Are you trying to figure out what the pros and cons of SEO and PPC are?

Well, there are many businesses, small and large alike, around the world on a daily trying to figure out how to get the best bang out of the buck in both SEO and PPC.

Whether your business selects SEO or PPC will all depend upon your line of business and how your business markets and advertises to customers.

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and search engine optimization (SEO) have one thing in common: both sources are means of driving traffic to your website.

You have a domain name, check. You have a website, check. You wait on search engines to index website, check. You have amazing traffic, *crickets*.

The above is the typical response when conversing about search engine optimization (SEO) with potential customers.

I have noticed many steps a customer can take to optimize their website. One of the most overlooked steps is the use of Google Webmaster Tools.

This value-add tool provides a website owner (a.k.a. webmaster) imperative information about their website and its overall health as Google sees it.

In today’s post, I’ll discuss the importance of Google Webmaster Tools.  I’ll also provide a very easy step-by-step, downloadable guide explaining how to use Google Webmaster Tools to complete the following:

• verify your website
• create a sitemap file for your website
• submit a sitemap file for your website

“Put your sword back in its place,” Jesus said to him, “for all who draw the sword will die by the sword.”  Matthew 26:52 (NIV)

Today’s post took me back scripture and without apology.

Most business owners operating in the online space have come to recognize the importance and role that major search engines play in regards to their revenue stream.

From organic or natural search to link building to pay-per-click advertising, businesses throughout the world are counting on search engines to make the cash register ring each and every day.

As much as I love honest search engine marketing and, more so, organic search engine optimization, I would like to share a story with you of a business owner and their business reaping the harvest of a SEM firm sewing bad link building strategies.

Be forewarned about who and what company(ies) are allowed to optimize your website or provide search engine marketing services for your online business.

If your business is heavily dependent upon major search engines or they are the only source of driving revenue, your business that is desperately living by SEM could very well find itself signing a death certificate for a slow and painful death by SEM.

Today’s cautionary tale of living and dying by SEM is provided by a premium generic domain: Candy.com. 

As we all know, the key to optimizing search engines is having search engines crawl and index your website.

Today, we’re going to discuss the opposite: how not to allow search engines to crawl and index your website or a specific page.

Maybe you have duplicate content throughout your website that you don’t want to delete, yet you don’t want search engines to index and penalize your website.

Or have you ever wanted to have a private page that is not visible to search engines but made available to users?

For instance, let’s say you want a quick and simple page guarding users from receiving content until they give their email.

This is a very popular online experience for those trying to build their mailing list.  They’ll offer a free resource of some sort in exchange for your email address.

Don’t get the stuffing beat out of you is a phrase one might hear around Thanksgiving depending upon one’s whereabouts.

With that intro, today, we’re going to discuss how keyword stuffing negatively impacts your website, and how it leads to getting the “stuffing” penalized out of your website in a bad way.

In short, you want to remove the keyword stuffing from your website and not be severely penalized for trying to fly under the sensitive search radar.

Search engine optimization can be very much like a black hole when explaining it and its nuances.

From search engine optimization basics to the advanced, some SEO strategies are simple to implement while others are more complex in nature.

Hopefully, by the end of this post, you’ll understand how to go about implementing simple search engine optimization basics to increase organic search traffic for your website.

Let’s dive in and start discussing search engine optimization basics you can apply to your website today.

Exact match domains have been known to hold great value in terms of boosting search engine rankings even after the latest EMD update.

However, most exact-match domains have also been registered for many years, making the availability of exact-match domains very scarce and expensive when one is capable of purchasing exact-match domains.

The scarcity and expensiveness of exact-match domains have led businesses to start leasing exact-match domains that they are not able to purchase outright due to the owner not wanting to sell.

There are a variety of domain leasing options and services when considering leasing exact-match domain names.

Most domain leasing services are designed to lease industry-specific, generic, or exact-match domains that help your website rank on the first and second pages across all major search engines.