Welcome to Slingshot SEO TV! In our first episode, hosted by our very own Senior Account Executive, Jim Brown, and Consulting Manager, Jesse Laffen, we cover topics such as JCPenney and Overstock’s exploited link schemes, the Google Farmer, or now dubbed ‘Panda’ update and the current state of enterprise SEO. The show wraps up with a final rant by Jesse focusing on the importance of a company’s unified agreement of the organization’s overall SEO goals.
Every time there is a toolbar PageRank update, such as the one which occurred earlier this week, people are always coming to us with questions. Many of these could be answered a little better if the SEO community had a decent, reliable model that explains how PageRank works, but unfortunately, we have yet to develop one. We’ve tried buckets, juice, oceans, lasers, just about everything to explain just how PageRank flows in and around websites, but to no avail. Read more »
Does your website have images? Of course it does!
Images make content more lively and attractive, helping to keep a visitor’s attention focused on your message.
Too often, however, we see we websites ignoring the few easy guidelines Google has published regarding optimization of your images. Following these rules takes little effort, helps a search engine better understand your page, and can vastly improve your visitor’s experience. Read more »
Google has told webmasters that there is a part of your site that has no material effect on your ranking, and since, many webmasters and SEOs are ignoring it. They’re wrong, and you can take advantage of it.
In the early days of SEO, much was made of optimizing meta descriptions. As search engines evolved and on-page factors became less important, the weight attributed to these descriptions faded into oblivion. Today, Google has said outright that meta descriptions have no bearing at all in their ranking algorithm. Read more »
Have you noticed Google’s real-time results for certain queries being integrated into the organic search results? If you haven’t, here’s a snapshot of what they look like:
For the past several months, I’ve been convinced that Google was using a fixed, pixel-width limit to decide where to cut off title tags in search results pages, replacing the contents with the dreaded ellipsis.
After finding a few hours to devote to researching my theory, I can tell you with absolute certainty that I was completely wrong.
It didn’t take long to see a pattern emerging: Any title tag less than 70 characters long was never cut off. Any tag with more than 70 was missing the word which contained the 66th character. Read more »