The long tail effect is what happens when your site starts ranking for a ton of keyword terms that you didn’t really focus on optimizing for. What’s cool about the long tail is that it can account for half or more of your traffic from the search engines. That’s right - 50% or more of your total traffic can come from keywords that you never even tried to rank for. Wow… kind of makes you stop worrying so much about that one ranking for that one keyword, huh?
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I wish I had $3.75, so I could at least buy a gallon of gas, for every time we’ve met with a prospective client that just had a new website built, only to find it was nowhere to be found on the search engines. The websites were generally well branded, had a good look & feel, were easy to maintain, and maybe even employed some creative conversion tactics. The problem was that no one considered the search engine compatibility of the site during the entire design process. So, how can this be avoided?
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April 22nd is officially “Earth Day” and some even celebrate the entire week surrounding this date. This is the time of year where we are inspired to “go green” and do what we can to make this big blue marble a better place to live for ourselves and generations to come. In honor of being green, we’d like to tell you about a few of our clients who contribute to this great effort, as well as a few things we do to try and conserve and give a little back.
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Eric Enge of Stone Temple Consulting recently made an interesting post in his “Ramblings About SEO” blog titled “11 Ways to Recognize a Bad SEO Firm”. We liked it enough to share it with our readers as well. Here’s our summary of what he had to say, but you can also click the link above to read Eric’s blog.
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You probably already know that inbound links to your site are good, and a quality inbound link from a topic-related site can bring great quality traffic and even help your search engine rankings. What you might not have known though, is that linking out to other quality sites within your subject can also help your rankings.
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It’s surprising that people still believe that meta tags are how you get your site ranked. If you’re not in the business of SEO, though, this common misconception is widely accepted. However, all SEOs know that all the major search engines completely ignore the meta keywords tag. And if you find an SEO that doesn’t know this, fire them, or smack them.
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It’s a common misconception that buying up additional domain names and pointing them to your main domain will help your site rank better. I only wish it were that easy. If it were, I’d be at GoDaddy buying up every combination of SEO-search-engine-optimization-cincinnati.com, .org, .biz, .info… you get the picture.

There are occasions when you might want to purchase multiple domains:
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comScore released the February 2008 U.S. Search Rankings report this week. Google almost doubled the number of searches of MSN & Yahoo combined. Google’s share of all U.S. searches was 59.2%, which was a slight increase of 0.7% over January 2008. Yahoo’s share was 21.6% and MSN’s 9.6% in February. The number of overall searches for the 3 major engines decreased about 6% in February. For more details, see the full press release.

The question often arises - “If I move my web site to a new host or a new server, will it affect my search engine rankings?” The short answer is no, as long as you do it right.

Clients move their web sites to a new host or a new server for a variety of reasons. In most cases, it’s just a matter of moving your site files from one machine to another. So, if the domain and the site stays the same, then moving the site shouldn’t cause any affect at all in your rankings. There are a couple things you should keep in mind, however, if you do plan on moving your web site.

1) Make sure the new server is just as fast or faster than your old server. Slow servers can slow down the search engine crawlers, which will cause them to leave your site sooner and index less. Have your old and new hosting company or server admin give you a report of the response time for both servers so you can compare the two and be sure that you are making a smart move.

2) Make sure the new server is not blacklisted. Although this is rare, there are times when your site’s reputation can be damaged by who you share server space with. There are many blacklist and blocklist monitors out there to check a server IP with, but you can also ask your hosting company to provide this information as well to prove that the server is clean.

3) Make sure a copy of your site is uploaded and tested on the new server before finally switching everything over. Do not cancel your original hosting account until the new site is stable on the new server. This will ensure a seamless transfer, as well as prevent any issues from popping up and harming your rankings once your site fully transfers.

If you’re a tech-y type and you want to get into the nitty gritty details of how to move a site from one server to another, check out this post on Matt Cutts’ blog. Matt Cutts is a Google software engineer, so we trust that he knows his stuff.

In the 1980’s and 90’s, trade shows were a very popular way for many of my clients to market their products and services. But as online promotion continues to command more and more of the marketing budget, it seems that clients’ participation in trade shows has been drastically reduced. And those clients still going to tradeshows often question the value. I ran across an interesting blog post that outlines metrics you should understand when determining whether trade shows are a good investment for your business. Please click on the link below to read the article:

Are Trade Shows a Waste of Time and Resources?