I just reviewed a one hour video featuring Matt Cutts (of Google) that gives a really good short course in search engine optimization. It is posted on Matt Cutts blog. Matt and his team go over all the basics of optimization in this session. It is a great overview, and points out a few tools that can be of great value to webmasters. Most everything he mentions in this session has been covered in our clinic, but I was not aware until he pointed it out, that Webmaster Tools will check your site for the existence of malware! Something like that can be really important to know if you think you are having a problem. This is a video that is worth an hour of your time if you want to make your web site perform better in the search engines!
This information was brought to my attention by Don Parsons, who has been associated with our clinic for many years and has taught several sessions for us. Thanks, Don!
I have often commented in our clinic that big brands on big sites that have big budgets don’t really rank well in search engines. I just came across a long post that takes apart several sites to illustrate the point in considerable detail.
This post analyzes several big corporate sites and demonstrates pretty clearly that they just don’t do SEO very well! From my point of view, this is great news! What this means is that people who understand how to do their SEO properly, and who are willing to put the effort into doing it, can achieve great performance on search engines without having to spend a lot of money.
Since my clinic is oriented toward small businesses, and small businesses typically don’t have a lot of money (otherwise, they would be “big businesses”, yes?), this is really good news!
As I said, the article is a little long, and may seem, to some readers, technical, but it is worth reading to get a better understanding of what you are up against when working on your web site.