CAKE Web Services Blog

Who cares!  Your customers don’t.  They assign a higher credibility to those they find on Page 1, not who has a higher PageRank.

PageRank may have had it’s place and still might be effective for site popularity, but we focus on the keyphrases (not just keywords) our clients want to target, then we make the On-Page adjustments and Off-Page anchors that will boost the actual search results.

I (like many) used to obsess about PageRank.  The only time PageRank seemed to be accurate was with very well established websites.  When my clients need to be found quickly, I stay focused on user-pleasing content, On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO (in that order), not PageRank.

It may seem harsh, but I don’t need an slow and complicated page ranking algorithm to tell me whether I’m on Page 1 or Page 8 of a Google search, so PageRank is a very small part of our Organic SEO plan.  A lower “pageranked” site can easily leap-frog in front of a higher “ranked” site.  The real trick to it all is CONTENT.

Some people lose sleep over the domain name of their website.  Not for branding, ease of use or rememberability (my new word), but for the keywords they think need to be stuffed into their “name”.

The secondary SEO value of domain name keywords aside, these people will sweat the keyword rich name of their website, then completely ignore some very basic formatting rules for the domain name, directory structure, file naming, etc…

Take a look at the following examples:

1. TheVeryBestWidgets
2. the-very-best-widgets
3. the_very_best_widgets

While the human reader can process and understand all three examples, it surprises many “experienced” web professionals that only #2 is seen as multiple words to a search engine.

The real truth is clever SEO motivated domain names simply aren’t very effective.  You’re much better off naming your site after the primary branding message, slogan or company name.  Far more important is the On-Page SEO you could gain by properly formatting everything else on your website.

I have seen it reported that Google will start judging underscores as word separators, but I-would-recommend-using-dashes.  Use them in file names, directory names and when appropriate in the ultra-important page titles.

Does your home page title bar have “home” in it?  If so, you might want to consider revamping the page titles on your website. There are many small, incremental improvements you can make on and off your pages, but your page titles are probably the most important for many reasons: Read more…

Search Engine Optimization has become the new buzz term amongst Internet marketing types.  Most people with a website have learned what “SEO” means.  However, most don’t know there are different flavors of SEO.

On-Page SEO involves keywords and key-phrases, plus page/title/heading formatting on your website pages.  After you’re finished making the logo look just right, you hopefully create content that would motivate someone to visit your website more than once.  Once you’ve mastered the On-Page SEO battle, it’s very possible that you still won’t be noticed by the search engines.  Read more…