For this edition of #ThrowbackThursday, I'm only jumping back about a year to a topic that has come up several times over the last 12 months: Website Over-Optimization.
In January 2015 I wrote a piece about getting ranked as number 1 in Google. In it, I bashed all those companies that send random solicitations claiming they can jump your website ranking to first place in Google. Coincidentally, this morning... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this edition of the weekly website review, I'm venturing to Freeport, NY to look for a jeweler. My search begins in Google with the phrase "jewelers freeport new york." Here's a snapshot of the search results I saw:
In this edition of Throwback Thursday, I'm jumping back to September 2011 and the topic of Article Spinning.
To understand what Article Spinning is you must first understand the importance of having a blog on your website. My avid followers will already know that I'm all about the blogging. High value blogging content... High value blog content that you post on your main website!
A few days ago, Search Engine Land published an interesting article explaining how Google is penalizing websites that abuse the way they use schema.orgmarkup. That post was an interesting read for me and a good lead in for this edition of Throwback Thursday.
In this edition of #ThrowbackThursday, I'm jumping back to May 2, 2011 the Daily Golden Nugget on hidden text on a web page that is not considered Black Hat SEO.
I haven't mentioned Black Hat SEO in a while, so let me briefly explain what that is. Google ranking algorithm was less complicated prior to 2012, and many people figured out simple ways to exploit that simplicit... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'm going to show you how to read one of the most popular reports in Google Analytics. In my opinion, retail jewelry store owners should know the basics of how good or bad their website is doing, and what might make it better.
When you first log into your Google Analytics account, you will be brought to your Audience Overview page, so let's start there. Here's a snapshot of one of my accounts:
100, 200, 301, 302, 404... Those are all numbers relating to websites in one form or another. Every time this Daily Golden Nugget series reached one of those numbers I wrote a special edition specifically about that number.
This is Daily Golden Nugget #666 and in honor of that special number I decided to write about one of the more "Devilish Black Hat SEO" techniques continuing to plague the internet.
What I'm about to describe is something that can happen to anyone who has low security on their website. A typical form of "l... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the final part of our long series on Black Hat SEO and recommendations on avoiding it.
Yesterday we gave you the first 4 of 9 tips every jewelry should be aware of when hiring an SEO Professional to work for you. These are very blunt directions that will make working with your SEO professional much more rewarding.
5. As for those ROI reports, don't be unrealistic with your expectations. The web is not a static ecosystem. Obviously you want more traffic, more customers, and higher profits, but traffic and customers cannot be created or destroyed; they instead are stolen from other websites.
As soon as the efforts of your SEO Pro start working, you need to realize that your competitor will step up their SEO game, too. T... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Over the last 6 days, we've given you Black Hat SEO discussions and examples of how to avoid them. Unfortunately there are a lot of SEO "professionals" out there that want nothing more than to take your money and promise you results.
A quick Google search for "link building services" returns 35,300,000 results and tons of ads, meaning there is big business in link building. Do you think all those paid link building services will openly tell you that they use Black Hat techniques? Remember that Black Hat SEO refers to anything you do that will trick the search engines into ranking you higher in the SERP.
If you're not doing your own website SEO you will eventually need to hire someone to do it for you. Between today and tomorrow we're giving you 9 very blunt directions that will make working with your SEO professional mu... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
We're continuing our topic of Black Hat SEO techniques that will cause your website to be banned or seriously penalized by search engines. Today's topic is about "Link Farms" and bad link building.
Link building is the process of posting a link to your website on another website. This can be as simple as putting a link in your next Twitter status update, or posting a link to your Facebook wall. On Google+ you can build a link to your website with a Public post. Building links slowly in this way is considered to be the correct, organic way.
Any time you pay someone to put a link on their website pointing back to yours it is considered paid link building. All the search engines hate the paid practice of link building and consider the process within the SEO boundaries of Black Hat.
We're continuing our topic of Black Hat SEO techniques that will cause your website to be banned or seriously penalized by search engines. Today's topic is about "Thin Content".
The highest ranked websites usually have the best original content, and a lot of it. Typical well ranked websites have a lot of interesting information on every page. The exact amount of interesting information is unknown because Google won't tell us. Many SEO experts say you need at least 250 words of unique content, but we feel you need at least 400 words.
"Thin Content" is the phrase given to a website, or a web page, that has very few words on it, say less than 250 words per page. We're going to review the common thin pages that so many jewelry stores have created without even realizing.
We're continuing our topic of Black Hat SEO techniques that will cause your website to be banned or seriously penalized by search engines. Today's topic is about "Article Spinning".
Websites with the highest ranking in the SERP tend to also have a lot of pages. Each additional page added to a website creates extra visibility in the search engines. This visibility happens simply because you are giving them more information and more words to help categorize your website.
Most news websites rank highly for a variety of topics. CNN.com and MSNBC.com are highly ranked for many random keywords simply because a keyword phrase was mentioned in an article. Your local newspaper will also rank highly for local searches and local topics.
There will be a time when you want, or need to have your website rank for new keyword ph... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Today, and for the rest of the week, we are continuing our topic of Black Hat SEO tactics that you should NOT be doing on your website. Black Hat SEO refers to unethical technology strategies or website content that will negatively affect your SERP ranking or will get your website banned from search engines.
Today we are explaining Keyword Stuffing and we'll give you an example of it. But first, let's give you a little background information for the benefit of website beginners out there, or to refresh your memory.
In order to have a web page appear in the SERP for a keyword, you need to use that keyword on your page. If you want your website to appear for the phrase "champagne diamonds," you will need to use that phrase on your website.
The question you should ask yourself is how many times the phrase "champagne ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Instead of giving you ideas for online marketing and SEO research, we're going to spend today's Daily Golden Nugget explaining something you should absolutely NOT be doing on your website.
Let's start by explaining that a search engine is simply a machine that follows a set of programming rules. In the early days of the web, the search engines would read a website and evaluate its credibility according to simple factors like how many times a word was showing on the page, or how many links go to a page, what was written in the meta keywords, how many words were bold, etc.
Early web programmers quickly learned how simple the process was to get ranked highly in a SERP. If the competition had the phrase "engagement ring" on a page 10 times, then you simply needed to have the phrase 11 times and you would rank higher.
On Friday, we told you that it was safe to have more than 100 links on a single web page when using them within your primary navigation. You could also hide several links within CSS dropdown menus.
The use of advanced CSS techniques in your website design allow for features that are very nicely user interactive.
CSS, which stands for cascading style sheet, can be used to create new types of interactive features that previously would take a lot of JavaScript programming. Some of the features in CSS can even contradict what some people know about SEO.
Hiding text on a web page is an old black hat SEO technique. Some people would disguise keyword rich text in black color on a black background. You could also use white text on a white background. The effect is that the text is invisible to users but not to Google.VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
"Black Hat SEO" refers to any search engine optimization technique that is considered misleading for users, or for the purposes of tricking the search engines into showing your website to more people.
In one of Google's training videos, they explain that they can now process all CSS, HTML, dynamic HTML, XML and JavaScript code. This not only allows them to discover functionality on your website, but also if you are trying to use one of those methods for Black Hat purposes.
Before Google started processing code like this, you could get away with several nasty little tricks to hide extra words on your website and sway the search engines toward your favor.
One such example of hiding text is to have a white background with several extra paragraphs of repeating white text at the bottom of... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
"...articles are easy to follow and seem to have information one can use right away." -Ann, Gallery 4, Hamden CT
"...serious kudos to you. We love your straight talk, pertinent information and plain language. I don't know how many industries have something of jWAG's caliber available, but I learn from the emails every day. Really, really nice work, and very appreciated." -Cheryl Herrick, Global Pathways Jewelry
100, 200, 301, 302, 404... Those are all numbers relating to websites in one form or another. Every time this Daily Golden Nugget series reached one of those numbers I wrote a special edition specifically about that number. 
