From: Webmaster Central Blog – by Luisella MazzaWebmaster Level: Intermediate. We hear lots of questions about site architecture issues and traffic drops, so it was a pleasure to talk about it in greater detail at SMX London and I’d like to highlight some key concepts from my presentation here. First off, let’s gain a better understanding of drops in traffic, and then we’ll take a look at site design and architecture issues. Understanding drops in traffic As you know, fluctuations in search results happen all the time; the web is constantly evolving and so is our...

by Sam Niccolls SEOmoz.com (NOTE FROM RAND: Please welcome Sam Niccolls, SEOmoz’s newest addition to the consulting team – we hope you all like him as much as we do!) A lot a marketers focus optimization efforts at the bottom of their conversion funnels. One effective way to examine conversion rates at the bottom of the funnel is to create a custom segment that excludes visitors who bounce. As this segment gives you a view of your engagement data that only shows interested visitors, this is a great way to inform site changes. After all, these visitors are the ones who are most likely...

by Mike Moran I’m sometimes asked this question, usually by someone savvy in search marketing. After all, it’s expensive to create and optimize pages for search, so you’d want to amortize that investment over as many keywords as possible right? Actually, no. The number of organic search keywords I recommend you target per page is one. Surprised? A lot of people are, and I admit to perhaps being more extreme than some on this issue. Still, I will stick to this advice because I think it’s the right way to approach the problem, even if you end up compromising later. Image by...

What Is a Title Tag? The title tag is one of the most important factors in achieving high search engine rankings. A title tag is essentially an HTML code snippet that creates the words that appear in the top bar of your Web browser. The HTML code for a title tag looks like this: XYZ Company Home Page The title tag belongs in the section of your source code, and is generally followed by your Meta description and Meta keywords tags. The order of these tags is not critical, so don’t worry if your HTML editor places them in a...