I’ve been planning an overhaul of one of my sites lately. It’s like the old stories – a doctor’s kids are always sick, a dressmaker’s kids are always in tatters. And an SEO’s sites are languishing. My good old halloween site is still up top, but I have a...

So you want Google Analytics on your WordPress site? And you don’t know which plugin to use? Look no further. It was a little surprising when I went through a bunch of my sites while writing this article. I had been utterly inconsistent with my analytics plugins.  Some had an analytics...

In my world, it’s all about the ads. With a hotdog chaser. There are lots of sites you can visit to see the top superbowl ads: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/03/super-bowl-commercials-2013-watch_n_2612632.html was ok...

When testing sites I always check the Hostname report in Google Analytics, to make sure I’m not accidentally including local or staging traffic in my clean profile. Lately there has been traffic from www.goo.gl/Qv87. On every site I check. Rather than visit the actual site, which is...

Google likes to name updates to their algorithm. Last year was a large change known as Panda, which targeted ‘thin’ affiliate sites, with minimal added value – typically MFA (made-for-adsense) sites with lots of ads. There were various mini-releases/refinements to the Panda...

Just testing the Google Analytics reporting that is provided by permanent URL redirects. I’ll post results when I’ve finished. Christmas redirect Lingerie redirect The above two links are each redirects. The first redirect is a 301 (permanent) redirect sending traffic to...

I wish I’d come up with this infographic of the Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors from searchengineland.com, used with permission. Click on the image below to visit the site, with a full explanation of the SEO components. Nicely grouped into content, html, architecture, links,...

Just noticed that I had 5561 hits on Christmas Eve to my Christmas site. That’s not bad for one day. Looking at the analytics, those 5561 visits were from 5261 absolute unique visitors, and they made 10,013 pageviews. That amount of traffic was a bit of a spike – usually the site...

Another excellent post at http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/get-user-generated-content-published-in-google-places-business-listings-11636 by http://expertiseonline.net/ on Google Place pages. The two main takeaways for me were: 1. Using hCard format for your contact details on your website. 2....

I’ve been catching up on my SEO reading over the holidays, in particular SEOMoz posts. One post I spent time on was benjarriola’s on managing duplicate content at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-block-redirect-or-canonical. Previously I thought you only used the...