Earlier this year, I had talked about my daughter Chloe and her success with Google ads in this blog post entitled, "SEO is the new first job for teens; flipping burgers is so last century." Well, her success story has made the local news and I am a very proud papa. She's quoted in The Capital Times by saying,

To read the entire article, please visit "Online cash flow McFarland teen makes money off Google ads."

Enjoy, and have a great Thanksgiving! :-)

Sometimes, I get the chance to update my website critiques through video presentations. Last February, I had devoted some time to Discountflies.com. Over a year and a half later, I was able to revisit their site through a video tutorial.

You will need Flash Player 9 or above to view the video, hosted on Practical eCommerce. To see it, please click on Video Tutorial: Discountflies.com.

One of the types of articles I write is a website critique, or SEO Report Card, on Practical eCommerce. In a recent SEO report card, I talked about an IR 500 site called "Beachaudio.com."

Here's a little bit about what I had to say for this critique:

Their overhaul helped them to do a number of things right. Between optimizing their URLs, adding crawlable consumer reviews, and great indexation and rankings on their internal search pages, you can definitely see an impact from their efforts. Unfortunately, they do have a lot of barriers because their page count (151,000 mentioned in the quote) is inflated due to duplication and throw-a-way pages. Among the other things that they could improve site-wide? Title tags.

To read this article, please go to "SEO Report Card: Beachaudio.com," appropriate subtitled, " Write handcrafted title tags for all category pages and for product pages of best sellers." Enjoy!

In my article on Search Engine Land, I talk about how microsites can help your company. To give you a good example, I address a microsite that my company, Netconcepts, built for Countrywide called Credit Demystified implementing a tag cloud and tag pages that boosted the Google page count to 1,100. In this quote, I talk about how content and intent are both really important if you are considering a microsite:

To read more about this article, feel free to read The Pros & Cons of Microsites As An SEO Option.

Early, in January of 2006, I had given a site called "Balancedlifeproducts.com" an in-depth web critique at their request. Through the critique, I found that they had a number of issues ranging from no attention to inbound links and PageRank to poor keyword choices and title tags. I decided to revisit their progress, by reporting their findings in a video tutorial.

To see the tutorial, click on Balanced Life Products: SEO video tutorial. You will need Flash Player 8 or above to view the presentation hosted on Practical eCommerce. Enjoy! :-)

Two of the most popular Web 2.0 interactive elements, Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) and Flash, might be great for customers and a fresh experience on many sites, but they are inherently unfriendly to the major search engine spiders. In my article on Search Engine Land entitled, "The Search Engine Unfriendliness Of Web 2.0" I cover AJAX and Flash in detail, to show you how to prevent these new technologies from harming your ability to get the most out of Web 2.0.

Here are a few quotes from the article that might help those of you who employ AJAX and Flash into your blogs or websites. This next quote covers a great tip about Flash:

In this quote, I talk about progressive enhancement's alternative to work with AJAX:

For more tips about how you can incorporate progressive enhancement, feel free to visit my article.

In an article hosted at Practical eCommerce, Amy Africa and I co-author an in-depth website critique on industrial tool supplier Product Tool Supply. Through my critique, I found a number of things that were affecting their overall SEO.

For more about this industrial tool supplier, visit my co-authored article entitled, "Tooling Around on PTS."

The above quote is from my recent Search Engine land article entitled, "Effective Tagging For Both Usability & SEO." I go into a lot of details how strategic tagging can help you. Here is a tip about tag clouds that I'd like to share with you:

For other, more specific tagging techniques, I hope you visit my article.

In an article I had co-authored for Multichannel Merchant entitled, "Red Envelope's Website Critique," I had gone into detail about the site's functionality and came across this interesting discovery at the time I looked at their site.

For more interesting details on this site critique co-written with Amy Africa, just follow the link above.

By using a few toolbars, widgets, or other add-ons, you can enhance your understanding of a website's SEO health. The Web Developer Extension from Chris Pederick is a great tool that can help Web developers, designers, and SEO enthusiasts.

In my article entitled, "A don't-leave-home-without SEO tool," I talk about some of the ways this tool can enhance your understanding of a site's SEO health, and how useful it is beyond SEO. At a quick glance, the tool allows you to check your JavaScript, view Alt text, meta descriptions, and link information, linearize the page to re-order content in the order the search engines read it, and much, much more! From screen captures to an in-depth explanation, I hope you'll try out this useful tool.