Do you remember who your friends are? If you care about them and respect them, why not consider how they earn a living? Times are hard for a lot of businesses, and it may mean more to them than you think. More than that, you may eventually regret going elsewhere … where they will appreciate you less.

I am reminded of a story of two friends, John and Mike. I introduced them many years ago. John was the number one real estate agent in town, and Mike was seeking to sell his house, and buy another. One day, Mike called John and asked him to evaluate his house for market, and make suggestions for improvements to increase the sale price.

John was glad for the call, and he offered his professional time and efforts to help Mike. A few days passed, and John discovered that Mike had listed the home for sale … but chose a different listing agent. As the top agent in town during a good time in real estate, John certainly did not need the commission, but was disappointed because he had wanted to assist our friend Mike in the sale, and subsequent purchase. Plus, he had been somewhat crudely taken advantage of professionally, by his friend.

This is an extremely important and yet simple to implement SEO tip about those “w’s” you often see in a web address. This will seem basic to many people, but it is shocking how often it is misunderstood, handled incorrectly, or overlooked. If you do not have this handled correctly this could make a huge improvement in your SEO efforts.

This is not just about whether somebody can arrive at your website by typing either domain.com or www.domain.com. This is about how Google and other search engines see it as duplicate content, because it is actually the same thing in two locations. It is also about how all of the links pointing to these duplicate versions of your website are treated, and their value split in two. It will not cause a penalty imposed by the search engines, but there is a huge penalty to it, all the same.

Either version of www or non-www is fine, but it is important to choose one version and funnel your efforts toward it. If your website has more high quality existing links pointing to one version, that is the right one to use! If you don’t know, be sure to check both versions with a tool like Open Site Explorer.

I am going to give you a helpful SEO tip that you can put to use fast and easy. It is a common error that can make a big difference in your search engine optimization efforts, and it has to do with canonicalization. Don’t let the big word intimidate you, because I will break this down and make it very easy to understand.

I could get really deep into the issues of your sitemap format, .htaccess files, rel=”canonical” tags, server configuration, and a squillion other things, but not this time. I want to give you the “low hanging fruit” that anybody can put to good use, starting immediately.

The Difference in a Slash or No Slash

Did you know that there is a significant difference between a web address that has a slash at the end and one that does not have a slash at the end of it? I don’t want to confuse anybody, so I will give a visual example of what I mean. I will show you two web addresses (URL) that look very similar, and will both land you in the same place, but they are actually very different. My sample web addresses are as follows:

http://www.awebguy.com/seo-lessons/
http://www.awebguy.com/seo-lessons

Here are some delicious tater chips for your enjoyment. Many SEO / Internet marketing and non-SEO people alike took notice of my recent article on how to sell SEO (and compare SEO). It is a pretty important topic for anybody hoping to do more business using the Internet. So, I thought I would write a piece on how to market SEO, but as before, this is not just for the SEO and Internet marketing folks. Whether you sell SEO services, fishing lures, or potato chips, this article can help you, too.
Don’t get confused just yet if you are not in [...]

In a recent release by the Washington D.C. Centers for Unemployment Research, a study of unemployed Web developers revealed that over 68 percent were able to directly attribute their job loss to the widespread use of Internet Explorer. It concluded that adoption of Internet Explorer factors heavily in job loss within other industries outside of only technology during the years from 2007 through 2009, but particularly hard-hit was the ecommerce programming sector with up to 73 percent. Further, the study revealed that in nearly each instance, they had also failed to flog, berate, and publicly out their friends and family [...]