Found this referrer my server logs today:

http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=wordle

Whoa, could my little website be ranking for “wordle” just a couple days after I mentioned it in a post?

Of course not. But the MSN/Live Search bot sends phony HTTP_REFERER strings when it crawls sites. [Read more →]

Following a suggestion at the Enterprise SEO session of PubCon, I’ve been using Wordle.net to create a tag cloud from inbound search terms.

Will this actually help me evangelize SEO to the rest of the team? This remains to be seen. Perhaps the real value comes in comparing clouds from multiple data points over time, to visualize the change.

Included here is a sample tag cloud, generated for an old personal blog, just to illustrate the result. Read on for tips and a special tool for Omniture users.
[Read more →]

Obviously it depends on the search volume for whatever term you’re interested in. Some terms have a lot of search traffic, and others not so much.

Whatever traffic you’re getting for a particular term now, I can tell you what you’ll get if it moves up or down in the SERPs. There’s a calculator after the jump… [Read more →]

We’ve had the number two result in Google for [epsom salts] for, like, ever. #1 has always been wikipedia’s page.

I know all the cool SEOs disparage PageRank, but relative measures ought to mean something — and wikipedia bests our page 6 to 4.

But as of today, the Google proxy Scroogle began showing Care2’s “13 Wonderful Ways to use Epsom Salts” article at #1. [Read more →]

In some cases, the maintenance page can get indexed!

This is a screenshot of the top result for [jobfinder], our “green jobs” listing at jobs.care2.com: [Read more →]

I’m obsessed with rank, and you are, too, unless you’ve surfed here by accident. I use rank-tracking software to see how my pages are performing for searches on relevant keywords.

Unfortunately, it lies to me. Check out the top 10 items it finds in Google for the search [green living]; the Care2 site is listed at #7 and #8: [Read more →]

SEO and content go hand-in-hand: if you have great content, you can get a lot of link juice for free… but if your content is lousy, you won’t be able to convince the search engines otherwise for long.

Therefore, I’m really excited to announce the launch of a wonderful new blog… [Read more →]

I’m awed by the simplicity of this page: Ringworm Pictures

What’s so awesome about it? [Read more →]