blogging 102

Reading time: 8 – 12 minutes SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the art and science of making search engines rank your site high in the natural search results when someone types in a query. That’s the intent of SEO, however. Since SEO is still an emerging field, there is no “governing body”, and the rules sometimes change. A good SEO professional understands these changing rules, and knows how to properly apply them. A bad SEO specialist generally makes mistakes, or purposely tries to deceive the system to win “fake” high rankings. It is not true that you have no control over what appears in the search engines. The content that you put on your site determines where you appear in the search engine results page (SERP). If your site is about “widgets”, you’re probably not going to appear in search results about “bus fares”. The most important thing you can do on the web is to represent yourself honestly. If your site is about... 

Reading time: 6 – 10 minutes When a company undertakes a search engine optimization program, whether it is performed in-house or outsourced to an SEO service, most of the attention (and rightly so) is focused on the company website. This is the one aspect where there is a feeling of control–once a website is released into the wild, the company will have to see how its site fares against all the other websites out there, whether the other sites are using ethical SEO tactics or not. Apart from changes made to the company website, the assumption is often that the company and, if it is using one, its SEO service, has zero control over what appears in search engine results. However, this is not usually the case. Often, you or your SEO service can have a direct effect on search engine results by monitoring your competitors and reporting them to the major search engines when the SEO techniques used on their site fall outside what is popularly referred to as ethical SEO. (Please...