2012 seems, in its infancy, to be a year in which Google can do no right. The reaction to Search Plus Your World has been, understandably, less than ecstatic. Not many people, including us, have been too happy about encrypted search (I know – that’s so last year. But it’s an issue that’s going to [...]

From Chateau Montelena to Chateau Ste. Michelle, FINE has designed a lot of winery websites. So when FINE acquired Big Daylight earlier this year, one thing we have begun to look at in detail is how to best approach SEO and online marketing for wineries. You would be surprised at how many wineries simply do [...]

Blogs can be such a good thing for your business. Not only do they provide more casual outlet for truly connecting with your audience, but you can address all sorts of questions on a blog that might not be as easy to integrate into your main website. They’re also great for improving keyword relevance and [...]

When doing SEO, it’s easy to get lost in your keyword list to the exclusion of other possibilities.  It’s not difficult to understand why.  You’ve put a great deal of work into research.  In many cases you’ve gone through multiple iterations of the list as a result of client input, an evolving understand of your [...]

I recently have been answering a spate of SEO questions about meta description tags, so without further ado, let’s get into it! Is the Meta Description Tag a ranking factor?This is kind of a trick question, but strictly speaking: NO. Inserting keywords in a meta description tag will won’t make you rank higher for that [...]

Remember the early days of SEO? The dark days? Crawling from the primordial ooze, advising clients to make good use of their meta keywords tags; helping them get better positions in Ask Jeeves and AltaVista and WiseNut; telling them that, sadly, all the great content they had in PDFs was invisible to the engines and, [...]

When Google Webmaster recently announced their new submission tool for new or updated URLs, I immediately had several clients email me. Yay! We can submit URLs directly via Webmaster Tools now! Of course, this is very cool, but for the majority of my clients, their sites were already being indexed healthily via the normal website [...]

I’m writing this post in response to a number of things. 1. One of our top referring keywords is, hilariously, “You Don’t Need SEO”. This is because a previous post I wrote talked about how You Don’t Need SEO Domain Names, but it ended up also positioning for “You Don’t Need SEO”. 2. A lot [...]

Question: “As many webmasters are linking only in nofollow, killing the natural way of links, do you think Google will penalize people who only link out with nofollow attribute in the future?” Answer: “EGADS! What do you mean, many webmasters are linking *only* in nofollow, killing the natural way of links???” OKAY, okay, those aren’t [...]

One of the most frequent questions I get as an SEO is whether or not it’s a good idea to register a bunch of different domain names (a.k.a. keyword-rich microsites).  Because then you could make them all live! And link to each other! And drive even more traffic! Right? Don’t get me wrong: registering different [...]