The SEO game has changed frequently and drastically during it’s short existence. Meta tags gave way to hidden text which gave way to Page Rank, incoming links - and the list will continue to grow each year. The big players, Google, Yahoo and MSN, strive to differentiate their directories by offering the most comprehensive and relevant results possible. This fact is great news for consumers and retailers alike - it keeps the playing field fierce, but level.

“Most search engines have developed comprehensive spam filters that weed out the spammers from the legitimate sites and penalize sites caught trying to cheat the system. Google in particular has led the charge for quality over quantity“. (site-reference.com)

Simply put, SEO is becoming a simpler practice. Not simpler as in “easier” - it’s as competitive as ever. But it is harkening back to the pre-spamming days when good content and a few basic search friendly ground rules were all you needed to ensure the majority your traffic.

• Optimizing PDFs for Search Engines

Although PDFs shouldn’t take the place of HTML in terms of spider bait, you may have salespeople on the road or prospective clients who need quick access to your catalog by way of the Portable Document Format. So we don’t want to convert PDFs to HTML and then deep six them – they do not have to be mutually exclusive. Rather, we want to convert them to HTML and optimize the PDFs so they are organically searchable. If we want to keep them live for easy download, we may as well follow the sim...

• SEM Services

Dave works on occasion as a Search Engine Marketing freelancer, and is willing to speak to you about consulting on the following subjects: Blog Development Consulting - From Author to Authority Why do blogs work as part of a marketing mix? It's really, really simple: Implementing a blog on your business site gives you the ability to become an authority on the products or services you sell. Don't just stock - talk. A conversion, be it the generation of a lead via a contact form or the s...

• SEOs: 3 Ways to Communicate in 2008!

Although that sounds like a disingenuous campaign slogan, let me assure you that I like to keep my political opinions to myself. C2K8 is the proper abbreviation (which I just made up) for said slogan and it stems from some hard lessons my department and I have taken to heart over the past year. Search marketing is going to change dramatically in the months ahead, with an economic downturn predicted along with the usual evolutionary nature of the profession, and increasing communication with clie...