I’m working to optimize a website for the search engines (primarily Google, of course) using as a guideline an SEO audit I did of this site a month or so ago. The site is built using a content management system (CMS) and uses various templates for different sections of the site.

There are some good things about CMS:

1. It makes it easy for the customer/end user to go in and add pages, modify pages, etc.

2. Can’t think of any others.

There are some bad things about CMS from an SEO perspective:

1. It makes it very hard, for …

This is a summary of the new SEO tricks that this particular old SEO dog learned about SEO from SEMpdx SearchFest 2009, held at the Portland Zoo conference facility in Portland, Oregon, on March 10, 2009.

It is in no particular order:

What is EVERY visitor to your site worth to you?

If you don’t know anything else about your visitors, it is essential to know the dollar value of each visitor to your site; how much each visitor is worth to you. You calculate this by dividing the value of your conversions (those doing what you want …

Today I took my camera and dogs on a walk up the hill from our ranch house to where we are doing some logging — about 20 acres of mixed alder and fir trees. It’s March 3rd, which is very early to start logging. There’s mud everywhere because it has rained about 6 inches in the last week. But the ranch needs the income, and we were fortunate to find a mill that is buying the timber at a decent rate right now, and a logger willing to do the work at this time of year. Loggers have been hard …