Short URL Tools
What to do when you need short URLs (concise Internet/Web addresses or URL forwarding) for Twitter or elsewhere? Either you use the proprietary t.co shortener by Twitter itself or bit.ly where .ly stands for Libya to keep the fuss at…
Top 10 URL Design Failures of Famous Websites
Famous painting, image by Fabrizio Verrecchia, but no clue in the URL: https://unsplash.com/photos/bv60QyW78Os Do you know what the websites of the New York Times World Bank WordPress.com PHP.net and others have in common? Their Internet addresses aka URLs suck! Right…
Top 10 Fatal URL Design Mistakes
* URL design? Is there any design involved at all in deciding how your website address and directory structure will look like? Yes, there is, or at least there should be! Nonetheless I see the same mistakes all over the…
Internal Google Rules Governing the Corporation
Imagine your business depends on a black box corporation like Google! What then? You have to learn to read between the lines. Thus I prepared an unofficial list of rules that govern the corporation. You may not hear about them…
Top 10 Benefits of Speaking at Search Engine Conferences
One day instead of working I went to SES Hamburg (a leading search engine conference, a side note for the uninitiated) to have some fun. I showed off my fair trade Panama hat (yes, I tricked you, I don’t actually…
How to Spot Content Theft on Social Media and Elsewhere
* Content theft runs rampant on social media. It’s utterly annoying in many cases. Sites like Pinterest are often used by criminals who capitalize on stolen content. On Pinterest this often amounts to bait and switch – an ages old…
SEM (Scanning Electron Microscopy) Demand Skyrockets
Google Trends is a wonderful tool to find out what the market really demands. One problem is ambiguity though. It happens when a term means more than one thing. It happens to acronyms quite often. I compared SEM to SEO…
How to Find Out How a Blog Performs Over Time
Why would you want to find out how a blog performs over time? You want to see whether you made some progress. Maybe your blog is even stagnating? You need to know whether it gains traction on social media and…
Are You Engaging Enough to Join A Tribe?
People follow me on social media like Pinterest, LinkedIn or Twitter and expect me to follow back or promote their content right away with no engagement whatsoever or worse by spamming me. Most just lurk while others try to send…
Introducing Traits of Green SEOs
* When one of my favorite green blogs was looking for an SEO expert I was seriously tempted to quit everything else and do green SEO full time. The best of us look beyond profits Some of the most…
How to Get Attention Blogging Part-Time
In the past I often made a common blogging mistake. It was trying to raise hell or be spectacular to get attention from readers. You really have to be to get engagement organically. Using hatebait to get there by way…
WordPress Theme Customization: How to Simplify like a Web Dev
Most WP themes need heavy customization or rather fixing. It’s bug fixing but also removing all the visual flaws only a Web developer can notice.
Internet Lies Translated
Did you notice? On the Web some words never mean what they sound like. No joke! Often they signify something they were never intended to mean in real life or when first coined. Some terms and expressions just do not…
Modern Online Forums Alternatives
Are online forums still needed? In my opinion: No. At least not in the way they work now or rather don’t. I stopped using online forums many years ago. Why? People on forums in general were often inaccurate rude problem…
10 Coding Guidelines for Perfect Findability and Web Standards
Perfect findability and Web standards can be achieved with the same means when it comes to coding. Thus I compiled a very simple list for you to improve your overall website and content findability. These are 10 coding guidelines for…
Top 10 Reasons Why SEOs Fail on Social Media
* Many search engine optimizers are still stuck in the past. These old school practitioners fail to adapt. They struggle with the new social media environment and attempt to apply rules of the legacy Web to the new environment. To…
7 Completely Insane Black Hat SEO 2.0 Techniques
Most average people assume that SEO is bullshit, evil and spam. Maybe it’s even a sexually transmitted disease! Who am I to disagree? A poet? Why not ride the wave instead? Why not go black hat? Wearing a Black Hat…
How to Get Content and Earn Credibility with Old News
* Who wants to read yesterday’s news? This might sound like a rhetoric question but it’s not: Google users or searchers want to read old news. People actually seek out your old, even archaic content right now. What do they…
Top 10 Reasons Why Great Content Fails on Social Media
One day I published a post that took me a long time to write and was well crafted timely pillar content. You won’t believe what happened next!
3 Phases of Blog Growth or How to Love Blogging
* Starting and maintaining a high quality or flagship blog is not really easy. You need perseverance and the will to keep on blogging no matter what happens. Yet that’s still not enough to keep your blog growing. You need…
