Posts in the SEO category

SEO, the acronym for Search Engine Optimization, is my job and my hobby. I write a LOT about SEO, mainly talking about WordPress SEO, linkbuilding and linkbaiting. SEO is a rapidly growing business on the internet, which shows by the amount of people writing about it. My SEO posts here will mostly be technical in nature, and talk about optimizing specific platforms.

  • October 16th

    20

    A4UExpo was great, yet again.

    Excerpt: Matthew and his team at Existem have done it again. If people ask me, anywhere in the coming 12 months, which show they should attend on online marketing, I can only say one thing: A4UExpo. They're really giving all the other search and online marketing shows a run for their money. The last f…

    Categories: Online Marketing, SEO
    Tags: , ,

  • October 14th

    14

    SlideShare should get it's SEO fixed

    Excerpt: While I'm uploading my presentation of my WordPress session to SlideShare, I was looking for an upload client as my HTTP connection was bound to die. I searched for [slideshare upload] and found this result: PHP Session ID's in your URL? A presentation as the best result on your site for that…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: ,

  • October 9th

    9

    Cool SEO tools roundup

    Excerpt: Some of the cool SEO tools I've come across the last few days I just had to share with you: Google Tutor has released a very cool Google Insights bookmarklet: Once installed you should see a bookmark cleverly titled ‘Google Insights Bookmarklet’ on your bookmarks menu. To use the bookmarklet s…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: ,

  • October 7th

    3

    Are you coming for dinner?

    Excerpt: Next week it's time for A4UExpo and while we were doing Strike Point last night, Dave said he'd buy me and our mutual friend Mel Carson dinner. Now Marcus Tandler will also be at that dinner, which makes it a perfect dinner to attend if you want to learn some interesting stuff! Now the good thing i…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: ,

  • September 30th

    0

    SEOktoberfest

    Excerpt: I was at SEOktoberfest in Munich last week. You should have been too. It was the best conference I've seen both content, networking and business deal wise. Ever. Be there next year. Richard's quote is the best thing to say about the whole thing: SEOktoberfest was the opposite of most webmaster con…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: ,

  • September 24th

    4

    SEOktoberfest starts!

    Excerpt: So today it all starts, I'm typing this from Marcus "Mediadonis" Tandler's apartment in Munich, from which we'll leave in about an hour or so to meet with the attendees and the other speakers. And when I say other speakers, I'm not talking about "little" people, I'm talking about industry people …

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: , ,

  • September 23rd

    16

    Leaving Onetomarket

    Excerpt: Typing this blog post gives me a weird feeling. I won't beat around the bush: I'm leaving Onetomarket. It's time for a new challenge, and it's time to broaden my horizon. Because of that, I will be joining a new company as of October 1st, and will be diving into another corner of online marketing. …

    Categories: SEO, Social Media
    Tags: ,

  • September 21st

    17

    SEO Plugin for WordPress

    Excerpt: Just a short note, to let you know that next wednesday, I'll be releasing an SEO plugin for WordPress. It's not the life changing best plugin ever, no, it's a reasonably small thing, that will make your post slugs much cleaner, and do so automatically. Now here's the funny thing. There's only one …

    Categories: SEO, WordPress
    Tags: , ,

  • September 20th

    10

    Submit your website? My ass.

    Excerpt: So I just got an email from "Paul" of http:// www. TrafficGeneratorSite.com/ (no linklove whatsoever there). He said he "really liked my website" and was "Wondering if you would like to post my site banner on your website - I pay 30% commision for life for the revenue you generate." Now I'm not the…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: ,

  • September 17th

    9

    Back in business!

    Excerpt: So, I'm back! After twelve days of honeymoon on lovely lovely Rhodes, of which a couple of pics can be found on my Flickr, I've decided that yes, I need a better camera. If any of you have good advice on what I should buy as my first SLR, let me know. If you want to send me one, even better! But any…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: , ,

  • September 10th

    56

    Measuring SEO: why rankings are worthless

    Excerpt: While Joost is enjoying his well deserved honeymoon, he asked me to do a post as guest blogger. "As long as it's anything about search", he said. Alright, that's not so hard :) I thought I'd dive into the discussion of search engine rankings and what the value is in SEO. To match the style of Joost,…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: , ,

  • August 22nd

    20

    SEO Link Analysis 1.0.4

    Excerpt: Yahoo released the new SiteExplorer, which forced me to fix the SEO Link Analysis extension, which now works again with Yahoo's new interface (it won't work on the old one anymore). Microsoft has also updated their webmaster portal, I'm currently figuring out how to include that again, but have for…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: ,

  • August 15th

    29

    B2B SEO: Link Building

    Excerpt: To get you through the weekend with a healthy dose of B2B SEO, here's another guest post by my colleague Erik-Jan Bulthuis, the third in this series, after B2B SEO: Marketing strategy for specific niches and B2B Content SEO. In this third article of the series about B2B SEO we'll be talking about…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: , ,

  • August 12th

    11

    Technorati Authority: why it sucks

    Excerpt: When I moved from joostdevalk.nl to yoast.com, I committed what someone described as "Technorati suicide". Why? Let me explain how Technorati Authority works. Your Technorati Authority is simply the number of unique blogs linking to your blog over the last 6 months. In my case, yoast.com hasn't bee…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: ,

  • July 24th

    14

    SEOktoberfest

    Excerpt: Some of my readers are seasoned SEO's, others are not, some wear black hats, some, like myself wear spotless white hats, but we all enjoy having a drink, don't we? Well this october, you might be in for the drink of a lifetime. Imagine being in Munich, during Oktoberfest, drinking alongside this c…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: ,

  • July 22nd

    14

    B2B Content SEO

    Excerpt: Another guest post by my Onetomarket colleague Erik-Jan Bulthuis: In the first part of this series about B2B SEO, we spoke about an online strategy for B2B websites. We named some differences between B2B and B2C websites. We also determined the kind of content a B2B website needs. This article di…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: ,

  • June 25th

    16

    How to destroy your reputation with 1 post

    Excerpt: Gino Goossens is teaching those who can read Dutch just how to do that... Ok, I should explain that a bit more for those who can't read Dutch: Gino did a post on how to make RFP's for web analytics. In itself it wasn't bad, but he felt he had to comment about just about all his competitors, sayi…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • June 24th

    38

    Danny Sullivan speaks at SES San Jose!

    Excerpt: I'm in Hamburg for SES, which is btw, a great show, with about 350 people attending. We had a great night yesterday starting with the launch party of Timo Aden and Lennart Paulsen's new company Trakken GMBH! During that party we did a show of Webmasters on the Roof. Kevin Ryan of SES was in tha…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: , ,

  • June 20th

    9

    Crawl Rate Tracker

    Excerpt: My friend Patrick Altoft and I were talking about his crawl rate tracker plugin yesterday, discussing some possible new features. He mentioned that it didn't work on 2.5, more specifically, that the install failed on 2.5. Luckily, Mezza had e-mailed him a fix, I tested it for him and it proved to w…

    Categories: SEO, WordPress
    Tags: , ,

  • June 19th

    9

    Winners!

    Excerpt: First of all, I want to congratulate Idealizer with winning the free ticket to SES Hamburg. He understand best what these conferences are about for Marcus, Matt and me ;). I will contact you for the details! Thx to everyone who participated, hope to see you there! There's a few other things I wante…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: ,

  • June 19th

    25

    B2B SEO: Marketing strategy for specific niches

    Excerpt: This is a guest post by my Onetomarket colleague Erik-Jan Bulthuis. You'll be seeing more guest posts from him and other people in the future! Business to business marketing is a strange thing. In some ways, it cannot be compared to business to consumer marketing: The market is much smaller T…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: ,

  • June 18th

    1

    Reminder: win a Ticket for SES Hamburg

    Excerpt: We're deciding tonight, so if you still want to enter, leave your three reasons to go to SES Hamburg here!…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: ,

  • June 13th

    18

    TwitterCounter chicklet!

    Excerpt: Fellow Dutchman Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten has created a new service called TwitterCounter, a nice little service to show you your followers over time and, more importantly in my opinion: it gives you a nice little chicklet, FeedBurner style, to show off your followers, check out mine: I'd …

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • June 10th

    49

    The must read article about WordPress SEO

    Excerpt: I've been working on this article about Wordpress SEO for quite some time, and I'm very proud to be able to release it to all of you now. I can say all sorts of things about it, but this is really the biggest, and probably best, article I've ever written. Go read it now: If, after reading it,…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: ,

  • June 10th

    2

    Google translating search results

    Excerpt: This morning, while discussing some issues with one of my German SEO colleagues, I was searching for [flug amsterdam] in google.de (if you know me you guess which client that was for). At the bottom of the SERP, I saw this: Basically, this is Google offering me, the user, to translate the search …

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • June 9th

    68

    Meet Yoast!

    Excerpt: After a couple of years on joostdevalk.nl, I've decided it was time to do a couple of things at the same time: redesign to a more professional look move to a .com domain and US based hosting 301 redirect the entire old domain to that new domain Now those of you who are unlucky enough to…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: , , ,

  • June 6th

    20

    Win a ticket for SES Hamburg!

    Excerpt: So SES Hamburg is close, very close, and if you haven't bought a ticket yet, you can win one here! There are three reasons, according to Matt McGowan, to come to SES: Constructive feedback on how to improve your website's visibility in the Search Engines - more relevant traffic, more sales …

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: , ,

  • June 6th

    14

    SEO Link Analysis 1.0.3!

    Excerpt: I've been receiving "complaints" from quite a few people the last few weeks that my SEO Link Analysis plugin for Firefox stopped working on Yahoo! Site Explorer. It took some time, (actually it took 20 minutes, but it took some time to find that time) but I've fixed it now, so go download the new ve…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: , ,

  • June 5th

    2

    Interview with Kevin Ryan of SES

    Excerpt: For a new series we've started on DutchCowboys I recently interviewed Kevin Ryan. We covered some interesting topics, like the difference between the European market and the American market, the influence of the Chinese market and loads more! I'm really looking forward to seeing Kevin and Matt on…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: ,

  • June 4th

    14

    PageRank Sculpting with nofollow, the final words

    Excerpt: Matt just did a huge post with updates to Google's SEO documentation, and mentioned a new page about nofollow. This page features one block of content that is the final word on whether using nofollow for PageRank sculpting is "allowed" or not: Crawl prioritization: Search engine robots can't sign…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: ,

  • May 29th

    2

    Webanalisten.nl

    Excerpt: My good friend Ton Wesseling just launched webanalisten.nl, a Dutch grouplog on the topic of webanalytics, if you can read Dutch, I urge you to add that to your feed reader, right now! …

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • May 24th

    11

    Nice noframes spam...

    Excerpt: I told the people who attended my session at SES New York a while back that spam in the Netherlands was just as abundant as everywhere, just more stupid... Well this is a nice example of such ridiculous noframes spam, which ranks them #1 for some pretty competitive keywords, check out how their goog…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: ,

  • May 22nd

    15

    So Matt, how would you classify these stories?

    Excerpt: Quote:: "There’s not much more deceptive or misleading than a fake story without any disclosure that the story is hoax." Ok Matt, please tell me, how would you make a top 10 for these keywords: crucifixion assumption of mary papal infallibility You know Matt, that I am with you on…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • May 9th

    21

    The difference between being on top of and ahead of your (SEO) game

    Excerpt: Warning, this is more of a philosophical post then it is a "technical" one as you're used to of me. It's also late here, so my english might not be up to par either, but this post needed to be written now. So here we go. One of the things that keeps amazing me when I look at the SEO community, is…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: ,

  • May 6th

    0

    Strike Point Co-Host

    Excerpt: I co-hosted Strike Point with Mikkel yesterday, here's a link to the show: Was Yahoo Immature in Microsoft Takeover Bid. We discussed the Yahoo! / MicroSoft stuff of course, IndexTools and sitelinks. I think it was a pretty good show, so go get it!…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • May 4th

    14

    Traffic estimation with Google's traffic estimator

    Excerpt: I was reading Aaron's excellent post on the value of a #1 ranking in Google, and decided to do a quick check on one of my most important keywords in the Google traffic estimator, vs. Google Analytics, and I was once again astonished by how incredibly bad the estimator data is when noone is bidding o…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: , ,

  • April 20th

    23

    Plugin updates: Google Analytics and Sociable

    Excerpt: Because of a few bugreports I had to fix some stuff in the Google Analytics plugin, as well as change the directory structure so it would work with the automatic update. Next to that I've also updated Sociable to include Wikio and Blogsvine, enjoy!…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • April 14th

    16

    Sociable 2.6.4 some bugfixes and Blogosphere news!

    Excerpt: I just updated Sociable to include Blogosphere News, and fixed some the issues causing the plugin to spew out invalid HTML. I really think Blogosphere News could become a cool resource, so I ask of you to have a look at it :). Now go download Sociable and enjoy! …

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • April 13th

    17

    Blog Metrics 1.0

    Excerpt: I finally found the time (while I should be doing other things) to upgrade my Blog Metrics plugin and release it for all of you to enjoy. It now shows the standard deviation on most metrics and comes with a widget! And it comes with a widget, as you can see in the sidebar, and in this pic, th…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: ,

  • April 9th

    9

    Enjoying SMX München

    Excerpt: I'm enjoying SMX with my colleagues Evert, Nina and Roy. The presentations went well, and the off-conference part was great too. Refined Labs, Thomas Bindl's outfit, threw a great party yesterday evening, while launching their new bid management tool Refined Ads, which looked pretty damn good! …

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: ,

  • April 8th

    5

    In Munich for SMX: jetzt geht's loss!

    Excerpt: We had a very fun time last night with my good buddy Marcus and his friends. We had the pleasure of meeting people like FridayNite, Sistrix, Jojo, Ron, inHouse SEO, Jens and four people of the German search quality team.   We now have a nice conference day ahead of us, where my Onetomarket…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: , ,

  • April 5th

    21

    User stylesheets to show nofollows

    Excerpt: Update: now works with links with rel="external nofollow" etc too! I've recently switched back to Safari as my main browser because good ol' Firefox kept crashing on me, and I must say that it's been a smooth experience so far. Safari is a great browser, of course, and 3.1 is very fast as well. O…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: , , , , ,

  • March 31st

    21

    Cool new Rank Checker by SEObook

    Excerpt: Aaron just pinged me that he has this great new Rank Checker available on SEOBook. I haven't tested it yet, but since it's Aaron's, it should be good anyway! Check out the video: …

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: , ,

  • March 22nd

    67

    PageRank sculpting - Siloing and more

    Excerpt: PR sculpting seems to be "all the rage" at the moment. Tracking the conversation back seems to get me to an article by Dan Thies of september 4th last year, pointing back to an interview with Matt on SEOmoz. It's been a whole load of buzz lately, coming up at SES again a few times too much, and I th…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: , ,

  • March 12th

    11

    PageRank sculpting: my view

    Excerpt: Dave did a good post about nofollow sculpting, and he got a very good quote from Matt Cutts: Nofollowing your internals can affect your ranking in Google, but it's a 2nd order effect. My analogy is: suppose you've got $100. Would you rather work on getting $300, or would you spend your time plan…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: ,

  • March 10th

    16

    Custom WordPress database error pages

    Excerpt: WordPress 2.3.2 (we're on 2.3.3 at the moment) introduced a nice new feature which has been on my todo list for quite a while, and I've now finally gotten around to: the possibility to create a custom database error page. The idea is simple, you upload a file called db-error.php to your wp-content d…

    Categories: SEO, WordPress
    Tags: ,

  • March 6th

    46

    A Dutch discussion on paid links

    Excerpt: Here in the Netherlands we have this long history of having so called startpagina's. They're basically collections of links to websites around a subject, with each subject having it's own subdomain. They're named after startpagina.nl, the first, biggest and probably best of it's kind, and there are …

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: , ,

  • March 6th

    11

    Google subdomain & 302 spam

    Excerpt: Dave pointed out last week that 302 spam is far from gone. Wiep pointed me at another form of spam that's far from gone, combined with 302 spam. If you search for "hypotheekoffers" and flip to page 2, you'll see a whole lot of subdomain spam. These subdomains 302 redirect to one domain, resulting in…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: , ,

  • February 26th

    16

    Snagsta

    Excerpt: One of the great benefits of becoming a bit better known in the SEO industry is that you get to work with the hip and the cool people in the web 2.0 space. The guys at snagsta, a social recommendation site, one of whom I met last year at A4Uexpo, have a pretty good concept which they are currently d…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: ,

  • February 22nd

    43

    SEO for Newspapers

    Excerpt: photo credit: Martini Captures In preparing for our first meeting with our new client het Financieele Dagblad today Ramon showed me a few articles he'd found on Newspaper SEO, and while reading through them I thought: kind of ok, but not completely there yet. So I present you with my ideas on Ne…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: ,

  • February 20th

    35

    Putting nofollow back on links in comments

    Excerpt: This blog has been a dofollow blog for quite a while, and I actually believe in the "fight spam, not comments" theory. However, the amount of spam I'm receiving this month, disguised as actual comments, is killing too much of my precious time. And since I think you'd all be better served when I have…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: , ,

  • February 17th

    22

    Experimenting with tags

    Excerpt: As some of you might have noticed, I've put up a tag cloud on the homepage of this blog. The reason for that is that when checking my analytics, I was finding that my older posts were getting lower amounts of traffic. Now that wasn't really a problem with the first posts I wrote, as those weren't so…

    Categories: SEO, WordPress
    Tags: ,

  • February 14th

    77

    Move your WordPress blog to a new domain in 10 steps!

    Excerpt: A friend recently asked me how to move his blog, which is on /blog/ on his domain, to a new domain on it's own. The steps are easy, but have to be taken in the right order to make sure you're not annoying your users and the search engines: Put up a robots.txt on the new domain with the following…

    Categories: SEO, WordPress
    Tags: , ,

  • February 11th

    29

    WordPress plugins and SEO mailing list

    Excerpt: I've decided to start a weekly mailing list on WordPress plugins and SEO, which will contain: Info on new cool plugins I've come across or have coded myself SEO tips for WordPress Speed optimization tips for WordPress Tips and tricks for increasing the conversation on and the community aro…

    Categories: SEO, WordPress
    Tags: , ,

  • February 8th

    3

    In Iceland!

    Excerpt: After a long day of flight delays, planes with flat tires, and snow storms at the airport preventing easy landing, I'm now relaxing at the Hilton in Reykjavik, and preparing for the RIMC tomorrow. Had some great fun already with Hubert Diemel, Ton Wesseling and Dennis Mortensen from IndexTools. I…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • February 4th

    6

    Finding crawl issues with Crawl Score

    Excerpt: A while ago I got an email from Dan Frost, who found me through DaveN's blog, if I wanted to participate in the beta of Crawl Score. Crawl Score is an online service to detect crawling issues with your site. It crawls your site, and generates sitemaps for for instance Google and Yahoo! while doing t…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: ,

  • January 22nd

    16

    Find out who's scraping you!

    Excerpt: Sometimes you just need to know who is linking to a blog, or even better, your competitor's blog, or who's scraping it, and you'd actually like that data in a format you can use. I thought I'd make a list of the sources you can use to gather link-data from, outside of the "obvious" Yahoo SiteExplore…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: ,

  • January 20th

    27

    Playing with the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header

    Excerpt: Ever since the announcement on the Google Blog and more recently Yahoo's announcement that they've enhanced their support for it, I've been meaning to play with the X-Robots-Tag header. This HTTP header allows you to do what you'd normally do in a robots meta tag, in an HTTP header, which has some p…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: , ,

  • January 15th

    6

    Reputation Management done right

    Excerpt: Danny was doing the right thing today. He made a mistake, and corrected it. This is what reputation management is all about. Not all SEO's are spammers, and we all have to work hard to make sure people stop seeing all SEO's as such. The last sentence from the article: I'd love to push the reset b…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • January 14th

    1

    Catch me on Strike Point tonight!

    Excerpt: Because Dave is having what he calls a "nightmare" at work, I'll be replacing him on Strike Point tonight, so it's me and Mikkel! So catch me and Mikkel on Webmasterradio.fm at 3 PM EST, 9 PM CET. Update: So it all broke down... Ah well... What can I say...…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • January 14th

    32

    Link request mistakes...

    Excerpt: Sometimes you get email from people asking you for a link, and their requests just demand that you out them... I've decided that from now on, everyone who emails me with a stupid link request e-mail, which shows that they did not look at my site for longer than 1 minute, will get a blogpost, without…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • January 13th

    21

    Update to Robots Meta plugin

    Excerpt: I've fixed a few bugs in the Robots Meta plugin which might have caused the disabling of certain pages not to work, due to the fact that I was a sloppy in whether certain variables were in scope or not. Also certain stuff was deprecated or it's functionality has changed within WordPress since the in…

    Categories: SEO, WordPress
    Tags: ,

  • January 11th

    14

    Technorati Ping Bookmarklet

    Excerpt: Sometimes I don't want to run my growing set of tools to ping Technorati, but simply want to ping one or a few posts, without having to go to the manual ping form. So I've created a small simple bookmarklet which let's you ping the current page: [code lang="js"] javascript:(function(){var%20r=es…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: ,

  • January 11th

    20

    Linking out? Make sure people notice!

    Excerpt: It happens to me more then a few times a day at the moment, which is quite a luxurious position I guess, that I see new unique referrers in my statistics. These are new sites linking to me. But sometimes they're not... Sometimes, it's a post that has been there for 3-4 weeks, or even more, on a low …

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: ,

  • January 10th

    4

    Conference Agenda 1st quarter 2008

    Excerpt: It's only the second week of january, but already my agenda is filling up. I've got a couple of conferences planned: First off: RIMC 2008, I'll be speaking there together with Hubert Diemel from Wegener, not too big of a conference, but it should be good fun and quality presentations with speaker…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • January 10th

    126

    Make the scrapers work for you!

    Excerpt: Some of you had already noticed that I've added a link back to my blog in the footer of articles in my RSS feed, like this: I didn't do that because I thought you guys couldn't find my blog. It was actually a plugin requested by Shoemoney, who wanted to make the scrapers work for him too, by …

    Categories: SEO, WordPress
    Tags: , , ,

  • January 9th

    4

    Book Review: osCommerce Webmaster's guide to Selling Online

    Excerpt: Disclaimer: I got a review copy from this book from the publisher, Packt Publishing, with the request of doing a review. I'm still free to say whatever I think of the book. This book is meant for people who already have an osCommerce installation, or don't need help setting one up, as this book d…

    Categories: Online Marketing, SEO
    Tags:

  • January 9th

    5

    Why I need a Google Fridge!

    Excerpt: Dan Perry is giving away a Google Fridge to the person who has the best story about what he'd do with it if he won. He has some judges: Tamar Weinberg, Barry Schwartz, Matt McGee and himself. So what I'd do with a Google Fridge? I'd put it on my desk! What good is that to you? Well, putting a fridge…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • January 9th

    7

    Elite Retreat, a conference that could change YOUR life

    Excerpt: Jeremy is at it again, the next Elite Retreat is going to be one of those conferences where you'd want to be, check out the line of speakers: Guy Kawaski, keynote Aaron "SEOBook" Wall Jeremy "Shoemoney" Schoemaker himself Neil Patel two other I don't know :) And the good thing is, tha…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • January 7th

    21

    Wikia Search: Crap

    Excerpt: Dave asked what people think of Wikia Search, and I can't say anything else but: crap. The results are crap, and what's worse, you can't track anything from it. Results Check out the query for my name. #1 is me, as it should, out of the other 10 results, 5 are german. I'm searching from the Neth…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • January 1st

    22

    Technorati Authority Booster

    Excerpt: I was reading a post on Sebastian's Pamphlets about increasing your Technorati Authority, which was based on an another blog post. The idea is simple: compile a list of blogs that link to you, and that aren't indexed by Technorati. Then ping Technorati with all those pages. The first post wanted …

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • December 29th

    27

    I need your votes!

    Excerpt: So, my dear, dear readers, my Robots Meta plugin has been nominated as "Best SEO plugin for WordPress" in the Search Engine Journal Search Blog Awards 2007. And to win that competition, I will need your votes!!! To do so, I will start a "mini" competition of my own: from everybody who tracks back…

    Categories: SEO, WordPress
    Tags: ,

  • December 28th

    11

    My 2007 business highlights

    Excerpt: I was tagged by Eduard Blacquière, to write a post about my business highlights for the last year. I'll use a broad angle, talking about my work at Onetomarket, my blogs joostdevalk.nl and css3.info, and my web design company AlthA, as all are somehow interlinked. SEOdays My year started as a n…

    Categories: SEO, WordPress
    Tags: ,

  • December 18th

    14

    More Sitelinks!

    Excerpt: A friend emailed me this morning, saying he saw a lot more site links reported in Google Webmaster Tools for sites that had not before had site links. When I went to check I saw a lot of my sites, amongst which this one, showing site links too. I can't get them to show up in the SERPs yet, curious a…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • December 14th

    31

    Google Webmaster Tools Content Analysis shows Google breaks the rules.

    Excerpt: Well, it might offer some cool data, but it also shows me that whatever Google does, they don't adhere to the robots standard. Check this: Well, yes, these pages do have duplicate title tags. But they have something else as well: [code language="html"] [/code] Perhaps, Google, instea…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • December 11th

    119

    SEO Link Analysis Firefox Extension

    Excerpt: Remember that Greasemonkey script that I recently updated? Well, maybe you should just forget about that... I'd been working on a version of that script which works on Yahoo Site Explorer and MS Webmaster portal too, and now I've gone even one step further: I've bundled the three of them, and turned…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: ,

  • December 10th

    7

    Link Value Factors

    Excerpt: Wiep has done some great SEOmoz style link value survey: Link Value Factors. Among those surveyed: Aaron Wall, Eric Ward, Debra Mastaler, Jim Boykin and my Dutch friends Peter van der Graaf, Martijn Anschutz, Andre Scholten, and ow yeah, me, of course ;)…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • December 7th

    8

    Personalized search disabling not working?

    Excerpt: I always use my own plugin to disable personalized search when searching Google, both in Dutch and in English. Now I was doing one of my fvorite queries: [webdesign nijmegen], and I found my site for AlthA at #1, so I showed it to a friend, and he saw another site at #1, and mine at #2. I logged out…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • November 26th

    0

    More SEO Blog tips

    Excerpt: Aaron & Giovanna have a nice write-up about SEO tips for your blog today, which is a whole lot broader then my WordPress SEO guide: The blogger's guide to SEO. Check it out! (And while you're at it, digg it!)…

    Categories: SEO, WordPress
    Tags: ,

  • November 24th

    8

    Live Search's link command work again and they're awesome!

    Excerpt: It's been 12 days since Barry reported at SERoundtable that Live Search's link commands were back online, the only thing you have to do is add a + in front of them. Since they're still working I decided to play around with them a bit. Quite a few nice things came up, so keep reading! There are a …

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • November 23rd

    112

    WordPress SEO - The beginner's guide

    Excerpt: Increase search engine traffic to your WordPress blog with one night's work! Imagine having the search engine traffic to your blog increased by tens of percentages, or perhaps even doubling it, by just a few hours work. With putting just a bit of SEO effort into your WordPress you can increase your…

    Categories: SEO, WordPress
    Tags: , ,

  • November 22nd

    5

    Matt, Adam, Please let me report linkspammers!

    Excerpt: Hey Matt Cutts and Adam Lasnik, I've got an idea on how you could help me report people who want to do foul link exchanges to you. What about creating an email address, to which I can forward all those automated emails with subjects like "Quality PR5 linkswap", so you can just ban all of them...…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: ,

  • November 13th

    11

    PageRank: more valuable than ever

    Excerpt: Now that Google has been so nice as to decrease PageRank for at least a portion of the sites they have identified as selling links, PageRank, and more importanly historical PageRank data, has become very valuable linkbuilding data. If you know that a site has decreased in visible PageRank, are yo…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: ,

  • November 11th

    6

    A del.icio.us linkstructure!

    Excerpt: del.icio.us is showing us right now what the power of an authoritative domain, together with internal linkjuice can do to your site. More and more, I see del.icio.us ranking for pretty cool queries with their "url" pages. For example, see these results for [iphone css3]: The title of that pag…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • November 7th

    25

    We need a Google court!

    Excerpt: Imagine this (and no this is not based at all on any of my clients, just for the sake of this argument): you have a client who has a pitch black history in search engine optimization, his tactics ranging from "simple" cloaking to using negative links to push his competitors sites down. At one point,…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: ,

  • November 1st

    13

    SMX Stockholm, having a blast!

    Excerpt: I've been here at SMX for the last few days and I've not been as prolific as I was last week at A4UExpo, mostly due to the fact that I'm actually talking to a lot of people and talking about loads and loads of nice stuff. Some highlights: Yesterday morning, the session on what's new with the alg…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • October 27th

    7

    A4UExpo Rocked!

    Excerpt: As all my regular readers now, I've been at A4UExpo the last couple of days, and I loved every single bit of it. The session were great (above all my expectations even), the people were great and the partying was good too. So: Matthew Wood: you rock! I'll certainly be there again next year. And a…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • October 26th

    0

    Semantic HTML and SEO

    Excerpt: Just wanted to let you girls and guys know, an article I wrote for dev.opera.com got released today: Semantic HTML and Search Engine Optimization.…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • October 26th

    5

    SEO has to be on your mind all the time

    Excerpt: Dixon is giving a presentation right now about the changing nature of search, and pointing at the problem I see with clients a lot too: SEO can not be a "slice" of your marketing "pie", it needs to be a fundamental value in all your other marketing activities. Yes you need to do your "basic 101" …

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: ,

  • October 26th

    0

    SES @ A4UExpo: Kevin Ryan and Mike Grehan

    Excerpt: The first session today was a session with Kevin Ryan from SES and SEW, and Mike Grehan who joined Bruce Clay earlier this year. They showed quite a few interesting charts and facts on Universal Search and how you could use that. I think there´s a huge chance for small companies and affiliates in U…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • October 26th

    3

    Extreme SEO Q&A

    Excerpt: So yesterday I was on the panel for the last session of the day: an Extreme SEO Q&A, moderated by Ciaran Norris, and on that panel with me were Dixon Jones, Marcus Tandler and Jason Duke. We had a lot of fun, and loads of good questions came up. Some of the topics we touched on: Buying links …

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: ,

  • October 24th

    2

    Big hunkin' list of Mac Tools for SEO's and Webdevelopers

    Excerpt: I've been wanting to do this list for quite a while, but I finally put myself to doing it: a big list of all the web development and SEO tools I use on my Mac. It's a page, I'll keep updating it when I find new apps that are worth mentioning there. If you have any applications I've missed or should …

    Categories: SEO, Webdesign & development
    Tags: ,

  • October 23rd

    16

    Nofollow outbound links on your homepage and category pages

    Excerpt: As you might have seen, I have now nofollowed all outbound links on my homepage and category pages. On the single pages for posts, these links are not nofollowed, unless I nofollowed them on purpose. I decided to do this after some discussion with a couple of guys (for who's interested: Roy, Martijn…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: , ,

  • October 20th

    7

    Good deal on DealDotCom

    Excerpt: Today's deal on DealDotCom is actually a very good one: Link Assistant's Rank Tracker for $47 instead of $87. It's quite easy for checking rankings if you don't have a big rank tracking system at your SEO company, and I even know some pretty big companies that use this tool all the time... For $4…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • October 19th

    41

    I requested reconsideration, and got my PageRank back!

    Excerpt: This blog got penalized with a -1 PR penalty for "selling links". Now I did have some paid links on this blog in the past, when I was newer and less visible to the search world, and less "wise". I'm not against buying or selling links, but doing it on your own blog, when you're an SEO is asking for …

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • October 18th

    10

    Conference schedule

    Excerpt: I'll be speaking at two conferences next week and the week after, and I'm really looking forward to both! The first one is A4UExpo in London next week, where I'll be on an Extreme SEO Q&A panel. I'm on that panel together with Marcus Tandler, aka Mediadonis, Jason Duke, aka JasonD from StrangeLo…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • October 17th

    0

    From RSS? WordPress plugin updated!

    Excerpt: I added in two features: The plugin now automatically tags links within posts to posts and pages within your blog as well, so clicks to these pages will still make you recognize them as RSS subscribers. The plugin is now way stricter in giving someone a cookie. A visitor only get's an RSS subs…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: , ,

  • October 17th

    2

    Intelligent site structure for better SEO

    Excerpt: I wrote an article for dev.opera.com titled intelligent site structure for better SEO. Go check it out!…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • October 14th

    2

    What's the PageRank of your wp-admin dir?

    Excerpt: Sometimes you've got these moments when you're working on something, and you think "d0h". I logged into the css3.info admin pages, to find that the /wp-admin/ page had become a PR6... So I decided to update my robots-meta plugin and add the possibility to nofollow the login/logout and admin/registra…

    Categories: SEO, WordPress
    Tags: ,

  • October 12th

    0

    Definite guide to robots meta tags

    Excerpt: I've created a big page with almost everything you need to know about robots meta tags! You can use my meta robots plugin to add these tags to your WordPress pages.…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • October 11th

    37

    WordPress: Noindex specific posts and pages!

    Excerpt: The single most requested feature for my robots meta plugin was to have the ability to add noindex tags to specific posts and pages from within the write post and write page admin screens. I've now fixed that, with the release of version 2.0 of this plugin! For those that have not updated since 1…

    Categories: SEO, WordPress
    Tags: , ,

  • October 10th

    1

    Google doesn't get it?

    Excerpt: Looking in my Google Webmaster Tools in the "Unreachable URL's" section, I found this (click to see bigger one): So let me get this straight, they couldn't reach the page, because it gave a normal HTTP 200 Success code? Seems like a bug to me...…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • October 8th

    12

    Google: keyword density should NOT be this important

    Excerpt: I'm talking about the Dutch SERPs at the moment. Google has been getting better and better at recognizing synonyms, plurals and singles etc in Dutch, and a few other European languages too. This caused a problem though, because suddenly, all our "startpagina's", pages full of links on a particular s…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: ,

  • October 8th

    5

    WordPress 2.3 makes creating dupe content even easier!

    Excerpt: WordPress 2.3 has tags built in, as it was one of the most requested features by users. The default kubrick theme and a lot of others now have a link underneath each post to the category the post was placed in and the tags appointed to the post. Like this: Combine that with WordPress's defaul…

    Categories: SEO, WordPress
    Tags: ,

  • October 5th

    23

    PageRank dropped??

    Excerpt: Although I don't see a PageRank update going on, somehow, the PageRank on my frontpage suddenly dropped to 5... Seems they're dropping PageRank on linksellers, JasonD was hit as well...…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • October 3rd

    15

    Feeds in the search results?

    Excerpt: There was some discussion on one of the biggest Dutch online marketing sites as to whether RSS feeds were any good for your SEO. I gave a quite lengthy reaction to that in Dutch which I wanted to share with all of you as well. My opinion is that the fact that feeds are showing up in the search re…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: ,

  • October 1st

    3

    Two nice bookmarklets

    Excerpt: Seth had a nice bookmarklet in a post today, it shows all links on a page. I altered it a bit to make the links clickable, and it works quite nice. So here's a bookmarklet: javascript:(function(){as=document.getElementsByTagName("a");str="<ul>";for(i=0;i<as .length;i++){str+="<li>…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • September 30th

    5

    Are search engines using link-data over time?

    Excerpt: Every once in a while, you encounter pages in search results that haven't changed for quite a while. When reading Aaron's post about major ranking changes in Yahoo! I started doing one of my favorite queries: the one for CSS3 (screenshot). I noticed two strange things: first of all, result #1 and #3…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • September 17th

    16

    Click here to read all about a natural link profile

    Excerpt: Sint Smeding IM'd me tonight, pointing me to this post on his blog, which basically is the Dutch version of what Brian Clark is talking about: whether or not to use "Click here" as anchor text for links. The first thing I had to think of was a post by Jennifer Slegg about choosing the anchor text fo…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • September 13th

    6

    Searching for freshly indexed pages

    Excerpt: function addOpenSearch(url) { try { window.external.AddSearchProvider(url);} catch (e) {alert("You need to use Internet Explorer (7.0 or later) or Firefox (2.0 or later) to install the OpenSearch plug-in.");}}The post Matt did about better date search inspired me to create OpenSearch plugins which a…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: ,

  • September 13th

    12

    Optimizing your WordPress titles

    Excerpt: I've recently redone my entire category structure, going from a large group of categories to only six of them. I did that with a plugin which adds an ajaxy bit of interface so you can easily add and delete categories to posts from the category overview. This plugin is called wp-cats. Now after do…

    Categories: SEO, WordPress
    Tags: ,

  • September 9th

    9

    More WordPress SEO: robots-meta update

    Excerpt: After reading Halfdeck's post about Third Level Push, which Roy pointed me at, I decided to add the necessary code to the Robots Meta plugin, since the code example Halfdeck gave was for an older version of WordPress (the wp_list_cats function he uses was deprecated in WordPress 2.1). It's quite…

    Categories: SEO, WordPress
    Tags: , ,

  • September 1st

    4

    Update of Robots Meta plugin: more duplicate content issues solved

    Excerpt: WordPress has a few nasty issues with duplicate content which the Robots Meta plugin I wrote can solve for you. In the latest update I just put up, you can now also disable the date based archives if you don't use them, and the author based archives. Especially the last one is one that few peopl…

    Categories: SEO, WordPress
    Tags: , ,

  • August 28th

    260

    The DMOZ mob strikes again...

    Excerpt: This weekend I was reading about Shoemoney being extorted by a DMOZ editor. I thought: heck, I'm a DMOZ editor, I don't want to be associated with stuff like that, let's see if I can do anything to help. So I posted something like that in the commentthread to the above post, and I added a note to Sh…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • August 24th

    8

    WikiPedia breaking the SERPs

    Excerpt: I can't help but agree with Michael Gray on WikiPedia if I see stuff like this: http://www.google.nl/search?q=merchandising&pws=0&hl=nl. That's 5 results out of 10 for Wikipedia... Come on Google, fix it!…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • August 16th

    9

    noindex,follow your WordPress search result pages

    Excerpt: The webmaster guidelines advise you to prevent your search result pages from being indexed, WordPress doesn't do that by default (yet), so I've written a small noindex-search plugin which takes care of that by adding a meta robots noindex,follow tag to search result pages.…

    Categories: SEO, WordPress
    Tags: , ,

  • August 9th

    10

    Spock: Another Search Engine Reputation Management Resource

    Excerpt: I've been looking at Spock for a while now, and now that it's in public beta, I can finally say what I think this is good for: (Personal) Search Engine Reputation Management! Just check out the search results for "Joost de Valk" and for "Onetomarket". My guess is the search pages will rank better fo…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • August 8th

    1

    JasonD on DaveN vs Jason Calacanis

    Excerpt: JasonD pinged me this afternoon if I wanted to test something on a new site of his, WidgetLogic, which isn't completely ready yet. The reason I wanted to let you people know was this vid. Go see for yourself, it's about DaveN and his discussion with the Paris Hilton of our industry, Jason Calacanis,…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • August 8th

    11

    Busting some SEO myths

    Excerpt: Short note: A fellow Dutch SEO, Wiep, has done a nice post busting some SEO myths, worth checking out! The results: Google indexes a website if you add a Google Analytics code. Busted! Google indexes a website if you use Google AdWords. Busted! Google indexes a website if you add Google A…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • August 7th

    2

    The trouble with 301 redirects and backlinks

    Excerpt: On the SERoundtable the question is raised whether you can check if a site 301 redirects to your website, referring to a thread on the SEW forums and an article by Aaron Wall. That seems quite simple to me, as most of the times you'll see clicks coming in from sites on which your own site doesn't ha…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: ,

  • August 4th

    2

    WordPress version detection

    Excerpt: Sometimes you're browsing around and wondering whether a blog is a WordPress or not (at least I am)... So I created a small script that detects that, and show the version of the WordPress as well. A useful tool for all you blackhats out there too perhaps? Go grab the Show WordPress version Greas…

    Categories: SEO, WordPress
    Tags: ,

  • August 2nd

    1

    Perfectly coded AJAX with fallbacks, and still no Google love?

    Excerpt: You've probably seen it too... Great looking websites coded with all sorts of fancy AJAX functions, and it's done absolutely right. If you disable javascript, all the links that were first used to show content or do an action on the current page, now take you to a new page on which the content you'r…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • July 28th

    32

    Why you should not use XML Sitemaps

    Excerpt: First of all: I do want you to use Google Webmaster Tools. It's an incredible useful toolbox, so please, please use it. If you're not using it at the moment, check out my post on how to use Google Webmaster Tools. I do think though, that XML Sitemaps (whether it be Google sitemaps or otherwise),  a…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • July 28th

    2

    Help me create a list of online RSS readers

    Excerpt: For a Google Analytics WordPress plugin I'm working on, I need a list of all the online RSS readers out there... I know Google Reader and Bloglines, but I was hoping someone could help me with a "complete" list?…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • July 13th

    5

    Searching with Google: country based results made easy

    Excerpt: Dave Davis dropped me a line to tell about the Google Global Firefox extension they have just released, which allows you to search Google with geo targetting for different countries without having to edit the URL by hand. It's quite useful, I dare say, so check it out!…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: ,

  • July 9th

    1

    Linklove monday

    Excerpt: Listening to Webmasterradio's Strike Point, the linklove section came by and of course everyone should participate, so here's a link to some great free clipart!…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • July 9th

    7

    Readable nofollows

    Excerpt: I noticed that on Dave's great new layout, his nofollow comment links where unreadable... This was caused by my greasemonkey script setting a pink background but not changing the text color and so forth. I've now changed it to do that, so I can read the name's in the comments. So if you're using thi…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • July 2nd

    36

    Google Search URL parameters cheat sheet

    Excerpt: I've been playing around with the URL parameters Google has to offer a lot lately, mostly after the de-personalized search stuff. I've now built a list of these parameters and created a PDF cheat sheet file with all of them in there. Included in this PDF are links to the documentation for the values…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: ,

  • June 28th

    16

    Blogspam works, but only in large quantities

    Excerpt: Dave Davies did some research on whether nofollow links still pass some linkjuice, and as it turns out (which we knew of course) it does, a bit... So, for your blogspam to be useful, you have to do it in very very large quantities :)…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • June 28th

    3

    What's more frustrating than having a link from dev.live.com?

    Excerpt: My domain-info script has a link from the dev.live.com mashups list, which of course is nice, I mean: who doesn't want a link from a live.com subdomain? But then I checked the dev.live.com robots.txt file... Now that sucks :) I wonder why they blocked it... I've sent in that question through the …

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • June 26th

    9

    Linklove tuesday

    Excerpt: So yesterday, DaveN declared linklove monday, so I thought it would be time for a linklove tuesday from my side! So some linklove from me, mostly to my Dutch friends and colleagues: Made for Adsense, a Dutch SEO blog, did a great post about Joost de Valk, heh, yeah, that's me :) Barry did a…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • June 24th

    6

    Nasty duplicate content trouble created by annoying "SEO"

    Excerpt: Update: Scott has since fixed the issue, as seen in the comments. (And I have thus removed the nofollows :) I was checking the backlinks to my No Personalized Search plugin page, when I saw this turn up as one of the backlinks: Now of course I thought that was odd (and a bit funny), so I w…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • June 14th

    51

    Google de-Personalized Search for Firefox and IE7

    Excerpt: I've done it myself, I've created an OpenSearch plugin which adds &pws=0 to the query and thus shows you the clean results. This plugin easily allows you to search without having personalized searchresults, without logging out of Google. It'll work with Firefox 2+ and IE7. Here it is: Google …

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • June 14th

    2

    De-personalising Google Searchresults

    Excerpt: James e-mailed me that he has created a bookmarklet which you can click on if you've done a search, and found out that you're still logged in. It will then do the same search again with &pws=0 added to the query, giving the "normal" results, as mentioned on SEL. Thanks James! Now someone else…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • June 11th

    5

    Yahoo SiteExplorer web vs. API: answers from Yahoo!

    Excerpt: In response to my post about the Yahoo API giving the "wrong" results, I got an email from a Yahoo! rep, and we've been emailing back and forth a few times since. When I showed him the difference in the numbers given through the API and the Web interface for css3.info (I've updated my domain-info t…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: ,

  • June 9th

    16

    Search Engine Friendly vs Search Engine Optimized

    Excerpt: This discussion has been around for ages, but here in the Netherlands, more and more webdesign companies are claiming they can do proper SEO. Now I'm not arguing that a lot of the work SEO's have to do sometimes, is caused by webdesigners who don't know what the hell they're doing. It's a good thing…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags:

  • June 7th

    5

    302-hijacks and domain name spam

    Excerpt: Aaron reported halfway april that 302 hijacking is back, and today, I came across the most horrible example I've seen in a while. Looking at this query (for obvious reasons), my eye was caught by the feedburner.name result in there. Since the title reflects another URL, I was already suspecting some…

    Categories: SEO
    Tags: