One of my customers was looking through her website statistics and she saw something called a robots.txt file.  “What the heck is it?” she asked. Robots.txt is a file that search engines use. It tells search engines to ignore the contents of certain file folders. For example, you may not want your images listed on [...]

I was doing some Search Engine Optimization (SEO) work for a client today when I noticed something alarming.  His Google PageRank had disappeared!  Yikes!  What in the world happened? It turns out that the folks at Google changed the location of some of the files that online tools use to figure out PageRank.  Whew!  We [...]

WordPress gives you the ability to specify a specific URL structure for your blog via the Permalink Settings.  Using permalinks that include names is great for search engine optimization (SEO).  For instance my Bread Machine Diva site uses the “Month and name” structure.  Here’s what it looks like in the permalinks area of my blog [...]

Recently the small business of a friend was featured on a TV show.  I was so happy for him.  I sent him a congratulatory email.  Then I looked at his website.  Yikes!  He was doing the one thing guaranteed to get him kicked off of Google.  He was using hidden text to try and get [...]

No, Google Caffeine isn’t the latest drink at Starbucks.  It’s the latest version of the Google search algorithm and it may affect your search engine standings. Google is always striving to bring people better search results.   So from time to time they change the way they calculate search results by changing their search algorithm.   It’s [...]

Recently a friend and I were talking about Google search results.  We queried Google for the same term and received different results.  Why?  I was logged into my Google account at the time.  I discovered that Google uses people’s web history to try and give them more relevant search results.  While that might be nice [...]

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a tricky business.  There are loads of tips and tricks written about what to do to score highly in search engines.  It’s also important to take a look at what NOT to do. Google, the current top dog in search engines, advises: Do Not Use Hidden Text – Sometimes it’s [...]

I posted the following information about search engines almost two years ago.  It’s still a good primer on how search engines work. Pay careful attention to the section on repeating your keyword phrase in the text.  The phrase should be in the page title, included in the text a bunch of times, bolded and included [...]

This is the second part of a response to an article on the Wall Street Journal entitled How to Create a Successful Web Site For Nothing (or Almost Nothing). You can see part one of my response here. In part one I analyzed points one through three of the article. Today I’m going to take [...]

When I last wrote about Technorati I wondered if the blog search engine was on it’s way out. My biggest problem with it was that it was painfully slow to use. Click on any link in the site and you were in for a good long wait while the page loaded. It’s been almost six [...]