Tropical Blogging

Just in the past few days I’ve responded to several e-mails from clients asking my advice regarding e-mails that they’ve received from NetBiz. Here’s my take on NetBiz: I’m not a fan of NetBiz. They’re not necessarily a scam, but they do seem to be at least somewhat misleading in how they represent themselves. (more…)

So I got a gentle tweak from Zack Katkin at Unique ID Web Design because I haven’t blogged in a while. I’ve been busy working on projects for clients, but I know that’s no excuse. I’m breaking the Golden Rule of Blogging, which I drill into my clients when they want to start a blog, to wit: You must blog regularly! Thanks, Zack, for the nudge. Okay, enough of that. Today I’m going to talk about crawlability and web design. I got to browsing the Unique ID blog and read Zack’s post “Straight From Google, The Four Biggest Search Rank Factors,” in which “crawlability” is listed as the very top, highest priority, most important search engine ranking ractor for a web site. This week I’ve also been following a discussion at the High Rankings forums about whether web designers have any SEO responsibility when designing a web site. (more…)

The infamous Google spam czar Matt Cutts has fired another round at honest webmasters just trying to go about their daily work. In a recent blog post, He invited readers to report web sites buying or selling links that are not using the ridiculous nofollow tag on those links. Read: Google wants us to snitch on our colleagues. Turn them in. Rat them out. Become WWW stool pigeons for Google. There is a host of issues surrounding this edict from Google’s pet spam fighter, all of them ugly. (more…)

Difficult as it may be to believe, but by January of 2007, Google is still unable to recognize when URLs that obviously lead to the same page are in fact the same page. So what’s a URL, and what’s the problem here? (more…)

Is there a sandbox or is there not? Is the question purely one of semantics? Let’s see what Googler Matt Cutts actually had to say: (more…)

Web sites need inbound links to do well in search engines. One-way, unpaid-for links are clearly the types of links the search engines prefer. How does one go about getting such links? (more…)

Yesterday I sniped at Google with my No NoFollow post, but today I’m here to praise Google. The technology that powers Google Maps is so very cool, and the very best thing about it, in my opinion, is that Google lets us use that technology right on our very own web sites! (more…)

I just edited the files in my wordpress template to remove all traces of the rel=”nofollow” attribute from links in this blog. All links, including those in comments and signatures, are now your basic bog-standard “follow” links. (more…)

I develop web sites for a living. One of my priorities is building search-engine-friendly sites that follow best practices for making sure that sites are easily spiderable by the search engine bots, and that the key on-page elements are present and used appropriately. (more…)

I was just browsing the referral keywords for my company’s site, TropicalWebWorks.com, and I discovered that TWW shows up in Google at the #4 spot for a search on web works. Out of 683 million results. Just wow. I don’t imagine that phrase will bring much (if any!) paying work my way, but still…..

Some years ago, when I worked in public relations in the corporate world, we hired a new employee in our department (the Public Relations Department, or PR for short). On her first day on the job, my boss, the department head, happened to see her as she drove into the parking lot — her car was sporting a bumper sticker that read, “I love PR.” (more…)