facilitating that change, there is one that drives it far more than the rest of the competition. Obviously, we’re talking about Google. Is there a point where adapting to Google’s changes becomes impossible? Share your thoughts. To a very drastic extent, Google drives...

Succeeding In SEO Requires Change

As you know full well, the search industry is constantly changing, and that means SEOs and businesses must adapt. This is always made abundantly clear at the change of each year as the previous year is reflected upon, and predictions about trends in the upcoming year are discussed. SEOs know that adaptation and ongoing education are crucial. The problem is that businesses don’t always understand...

Should You Ever Have More Than 5 Clicks To Get To a Page?

Most search engines find new pages by crawling links from other sites. At the same time, the more links to a page and the quality of the pages linking to a page, drives the quality of the page being linked to. These are all basic SEO principles. This is why many SEOs place links to their most important internal pages, right off of their home page. Why? (1) They want them indexed faster and typically...

Can You Optimize for Stop Words in Search Results?

A HighRankings Forum thread asks an interesting SEO question. The question is, can you optimize for stop words in Google or other search engines? His particular example seems flawed, in that he is calling IT a stop word and it is stopping him for optimizing for the query [it companies]. However, when I search for [it companies] in Google, it does seem to figure out, IT here stands for information...

Is PPC More Important to a New Site Than SEO?

In a recent article, we looked at a debate over what is better between search engine optimization and pay-per-click. Of course both should be used typically, but on a recent panel at SES Chicago, participants were asked to pick a side to highlight the benefits of each compared to the other. It made for some pretty interesting conversation. Both SEO and PPC are important, but do you think...

Link Building for Bing Rankings: Dos and Don’ts

It’s easy for businesses to get caught up in Google’s expectations for their sites, when trying to market through search. That’s certainly a wise thing to do, considering Google dominates the search market by a huge margin. Still, there are other search engines that people are using, and it is also wise to make sure your site is performing to the best of its ability in those too....

Google Rolls Out Breadcrumb Display in SERPs

Update: Google announced today that it will now be rolling out the use of breadcrumbs in seach results on a global basis. They will only be used in place of some URLs – mainly the ones that don’t give the added context of a link the way that the breadcrumbs do. Google says: Some web addresses help you understand the structure of the site and how the specific page fits into the site...

Click Through Rate by Search Engine Result Positions

How much better is a number one organic listing than a number two result? That is often a question webmasters, publishers, site owners ask themselves and others. A WebmasterWorld thread asked that exact question. Tedster, a WebmasterWorld administrator, answered it with AOL’s leaked data from 2006. Tedster shared the click-through rate by position: #1 – 47% click-through #2 –...

10 Search Topics That Require Further Discussion

The search industry has changed a lot since it was conceived years ago. The rate of change shows no signs of slowing down either. That’s one reason why it pays to keep up with the current trends and discussions surrounding the industry. One way to do this is through attending conferences. WebProNews attended and covered Search Engine Strategies in Chicago this week, and we’ve put together...