SEO Egghead Consulting Group

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Excerpt: There are many rumors surrounding the venerable IP address as it relates to search engine optimization and web hosting.  So let's talk about it, dispel some myths, and conclude with some information regarding hosting services that provide for hosting on various ranges of IP addresses.It is useful to think of an IP exactly as you do a phone number.  Let's look at a phone number for a random "Mr. Cutts":For this example's sake, let's format the phone number differently — as if it were an IP:650.949.4094.  The first number, "650," is the area code, the second, "949," is the exchange,…

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Excerpt: Have you ever felt stupid about wasting money?I have — many times; but to make us all feel better, I'm going to do a case-study of Cingular Wireless.They boldly claim that they have the fewest dropped calls of any wireless network.  That's wonderful.  But with one of their competitors, T-mobile, paying for text links, I can surmise that wasting any URL equity at all in their ultra-competitive industry is just plain silly.  That's just what they're doing.  Let's take a look:A few years ago, Cingular had the great idea to open an online store.  The URL was onlinestore.cingular.com.  According to…

Here's some "oven roasted turkey" just for you:

The rest of us get to eat real Turkey.  Sinners!

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Excerpt: Text Link Ads was acquired by an advertising agency, MediaWhiz, a few weeks ago.  That company, in turn, is wholly owned by an uber-boring-sounding private equity firm, Lake Capital.  OK.  So, why does this boring information mean anything to you?It means a few things.  It validates that text link advertising, much to Google's chagrin, is an ethical approach to advertising.  I always believed this.  And I seriously doubt a "portfolio company of private equity firm Lake Capital" would purchase something that peddles unethical products.  This just adds to the credibility of the link advertising model.  MediaWhiz echoes this sentiment: …

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Excerpt: A few weeks ago, Yahoo announced its support of wildcards in robots.txt.  This week, Google, Yahoo, and MSN all agreed on a standard for sitemaps.  I don't think this a coincidence of events.  Rather, I believe it is an indication of a trend — that search engine vendors see a value in collaborating on certain issues.  Other similar examples that come to mind are NavTeQ and TeleAtlas's agreement to use a standard protocol for traffic information in navigation systems.  It's just a win-win situation for everyone. The standard looks a lot like Google's XML-based standard.  This does not surprise me,…

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Excerpt: No Links For You!I wrote the Wikipedia page on Link bait a few months ago — only to have it mercilessly edited and destroyed by a bunch of editors who naively see every blog as unfit to be quoted.  Let's see.  Which group actually understands the concept of link bait best?  Could it be bloggers?  Ding!  I quoted:1. Matt Cutts (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/)2. Rand Fishkin (http://www.seomoz.org/)3. Aaron Wall (http://www.seobook.com/)4. Me in My Book (http://www.amazon.com/Professional-Search-Engine-Optimization-PHP/dp/0470100923/)In fact, the original content was based off drafts of my book.  I know blogs are sometimes full of misinformation; but in a field like search marketing, you are…

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Excerpt: There are a lot of idiots charlatans still out there promoting meta tag optimization services, so I decided I'd write a short list of questions to quickly weed them out.  Any decent search engine marketer should be able to answer all of these questions at least partially correctly.  I may need this list rather soon, so why not give it away in exchange for some user-feedback — and perhaps a little of something enumerated in question #4?1. What significance do the meta keywords & description tags have?Answer: The meta keyword tag is almost entirely useless, as search engines ignore it…

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Excerpt: Your default WordPress installation has a problem.  Your posts slowly get pushed into "pagination death" as they age; your older trusty content gets buried deeper and deeper internally.  Furthermore, duplicate content issues plague your category and main listing pages. Slowly, but surely, every old post in your WordPress blog gets buried under 50 pages of other posts.  Slowly, but surely, all of the duplicate content adds up. I saw this post on Digg.com today, and although it has merit, it doesn't dive into gory technical details like I will here.  There are really only 2 or 3 things you have…