I routinely check all the outbound links from my site using a program from www.xpelo.com to look for sites I link to that Google has banned, and using www.linktiger.com to find any broken links. If your site has a ton of broken outbound links, or if you link to a website Google has banned, you can bet that Google will penalize your site.

I found one such banned link today on my site, on a page I hadn’t updated in a a while; I updated it with all the info I have on how to effectively get links to your …

User Jan wrote me with the following query about optimizing database driven websites.

Hi there,

I have a question about search engine friendly sites in regard to your article here about SEO of Database-driven Websites. I’m trying to make a website search engine friendly, using descriptive urls. Currently every link to a subpage looks like this: www.dom.ain/?visit=cat

So I only have 1 index file that provides information the user wants. Is there any way to improve this without creating a new php for every page on the site?

I thought about creating a *.htm that will …

Just received this fan letter from Lynda in the UK, about our Google AdWords Tutorial.
—–
“Blimey! That was a great read! There have been several “make money with adwords” ebooks/programs I have bought that have still left me blind, but this info, was practically everything I needed to know, so in depth, and best of all, it was free! Not many actually give their knowledge away, unless its for a hefty price in return. Thankyou! I have the confidence to get on with adwords now, knowing some tips and the advice you gave. I …

I’ve been working long hours on a large drug rehab site (over 200 pages), taking it out of a Content Management System (CMS) so we can actually optimize each individual page for its keywords; it’s a relatively large project as these things go. It has a ton of drug information to help educate people on the dangers of drugs.

Their CMS system was really getting in the way of doing things like adding a “canonical” meta tag to each page of the site.

Over the years I’ve optimized several smaller drug rehab sites; yesterday I …

Nice Acknowledgment:

Every so often I receive a thank-you email from a random user of my main site about SEO, Words in a Row:

Just wanted to thank you for the incredible information about SEO on your site. Everything was so easy to understand/well written for the non technical user. Thank you! ~~ Cheryl Palange
Heard about through a Google search on “SEO tutorial“.

There IS a lot of info about SEO on my site; it’s nice to be appreciated.

I just completed an SEO audit (an alalysis of the points that make a site search engine friendly) of a directory and sent the owner and her webmaster a list of 20 things that need to be done to make it more search engine friendly. I tried to cover both on-page and off-page SEO points. This is a site I built about 6 years ago — haven’t optimized it for about 3 years as it was doing very well for its keywords and it only recently started to fall in the rankings — I suspect mainly because of link-building on …

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 …

We manage the Google AdWords accounts for many of our clients. Tracking the results of a Google Adwords campaign is, most of the time, pretty easy. Put the conversion tracking code on their sites and let Google Analytics take care of it.

Some clients want their website to sell things, and we set up shopping carts for them. Google Analytics is great for tracking those conversions that result in a sale. Although when you track the sales directly–how many orders actually came in–it doesn’t always line up exactly with what Google Analytics tells you. But Analytics provides a pretty close …

Jimmy asked:

1. Would you say its better to have your domain name relevant to the sites content or actual highly searched for keyword that will be optimized on the site?
2. Content –Do you recommend hiring someone to write content if we cant do on our own? how exactly does this work?
3. I’ve been told that a high CPC value is important on those highly searched for keywords that your optimizing. What exactly does that mean? How does it work as far as making money?

Dumbed down answers please! Thanks Jimmy

My reply:

Hi, Jimmy

 …