Posts by RoughMagick

Quality of Content More Important than Ever in SEO

I have always been a die-hard, quality-content SEO kind of person. No garbage content. No spammy press releases.   This is because it didn’t make sense to me: how would search engines justify returning results that irritated and turned off their customer base?  They wouldn’t it turns out – and for good reason.  You give your audience garbage, they leave your search...

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Behavioral Search Changing Landscape of SEO

For the last year I’ve noticed a disturbing trend in Google – searches influenced by previous searches, even when logged out of any Google accounts.  This is called "behavioral search" and it’s Google’s way of trying to figure out what we really want to find in our search.  It isn’t only based on being logged into a count, it’s based on a...

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Web Content for Real People

When you build a website, you are trying to attract a specific audience that is interested in your topic.  The content must be useful, helpful, and updated enough to keep them coming back. Notice I didn’t say anything in there about making people buy things?  Why?  Because if you have a great website that attracts the right audience, they will naturally be interested in your product or...

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Press Release Spam

I sign up for Google alerts on topics that are important to me and my business. I create a lot of topic alerts, but I also create alerts on my competitors to keep an eye on what they are doing. Much of the time I find out they are doing stupid things like press release spam. These cheap techniques to try to improve search engine positioning often work pretty well in the short run. That is, until...

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Doorway Pages? Nyet!

Doorway pages were very popular in the early 90s. I remember seeing a competitor flooding the web with their awful pages, some of them using cloaking techniques. Back then it seemed to work, but I knew it was cheating so although I was pressured by my employer to try it I flatly refused. I knew that competitor would regret it, and while we worked hard to create quality sites and it took longer,...

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