I've been involved with a few projects lately where the company doing the hiring has brought on special SEO consultants for the purpose of optimizing the SEO of a particular site. I know for a fact that many web companies look at SEO like it's the proverbial cash-cow, so I'm really curious to understand just what it is that SEO specialists are doing. And while doing a search for that, I came across this website, that I thought interesting. First, I'm going to exclude black-hat SEO, because I don't think it's ethical, and it's definitely something I never want to be involved in. At a personal level, ...

So, I was lying in bed last night, letting my mind fill up with useless dribble, when I started thinking about WordPress permalinks. I came to the conclusion that the WordPress friendly permalinks aren't really permalinks in the traditional sense, in that they can be changed after the fact by an end-user. First, here's a definition of a permalink: A permalink, or permanent link, is a URL that points to a specific blog or forum entry after it has passed from the front page to the archives. Because a permalink remains unchanged indefinitely, it is less susceptible to link rot. An example of a ...

I've spent a great deal of time in the last few months trying to understand how search engines work, and how sites get indexed. In my last article, I recommending that the XML Sitemap generator for Wordpress should be installed on sites to help with search engine crawling. On this site, Google has gone from around 400 indexed articles (about 20%) up to around 1600 articles (about 80%) for my website -- a substantial increase, entirely due to the sitemap. I want to write briefly about Wordpress title tags in the context of search engine optimization. Most default Wordpress blogs are configured ...

This has been a bit of a mystery for me over the last few months. I've slowly watched my technorati rating go from about 180 down to where it currently is, sitting snugly at 156 (although it was 159 yesterday). Considering it's been climbing non-stop since last year, I've been a bit confused as to why it's started to drop. After doing some research, it appears that technorati has been busy changing things on their backend. Recently, they made it so subdomains no longer count towards main domain scores. This has hurt the rating of quite a few large blogs. Prior to that change, technorati made ...

As you can see, my little advertising experiment with Commission Junction is pretty failtastic. Which is strange, because the ads are fairly targeted based on a few specific, popular pages of mine. I'm not a big fan of advertising to tell you the truth -- I ripped Google Adsense off here a few months ago. To me, it's worth $10 a month or whatever not to have them pollute my main page. I was testing a new concept though with more targeted ads that I choose, but so far it's not working. Is anyone here actually making money with your blog (i.e, enough at least to pay for hosting)? ...

I'm not entirely sure if this is a new feature or not, but I use analytics all the time (and if you don't, you should promptly head over and sign up for an account), and I don't remember seeing it until just a few minutes ago. It appears Google now has a new analytics section where you can track internal searches on your blog. So while Google Analytics already shows you how other people are reaching your site from Google, you can now see how people are navigating within your site based on searches within your blogging platform. To configure it, you have to go edit your website profile from the ...

One of the changes I made on the site the other day was the inclusion of wordpress related entries plugin when viewing single posts. Unfortunately wordpress has completely overhauled their folksonomy system in the 2.3 version, and not all my posts are tagged properly. In fact, I'd say only about 20% of them really are. I'm going to try and do about 10 of my old posts a day or something like that to try and get them up to snuff, but it's a fairly boring process, only made possible by this bottle of pinot beside me. In other fairly exciting news, Boris Mann, everyone's favourite Vancouver Janitor, ...

Well, well. Lookie what we have here.. Somehow, Google is in a state of flux. My top #1 position has indeed been usurped, but thankfully I still have a few weeks to get it back. I'm not going to get too excited about daily changes, but I definitely don't want to lose out, especially after all my trash talking. So, I'll see if I can pull a few aces out of my sleeve in the next week or so. At the very least, this is a pretty neat exercise in the realm of search engine optimization. You can read about my last post about the Vancouver Blogger War here, and more about the Vancouver Blogger challenge ...

On Saturday night, Boris and I headed down to Kits to start celebrating Alexandre Brabant's birthday. Since Alex is a search engine optimization wizard, Boris decided the best thing would could possibly give him were a few incoming links to his website. So, without further ado, here it is. If you are looking for an absolutely amazing search engine optimization individual in Vancouver, BC, Canada, then look no further than this Vancouver BC Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Services Expert. Happy Birthday Bud. ...