JeffAshby.com

These days, any SEO person is looking for an edge.  We are looking for that silver bullet that will propel us to Google’s first page with as little effort as possible.  In order to find anything like this, I have gone as far as speaking with employees of Google to find out what their take is on SEO shortcuts.  Obviously I haven’t been able to find anything.  There is no secret META tag.

However, I have found something almost as good: Your Domain Name.  Having the right domain name can really give you a head start in rankings.  The right [...] Continue Reading…

I apologize to all of my avid readers who have been waiting for new content from me for so long. This summer has been extremely busy, and i’ll mention a few things here.

I was the top SEO guy for Marketecture until May when the company management realized they had no money and had to let me go. From what i’ve been told, the company has stopped selling SEO packages (and i’m not sure if they are fulfilling on current SEO clients). Instead of looking for a job right away, I decided to hold off a bit [...] Continue Reading…

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the practice of optimizing a website by both internal measures on the website as well as external measures off the site.  SEO is done to increase visibility in search engines and with that, more website visitors.  The level and complexity of SEO can vary depending on the website you have and how competitive the competition is.  Each SEO expert will vary with their strategy, however there are some generally accepted SEO principles that I will be discussing here.  Later on, after the basics have been mastered, I will get into some advanced SEO [...] Continue Reading…

Wow, it has been about 3 months since I last wrote on my blog.  A lot of things have been going on, and I haven’t really found much time to write, especially during the holidays.

I thought I would write today also after realizing that this website was ranked on the first page of Google for the keyword “SEO Tactics” which is the main keyword I am going for right now.  It gave me some incentive to buckle down and write this while I watch some American Idol.  Anyways, here we go…

I want to talk a little about link building.  [...] Continue Reading…

It has been a week or so since I posted.  I have been somewhat busy actually working on SEO for my clients, however I did run across an issue that I wanted to address here that I thought would be useful.

What happens when you decide that you need a new domain for your website?  Perhaps your website has been penalized (shame shame).  Or, perhaps you realized that your domain could be better if it had a few more keywords.  Whatever the reason, if you decide to just scrap your current domain and start another, you need to do it [...] Continue Reading…

Through my experience of working with scores of SEO clients, I have ran into a lot of good clients.  These clients have a decent website, have a little knowledge of what SEO is and how long it takes, are helpful in discussing keyword and content strategies, and are generally patient.  I have run into a lot of bad SEO clients as well.  These clients have small timetables, think they know everything about SEO, know nothing about SEO, or generally just have the wrong priorities.

I have decided to make some very generalized customer profiles and how I like to deal [...] Continue Reading…

In my last post, I talked a lot about some of the capabilities of the actual WordPress platform when it comes to SEO.  Sure, WordPress has several built in tools that can help you out in the SERPs, however these tools are nowhere near the potential power of your WordPress website.  WordPress plugins are the magic behind WordPress SEO.

Because of the open source-ness of WordPress, many developers have built plugins to make SEO easy for even the newbie search engine optimizer.  I have compiled a list of my favorite SEO related WordPress plugins in order to give you a [...] Continue Reading…

During my experience as a website developer and SEO technician, I have never found anything quite like WordPress.  Not only for its ease of use, but also for its capabilities to help your website gain spots in the search rankings.

For those who don’t know, WordPress is a powerful blogging software (or platform) which makes creating and maintaining a weblog extremely easy.  However, not only can it be used for blogs.  It can be used as a CMS (Content Management System) to build an entire website.  Some of you might have heard of similar platforms such as Blogspot or Typepad, [...] Continue Reading…

I mentioned in a previous post that I am working on a new website for my mother’s craft website www.sweetdreamspatterns.com.  In order to do this, I have been doing a lot of research this last week about possible open source solutions for this ecommerce website.  The current site was built by myself in 2003 using osCommerce 2.2, which at the time was the only open source ecommerce solution out there.

I wanted to share some of the research I have done just in case any of you out there are in need of an eCommerce platform and you have the [...] Continue Reading…

The SEO community is buzzing with Google’s latest announcement that they do not use META keywords to determine website rankings.  This doesn’t come as a shock to most of us out there who have tried “keyword stuffing” in the past and had no results.

According to Google’s Webmaster Blog
Google doesn’t use the “keywords” meta tag in our web search ranking.
Google employee and general SEO spokesman Matt Cutts released the following video:

According to Matt Cutts, Google (and most other search engines) did use META Keywords several years ago as a factor in search engine rankings.  However, SEO Spammers realized this and [...] Continue Reading…