Enjoy the new 2011 Google Zeitgeist video below. We made it. =] YouTube: Year in Search 2011

In the past few months I’ve taken a new interest in learning how to program and code as it applies to SEO. This came out as a need to research and evaluate SEO campaigns in a scalable manner where popular SEO tools didn’t work for my situation or I had no engineering resources available. It was like I had both hands tied behind my back. For example, I found myself asking certain questions and performing SEO fixes that were very labor intensive. What is the redirect destination for a list of 200+ URLs? How many links are pointing to the new location? And to take it further, how many times were those pages crawled by Google in the last month? ...

It’s been very busy for me this month so unfortunately I do not have anything to write about. However, I am introducing my monthly link round-up where I share some of the most link worthy blog posts out there about SEO - I guess that’s my treat. As for the trick? Well - there is none. I am not putting up any old links just for the hell of it. I passionately endorse these articles because I know I will refer to them again in the future. ...

Feb 2014 Edit: The calls, functions and worksheet used in this blog post may be outdated. If you know of a better guide please contact me and I’ll send a link your way. I want to share with everyone a very quick rank checking tool that I built using the ImportXML function from Google Documents. But first, a quick history lesson… Or you can just grab the G-Doc ImportXML Rank Checker here. Historical Context I used to love rank checking when I first started out as an SEO analyst. I thought it was the only thing that mattered and took great pride when the keyword rankings jumped to the top of the fold on page one. However, as I matured professionally and took on more important responsibilities at CafePress*, checking for keyword ranks fell to the wayside and lost its novelty as it became a time suck. ...

I’ve officially transitioned my SEO blog from the free wordpress.COM to the paid wordpress.ORG version. Everything went off without a hitch and I can’t thank the WordPress team enough for making this process ridiculously easy. I have yet to work on the color scheme and layout although that can always come later. With that out of the way, I think it’s time to set some goals for my new blog domain. I am the type of person who likes to reassess their goals every year, half-year and quarter. I admit it maybe a little extreme but it keeps me focused on my long term goals. For example, when I was first hired as an SEO Analyst at CafePress, I re-evaluated my job responsibilities every month. In fact, I still have them! ...

When I first started this blog a little over a year ago, its main purpose was to act as my resume. It was to show potential employers that even though I had no knowledge about the SEO industry, I was very passionate about it. I made it my goal to write at least one blog post per month even though there wasn’t any real value to it. But that will all be changing soon as I have finally decided to migrate over to the paid version of WordPress - with new goals in mind. ...

Wow - this blog is officially ONE YEAR OLD! I have learned a lot about the art and science of search engine optimization since my journey began and I must admit it has been quite an experience. Below are some of the lessons learned these past 12 months in no particular order of importance. Want to propose an SEO change? Justify it with numbers. People search for the darn-est things. Reading a book (or blog post) written by an industry leader is different than actually doing it yourself. ...

I ran my SEObook Rank Checker the other day for one of my clients Google keywords rankings when I came upon the Captcha image below. They may be the world’s best search engine at the moment but they still have a lot of work to do….lol. google captcha - balls