Thursday, May 26, 2011

Is SEO Just About Dead?

Well, maybe not dead, but if this guy is correct (and I have reason to believe he is pretty darn close) one of SEO's holiest of grails (meta keywords) seems to be pretty much a waste of effort. Anyone disagree? I'd surely like to know how to position my efforts wisely.

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Meta stuff

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The search engines pay virtually zero (0) attention to meta stuff anymore mainly due to abuse over the years. The only thing they might MIGHT use would be a meta description to use as the snippet in a search result, but in my experience even well crafted meta descriptions only get picked up 40 to 50% of the time. The rest of the time the search engines will make their own decision. And meta tags are not even considered at all. They completely ignore them (again due to abuse). The search engines will look at your content and pull what they consider to be the important keywords out of your content.


On my client's site's even though I have the ability to add keywords I don't even bother as the search engines don't use them. I do meta descriptions, but given they only use them about 40-50% of the time I don't spend a lot of time on them.


Catagorize and tag your posts (total of 12 maximum tags + categories), use keywords in your titles and in your content but do not overuse them and everything will be fine. WordPress.COM has some of the best SEO right out of the bag of anywhere around and a wordpress.COM blog with the exact same content will always be higher in search results than a self-hosted blog with all the SEO tricks.


Worry about creating high quality content, post regularly, use keywords in the content and titles and forget about all the rest.

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Saturday, May 21, 2011

How to Get Your Business Growing Again

New businesses get a lot of attention, whether it's strategies for building a social media base or applying for a first bank loan. Less often do we see attention for businesses that have been around for more than a decade and are profitable but in a holding pattern. To compete with today's newer, faster, leaner and most likely e-commerce-friendly businesses, these older companies need to get the wheels spinning again.


Monday, May 16, 2011

How We Got To Where We Are

Although it's obvious English is not Marie's first language, her passion and understanding of the things she writes about are admirable. Here she writes about how power resides, ultimately, in we the people and how so much of our progress in civil rights and economic justice has been bequeathed to us by prior generations of sacrifice. This is a good read.


Saturday, May 07, 2011

Using Your Menu Wisely!

Precipitated by an inter-continental Twitter discussion involving, among other things, Chicken-fried Steak, Vinnie Mirchandani (author of "The New Polymath") posted this instructive picture of a menu, with comments on what makes it useful and well-designed.



Any of my restaurant friends paying attention?

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The "Menu Magician"

I saw this in the Southwest Spirit magazine. Gregg Rapp runs a boot camp and a consulting practice to help restaurants rethink their menu to become a sales tool.

Menu magician
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