Unlike pay-per-click (PPC) advertising that may literally drive traffic to your site overnight, search engine optimization (SEO) strategies take time to pay off. That’s important to understand so you don’t become frustrated or discouraged and abandon your SEO efforts while you are on the brink of success.

In the last article in my SEO series, we’ll explore four important time-related SEO factors: the age of your domain, the age of your site, the age of your content the age of inbound links. Understanding these issues will help you stay patient while you wait for the reward. Continue reading ‘Being Patient with SEO Pays Off’

One of the fastest ways to improve your search engine rankings is to build high-quality inbound links—links from other websites to your website. In fact, successful search engine optimization (SEO) demands a focus on inbound link building, also called backlinking.

Here’s why: Although Google (and other search engines) evaluate scores of factors as they rank your site against the thousands of other agent sites on the Internet, inbound links are among the most powerful determinants of where your site will show up in the list of results.

Continue reading ‘How to Get High-Quality Inbound Links’

Now that you understand how to pick keywords that will help your target audience find your Website (from my earlier post), it’s time to move on to the next phase of your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts: creating page titles and meta descriptions.

Peppering keywords in your content is important, but it’s not good enough to get the attention of search engines that drive targeted traffic to your site. Once you understand the importance of page titles and meta descriptions—and once you learn to use them strategically—you’ll be well on your way to increasing your prospects.

What Is a Page Title?

Continue reading ‘SEO-Making the Most of Page Titles and Meta Descriptions’

One of the unfortunate downsides of the information age are less than desirable organizations that perform malicious acts and put your identity at risk.

Phishing scams are just that – illegal organizations “fishing” for personal information about you in order to commit identity theft. A fraudulent, yet very official looking, email is sent requesting the recipient to verify some bit of information about themselves.  This information can be banking account numbers, social security numbers or username/passwords. If collected, this information, is then used for identity theft by compromising your account.

It is important to always remember to treat any username and password as personal information that could be used to commit identity theft, including your email username and passwords!

A few typical indicators the email you received is NOT legitimate: Continue reading ‘Phishing–Are You Being Baited?’