JeffAshby.com

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…

I have compiled this list of 10 of the most common SEO mistakes I have noticed over my years of experience. Make sure to avoid these mistakes and you shouldn’t have any trouble getting decent rankings.

Flash
Avoid building your website completely in Flash.  Search engine spiders cannot read flash content just like they cannot read content from images.  Many developers don’t realize this as they build a visually appealing website.  A small amount of flash is okay as long as there is a text version of the content as well.  In the SEO world, content is king.  If content [...] Continue Reading…

In the last post, I talked about how to find keywords phrases that people are searching for as well as the possibility of being competitive for.  The next step in website optimization is one of the most important:  Title Tag structure.

For those who aren’t familiar with HTML, the title tags can be found in the website source code header between the <title> and </title> elements.  This is shown at the very top of the browser as well as the click able text in the search results.

Here are the most important points when it comes to writing awesome title tags [...] Continue Reading…

Let’s talk about the very basics of SEO for a minute.  When you have a new site that you need to do some optimization for, what is the first thing that you need to do?  The title of this post gives it away.  You need to research your keywords.  This means, you need to decide on the keyword phrases that you want to rank for, and then use current search statistics to decide exactly which phrases you are going to target.  In order to show exactly how I do this, I am going to give you an example with [...] Continue Reading…