Articles by Tom Schmitz

I have two styles of work. One is intuitive. When I have invested my 10,000 hours into I work quickly. I can because I have the knowledge and experience needed to be accurate and effective. I am not, unfortunately, an expert on all things. In fact, when it comes to most topics I know just [...]

Search engine results have changed dramatically. Today, which websites get top rankings depend on very different signals than in the past. So much so that what we once considered the whole of SEO is now only a small portion. Here are some of the factors affecting search engine optimization today. On-Site SEO On-site SEO includes [...]

Would you be surprised to learn that I’ve been writing Google Search+ recommendations and how-to guides for Portent clients this week? I plan to share my findings here on the blog, but before I dive into the new stuff I feel that it is important to cover some old ground first. Have you laid a [...]

I am not a fan of using keyword density for SEO. It’s been long and many a winter since search engines cared about how often a word or phrase appears on a page in relation to the quantity of other words. Today, Google and Bing care far more about natural language patterns. This means the [...]

At the risk of stating the obvious, when using social media for SEO, remember the SEO. While I am not going to name names, I watch a lot of SEO and social media campaigns and I’ve noticed something happening among my agency brethren. They post on Twitter and Facebook. They publish infographics or other link [...]

Lots of shopping sites have product feeds. Product feeds are a way to give other websites and search engines a list of what you sell. For example, you would use a product feeds to tell Google which items you want listed in their product search. These can appear in Google Shopping or in the universal [...]

What are the first things you check after launching or re-launching a website? Here are seven things worth checking. Robots.txt Make certain that the search engines can visit and index your website. The blocking of search engines occurs more often than you may think. Developers disallow all spiders on the beta site then forget to [...]

Twitter SEO Strategies for Online Newspapers and Magazines – Part 1 This is the introduction to a series about how online newspapers and magazines can use Twitter for SEO and achieve greater visibility in the process. Twitter is an SEO signal. Google and Bing have told us so. Through observation we know that Tweets can [...]

A complete SEO keyword research strategy. All the steps you need to make great keyword charts.

Headings are for SEO Does your website use headings or h-tags for CSS design? It shouldn’t. Instead, reserve h-tags for outlining our document and SEO. Today the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog published this: One way Google’s algorithms determine the context of content on a page is by looking at the page’s headings. The way [...]