I monitor SEO for a lot of clients on a monthly basis. A lot of it appears to be redundant to them because there aren’t many changes, but all of it is relevant for a very important reason. If an update occurs on your site and something goes down behind the scene, you aren’t going to notice it unless you or someone else is monitoring you websites SEO on a monthly basis. This is a list of things that I recommend you or someone else should be monitoring for you so you can ensure that you site continues to rank well in the search engines.

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Sitelinks have been a staple within Google search results for years, and until this week, they have remained relatively unchanged.  However, Google recently launched a new form of sitelinks that give visitors a more detailed description of pages within a particular site.

With that formal introduction, I present to you, “The Bridgeline Sitelink 5 W Guide.”

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There are a few battles out there that bring forth impassioned arguments from a variety of sources.

Superman vs. Lex Luther.
Broncos vs. Raiders.
Ninjas vs. Pirates.
Subdomains vs. Directories.

Yes, in the world of SEO, one of the biggest debates is the use of subdomains or directories to segment different microsites or site sections. (more…)

The Basics of URLs

Let’s start off this post by explaining what URLs are. If you Googled “URL” and landed on this page, then odds are you know what they are, so you can skip to the next section.

A website is made up of a very organized (or at least I hope yours is) and complex system of folders and files inside of folders, inside of folders. The main folder that houses everything is the root domain, otherwise known as your homepage. Each time you create a new page, you are adding a folder or file thus extending the length of your URLs.  URLs are what you type into the top of your browser to get to a page; in essence, it’s an address for a website or web page. URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator, but you will never hear that term. In fact, I had to look it up.

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Monkeys and tigers?

Google and Bing?

It’s rare for Google, Yahoo! and Bing to get along. So when they announce any kind of joint effort to establish standards – it’s important to take notice.

This past week, the big three introduced Schema.org – a collection of common tags website owners and content managers can use to distinguish specific data elements on their site. (more…)

I love SEO.  Seriously, it’s like chasing a game that’s always changing the rules.  But, I have to declare something once and for all.  I’m putting my foot down today, because I’m tired of hearing it: You will never rank on the first page of Google just because you change the meta titles, descriptions and keywords on your site.   And if you do, you’re probably already working on the things I’ll be discussing below.

In case you didn’t catch that… there’s more to ranking in the search engines than meta data.  Phew, I’ve been waiting to get that off of my chest for a while.

So what else do you need?

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