Use A Benchmark Server to Improve Site Speed
What do you do with a benchmark server? You use it to serve minimal content to other servers around the world and see how responsive your Web server is. If your Web server is located in New York City and you fetch the page from Los Angeles, what is con…
To Categorize Or Not
I’ve seen this question and a few related questions in several online discussion groups. Admittedly the people asking these questions have less experience than many of the long-time readers of this blog or our premium newsletter. But I’d like to summarize my thoughts on article categorization for typical blogs. In no particular order, the basic…
Blog Redirection Guidelines
A new client asked me if Randy Ray and I have a template we use for blogs. I don’t remember anyone ever asking that before. I couldn’t say we do. But the truth is that we sort of do have a template – and we definitely do NOT. Let me ‘splain. We Use WordPress for…
Measuring Server Response Time
People continue to struggle with this challenge. The available tools are, in my opinion, woefully inadequate. But I can’t do anything about them. Here are my concerns with what I see in requests for help with server response time: People put too much faith in the tool reports People assume Google is penalizing their sites…
Pros and Cons of Using Subdomains for SEO
Subdomains are older than the World Wide Web. RFC 1034, adopted in November 1987, defined subdomains this way: “A domain is a subdomain of another domain if it is contained within that domain.” Seems simple enough. And yet generations of Internet pontification have disagreed on whether “www.[whatever]” is a subdomain or something else. To a…
The post Pros and Cons of Using Subdomains for SEO first appeared on SEO Theory.
Why You Want to Fix 404 Errors
While not as divisive as topics like Subdomains versus Sub-folders, questions about 404 error code management usually receive multiple opinions and rationalizations on the best strategies. Because search engine optimization has no standards, there are few wrong answers and many good answers for questions on what to do with dead URLs. I often ask people why…
The post Why You Want to Fix 404 Errors first appeared on SEO Theory.
Google’s Linguistic Analysis Is Not All About Web Search
Google’s research branched out well beyond Web search over a decade ago. Unfortunately many Web marketers who lack any formal training at all in the theory of computation, search engine design, learning systems, and other related disciplines take sound bites…
Why Do Websites Lose Traffic Gradually After A Major Google Update?
What would cause a continued gradual week by week decline in search referral traffic after a major Google algorithm update has supposedly finished? This is a real question I found on the Web, asked by a frustrated Website owner who…
7 Ways You Do SEO Wrong
There are many discussions about search engine optimization on social media: you’ll find them on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and more traditional Web forums. The most popular SEO bloggers are essentially running discussion forums in their comment sections, too. It’s easy…
Basic Crawl Management for SEO
Crawl management is integral to search engine optimization. And yet crawl management is so poorly explained by the Web marketing community that many sites mismanage crawl. What should be one of the fundamental areas of search engine optimization has been…
Is There a Single Most Important Technical SEO Task?
Technical search engine optimization articles have become the new Web spam of marketing tutorials. Everyone has an ultimate beginner’s guide to technical SEO and a list of priority tasks that you must perform to ensure the critical success of your…
Is There a Single Most Important Technical SEO Task?
Technical search engine optimization articles have become the new Web spam of marketing tutorials. Everyone has an ultimate beginner’s guide to technical SEO and a list of priority tasks that you must perform to ensure the critical success of your…
Content Marketing or Search Engine Optimization?
It is a rare chart that tells a whole, comprehensible story. I don’t have such a chart for you but I do have a chart that tells, in my opinion, an interesting story about how ignorance breeds change and growth.…
Content Marketing or Search Engine Optimization?
It is a rare chart that tells a whole, comprehensible story. I don’t have such a chart for you but I do have a chart that tells, in my opinion, an interesting story about how ignorance breeds change and growth.…
How to Speed up a Website without Causing a Disaster
Web marketers are almost obsessed with Website speed. In my experience most concerns about “page speed” are misplaced. If your pages are not triggering site speed warnings from Bing and Google you don’t have anything to worry about from an…
When to Use Subdomains for SEO
Mention subdomains in a crowd of SEOs and you’re as likely to see eyes rolling, hear deep-and-heavy sighs, or watch the room divide into “TASTES GREAT” and “LESS FILLING METAPHORS”. Through the years I have done my best to reassure people that subdomains are NOT bad for SEO. You’re free to use subdomains or subfolders as you please. The search engines want to show their searchers the most reasonable listings possible, and therefore they are trying NOT to favor subdomains over subfolders (or vice versa). Of course, there was a time not so long ago when if you wanted to tackle hundreds or thousands of keywords you could just plug them into templates and publish lots of subdomains. Sometimes the search engines detected what you were doing and slapped you down and sometimes they did not. It came down to execution, although we in the industry have learned to say things like “you need to add VALUE to (whatever you’re promoting)”. Subdomains represent a niche opportunity for creating a type of value that we could call DIFFERENTIATION. That is, simply creating NEW-YORK.domain.tld and LOS-ANGELES.domain.tld doesn’t differentiate anything, but it does give you an opportunity to differentiate some of your content. […]