Social Search: Power to the People! Great News for SEO 2.0
[Update: Google’ SearchWiki has been discontinued. Some features have been later adopted for new services like Google+] Above you see the Google results for SEO I wanted to see when Google introduced social search features called SearchWiki, but Google didn’t…
How Can Websites about Boring Topics Succeed on Social Media?
* A reader asked a very important question in the comments which many people ask: how can websites about boring topics succeed on social media? Indeed for many people it’s already an assumption that so called boring topics can’t succeed…
Blog Suicide: Top 7 Title & Meta Tag Mistakes that Kill Your Blog
* I’m shocked! Not only do bloggers waste time with meta tags although most of them are worthless for Google, bloggers hurt themselves using meta tags. It does not get better it seems it gets worse. Some people even commit…
When Wall Street Goes Down SEO Goes Up – How Come?
Don’t read the papers first thing in the morning! Usually they ruin your day! Remember when Wall Street broke down and spawned the financial crisis? Banks crumbled and corporate capitalism turned to “state capitalism” as it seemingly only works as…
10 Scariest and Most Annoying Facts about Google Chrome
* When I wrote that Google Chrome is not a good idea the post got popular really fast and got debated a lot ever since. It didn’t help. Chrome became the dominant browser/spyware on the Web. I tested Google Chrome…
Why Google Chrome is a Bad Idea
* Are you wondering “why Google is bad”? So do I! Now please choose one of the following: This post deals with the reasons why Google’s Chrome browser is a bad idea. Scroll to read the rest. To find out…
10 Google Operators for Advanced Search I Use Daily (and You Should Too)
While using Google as a searcher but also as a search engine aka website optimizer I apply so called advanced search operators which in fact aren’t that advanced once you know them. Still most people don’t use them. You know…
Google Suggest Effects on SEO, Search Usage and Business
Who the hell is the Gossip Girl? Google Suggest offers users possible search queries based on the number of searches and results. When you start typing your search query Google suggest popular keywords or phrases to search for. Ever since…
When Yahoo Search Results Turned Sour
SEO 2.0 rankings for the keyphrase [SEO 2.0] during summer 2008, a Raven chart. In mid 2008 Yahoo updated their Index to offer “more relevant results” which allegedly were “more like Google“. I was amazed to find out that the…
The 10 Worst Findability Crimes Committed by Web Designers & Developers
* Web designers & developers often focus on web standards, table-less layouts or CSS effects like styled lists or sidebars e.g. All these things are perfectly OK unless they are executed at the expense of findability. Yet they often do….
Top 10 URL Design Failures of Famous Websites
Famous painting, image by Fabrizio Verrecchia, but no clue in the URL: https://unsplash.com/photos/bv60QyW78Os Do you know what the websites of the New York Times World Bank WordPress.com PHP.net and others have in common? Their Internet addresses aka URLs suck! Right…
Top 10 Fatal URL Design Mistakes
* URL design? Is there any design involved at all in deciding how your website address and directory structure will look like? Yes, there is, or at least there should be! Nonetheless I see the same mistakes all over the…
Internal Google Rules Governing the Corporation
When your business depends on a black box corporation like Google you have to learn to read between the lines. Thus I prepared an unofficial list of rules that govern the corporation. You may not hear about them in the…
Top 10 Benefits of Speaking at Search Engine Conferences
One day instead of working I went to SES Hamburg (a leading search engine conference, a side note for the uninitiated) to have some fun. I showed off my fair trade Panama hat (yes, I tricked you, I don’t actually…
SEM (Scanning Electron Microscopy) Demand Skyrockets
Google Trends is a wonderful tool to find out what the market really demands. One problem is ambiguity though. It happens when a term means more than one thing. It happens to acronyms quite often. I compared SEM to SEO…
How to Get Attention Blogging Part-Time
In the past I often made the common blogging mistake of trying to raise hell or be spectacular to get attention from readers. You really have to be amazing, outstanding and extremely useful to get engagement. There is an easier…
How to Get Content and Earn Credibility with Old News
* Who wants to read yesterday’s news? This might sound like a rhetoric question but it’s not: Google users or searchers want to read old news. People actually seek out your old, even archaic content right now. What do they…
Findability: New and Better SEO?
Findability is a term that has become a buzzword for a while due to a book called Building Findable Websites by Aarron Walter. I’m always on the lookout for new concepts and innovation. Thus I made a little time to…
SEO 2.0 Best Practices: Finding Images/Choosing Free Photos
In the early days of blogging on the SEO 2.0 blog I used images only as a nice to have addition. Why? I wrote and published a lot while there weren’t many free (to use) photos back then. Nowadays you…
PageRank Superstition: 200+ Signals Are Not One Google Juice
* There is no hidden Google juice that miraculously determines the ranking in Google’s results like some people still claim. It’s not 1998 anymore. PageRank vs 200 ranking signals One day Google disclosed that about 200+ so called “signals”…
