The worth of title tags

I sat down with an SEO expert a few days ago and got a brief run through on his perspective of the state of the field of SEO. I’ve always considered SEO to be a field in which everyone thinks they know what they’re talking about, but everyone’s really just guessing. Still, there are people out there doing real, controlled testing, and after enough of these people arrive at the same conclusion, you really have no choice but to agree with them.

Most of what I heard were reminders: “meta tags don’t help with Google rankings” and “hiding text and farming links will hurt you in the end”, but some stuff was quite interesting, not because it was new, but because it was explained in a way I hadn’t heard before...

The evils of subdomains

Today I learned something that I should have figured out a long time ago – if you want your site to rank higher on search engines, don’t organize your content into subdomains.

You know, it really makes sense. The content of your site is always on one subdomain or another. If you haven’t set up any subdomains, you’re using the default – “www”. Even if it doesn’t show up in the address bar, you’re using “‘www”.

What’s important to know is that each subdomain is actually its own site...

Getting ignored by Google

Since this is a new site, I’ve spent quite a bit of time checking to make sure everything is running as I think it should. One thing I’ve been most concerned about is how Google interprets my site content and ranks it in search results. I know I’m going to start out low, but I want to make sure I get this site off on the right foot.

A full week after I launched this site and began posting content, I was still surprised that my site did not come up in any Google searches – in fact, there were no keywords even associated with it...