Visitor J.A. says:

I’m interested in some SEO consulting from you.

My dream words are ‘email lists’

I’m on page 4 now, what will it take — backlinking?

Hi, J.A. -

There are only 37 mentions of your site that Google knows about. That’s a pretty small number.

If you run this search for backlinks on my site www.wordsinarow.com, it will find about 1010 such links. It’s one reason my optin email lists page does so well in a search at Google, where it is has been #1 for about 3 years now in a …

Question: Blunt question that you can hopefully answer very briefly: Is website optimization still productive? I heard from one of my partners’ website designers that you’re not supposed to put in keywords any more because the current browsers like Google use spiders that only look at actual content rather than a list of keywords. If that is the case, are there still other things you can do besides paying for it, to get good placement? Don’t tell me what, just tell me IF this is still a valuable service! Or is that not strictly true?

Answer: Yes, optimization is still …

My server has been the target of 174,000 attempts to hack into to the control panel over the last 24 hours, most coming from one IP address in Germany. I’ve reported the abuse to the appropriate German authorities; we’ll see if they do anything about it. That’s two attempts *per second* to log into my server’s control panel, solid, for 24 hours.

I expect this is just more example of the religious discrimination against anything pro-Scientology, taking the form of malicious mischief by this group of “anonymous” cyber-terrorists. I’m gathering that this is a hate group of a dozen …

Question from Todd: Will keywords in the table summary help boost rankings? An analysis of one competitor’s code suggests that it is helping them boost SEP.

Answer: You know, that’s a good question. For several years I routinely put in a table summary tag and put the keywords for the page in it — and it didn’t seem to make much difference. It didn’t hurt, either.

So it’s optional. Let me know if you have any success using it.

If you’re going to use tables, however, then I recommend you also use the “table trick” described here: …

Question: Jere – I have the stable datum that keyword density should be around 3-4% of the page content for best optimization. More is bad apparently for Google and less isn’t as effective. Any thoughts?

Answer: Good question. That’s not a bad stable datum, but in practice I’ve seen keyword density on a high-ranking page at Google range from 0.01% to 10%.

This page on my site about optin email listsusually ranks at #1 for “optin email lists” at Google.

I have no idea what the keyword density is on that page (I’ve never …

Every once in a while, when doing web design, it is necessary to get up from the computer and get out and take a walk to clear one’s head.

I usually take my favorite walking stick, my dogs (Max & Xena), camera (Pentax K-10D), gun (holstered 9-mil Sig Sauer), hat and gloves, because I live on a timber ranch in the middle of nowhere and because I remember my boy scout training (“Motto: Be Prepared!”)

Mountain lions, bears, lynx and coyotes, are all confirmed predators here on the ranch, and I keep a sharp eye out while walking, …

Question:

Thanks so much for your prompt reply. I will input keywords for the PDF files.

I do have one last question: …. I read on your site and came across you saying that it’s better to have phrases than singular words for the keywords.

This seems to contradict what I have been reading about keywords on other sites. There was no mention about phrases being more effective. And when I check my competitors’ sites which rank high on Google search results, I noticed that they all use singular words.

So I am now a bit confused …

Question: Hi, do any of the search engines search PDF files? Reason for asking is that the Adobe Acrobat has a Keywords field under the function Document Properties. So I’m just wondering if these keywords would be searchable by search engines? Else, I won’t waste time populating my PDF files with keywords! Thanks for your advice. I really like your site. It’s easy to understand and very useful for newbies like me. I used your html validators to clean up my html files.

Answer: Thanks for your kind words about our website.

The search engines (especially Google) are …

Question: I recently purchased a website from someone that had operated the business for 3 years and had at least top ten rank on most search engines. During the transfer of ownership the site was down for about ten days. I lost the excellent page rankings. Do you think this ranking will come back when re-spidered? Should I re-register with the search engines? How much do you charge for the search engine submission? Thanks
-J.

Answer: That is a bummer on the transfer taking ten days. Usually you can do those with no downtime at all; I’ve done that …

Question: Am I Spamdexing?

I was wondering if you could advise me as to whether this would be considered spamdexing by search engines. The list below is my keywords tag. What do you think?

“weekend intensive Italian language course, learn to speak Italian, Italian
language course, language course intensive Italian, course intensive Italian
Language, course intensive Italian, learn Italian, learn Italian language” – D.

Answer: As long as you actually use all those words in the text of the body of your page (in see-able text humans can read), then you should be okay. Be aware that most …