The Godfather Trilogy is easily my favorite set of movies of all-time – desert island movies easily. Today, I thought I’d get creative and try to figure out different things that The Godfather movies can teach us about SEO.

Here’s my crack at it:

1. Orders come from the top down. Much like the Corleone family gives and follows orders from the Top (Vito Corleone) down the the bottom (Willie Chichi), you should approach your SEO campaigns from the Top (Homepage) down (Subpages).

   The homepage is your most important page in terms of ranking ability, and should be optimized first.

…

Here is a question that was posed to me recently by a client:

Almost by accident, this client forced me to be tactical on the spot (while also creating illusions of old Clint Eastwood or John Wayne cowboy flicks). The client’s question got me thinking. If I had only five things that I could do for a site to enhance it’s SEO, what would I do?

I mean really – what are the top 5 core tactics (as they…

When you are trying to break down a site’s analytics, what is the first thing everyone looks at? Chances are most people will say ‘Total Visits’. This is probably the reaction that most people will have, and it is generally a good way to get a quick snapshot of how your site is doing.

However, if you look at total visits alone in a vacuum you’re not allowing yourself to see the whole picture – and potentially doing yourself a tremendous disservice. You can look at the cover of a book and still probably be able to dechiper what it…

In my last article 5 Ways to Measure SEO Success, I described several different methods of establishing the measurements you need in order to determine if an SEO campaign is successful or not. Despite the general variance in the different success metrics, the one constant was an absolute NEED to develop baseline metrics from which to compare future measurements of things like traffic and rankings.

Measuring hard baseline statistics is an absolute MUST. Should you ever wish to show success, you’ll be hard-pressed to prove it without actual (unquestionable) data to support your…

One of the biggest issues with running effective Search Engine Optimization campaigns today is the muddy waters that often surround whether or not the campaign is successful or not.

If you work for an agency, you’ll know about the rampant skepticism that usually accompanies the industry. Therefore, it is absolutely necessary to be able to convey success through hard statistics rather than allowing a client to take your word for it (which often causes clients to cancel swiftly).

Additionally if you’re managing your own SEO, you’ll need to be able to analyze hard facts in order to determine where…

Images present a very unique problem webcrawlers. A search engine webcrawler doesn’t have the ability to view and image on the web and inherently know what that image is depicting. In other words, unless we (the webmasters and SEO’s) help them out, they are blind as a bat!

“Help Me Help You”

Like the famous quote from the 1996 movie “Jerry Maguire“, search engines want you to Help Them Help You. There are many benefits to optimizing your site’s images, including inclusion into the image directories (which sometimes get injected into search results), and…