» Don’t Let Google Page Rank Be Your Focus
November 10th, 2009 Sammy RussoGoogle Page Rank is the number or score assigned to each of your websites pages. Google Page Rank is a key metric to monitor but should not be the main focal point of an SEO Campaign. About a month ago Google made a major change to Webmaster Tools by removing all PageRank data.
“We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true,” states Moskwa. “We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it.” (Source: WebProNews)
» Google Tools for Market Research
June 26th, 2009 Sammy RussoThis morning I came across this article at SitePro News entitled “5 Google Tools For Researching Your Market“.
» Search Friendly Web Design Tip: Clean & Simple Code
May 15th, 2009 Sammy RussoThis article is part of a series that I’m working to serve as a beginners guide to SEO and search engine friendly website design.
Keeping your website code clean and simple will create a good foundation for a successful search engine friendly website. I’ve worked on too many sites that are just table nightmares with massive amounts of images and tons of missing end tags. All these items mentioned can really degrade how well spiders crawl your pages. Read more…
» What Happened to All My Backlinks?
May 13th, 2009 Sammy RussoThis morning I decided to go check the backlinks for a clients’ site and to my surprise their backlinks had dwindled from over 600 to 78 and most importantly their Yahoo Directory & DMOZ listings were gone also… I checked in Google Webmaster Tools and via the Google Toolbar for Firefox.
So what happened to all the backlinks? After doing a little more investigating I found a thread on the Digital Point Forum stating that the new version of Google Webmaster Tools would have all my backwords links. So I went to my GMT account.. clicked the “Check out our new look” made my way over to links are and there they were. All of them including the Yahoo! and DMOZ backlinks as well.
So if you using the link:www.domain.com command or the old version of webmaster tools you are most likely seeing the same thing I saw. So go check out the new version of Google Webmaster Tools and you’ll likely find your missing backlinks over there.
» Factors Determining The PageRank of a Twitter page?
May 9th, 2009 Sammy RussoFound this on Twitter and wanted to share the video here…. What are the factors that go into determining the PageRank of a Twitter page? (@mattcutts on video)
» Social Networking & Social Media Optimization
August 23rd, 2008 Sammy RussoI just finished a successful week at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose. While traveling home to Southern California on the Amtrak train.. I had some to reflect on what on what I took away from the conference. The hot topic was social media and social networking.
» Preparing SES San Jose 2008
August 15th, 2008 Sammy RussoIt’s been about 6 years since I’ve been to a Search Engine Strategies Conference. I’m really excited to have the opportunity to go this year.
There are actually several colleagues of mine that are attending also. Over the last few weeks we’ve been brushing up on what we suspect will be the hot topics… like Blogging for search, Social Networking and SEO and more.
My friend Jamie also shared this article with us on the topic… http://blog.searchenginewatch.
» URLs Restricted by Robots.txt in Google Webmaster Tools
July 28th, 2008 Sammy RussoThe other night I popped into the Wordpress Support Forum to see if I could help solve anyone’s issues. One thread I responded to had to deal with someones site not being indexed properly by Google, plus Webmaster Tools was stating the site urls are restricted by robots.txt… but the site didn’t have a robots.txt.
» Search Engine Friendly Website Design
May 31st, 2006 Sammy RussoI spend most of days working on building websites… but what sets my designs or pages apart from most others is they are search engine friendly and further more than that… they are user friendly. For now we’ll stick with the search engine friendly.
So what is a search friendly website design anyway. It’s the art of designing a website where most of the elements are text and html.. not graphics but in turn is crisp and clean. When I first started designing websites back in 1999… the only way to get a website to look crisp, clean, modern and professional was to use a ton of images and graphics. Search engines can’t read graphics … only the alternative text that is wrapped in them. Even today, navigational items for starters most often end up being images in traditional builds because you can really dial in the presentation and add rollover effects and so on. On the flip side you can dial in your site navigation and have it look just as cool and clean as an image by honing in on your Cascading Style Sheet skills. Combine your css based textual navigation and add your keyword strategy and you now have the foundation for a solid seo friendly website.
Over the course of the last year… I have spent numerous hours learn and tweaking my css skills because css is ultimately what allows one to build a true search engine friendly website. Almost every single website I’ve built in the last year is 99% html and 1% images and graphics. How… through cascading style sheets.
To sum it all up… search engine friendly website design starts with cascading style sheets, because without them you’ll still be designing with images and not html.
