DKS Systems Search Marketing Specialist Nick LeRoy offers SEO tips and tricks through a series of articles. Link Building, On Page Optimization, Social Media, and a lot more! http://www.dkssystems.com For the last couple days everyone has been in an uproar about JCPenney’s shady SEO practices and the manual ranking penalty Google placed on them. This public outing by the NY Times brings up a lot of valid questions that are being discussed in the SEO world. This includes the value in reporting your competition, how Google will respond and if your sites overall authority plays a roll in the severity of the penalty. http://www.dkssystems.com/reporting-your-competition-a-viable-seo-technique.html That's right, the title of this post is absolutely correct. You don’t have to be an SEO to increase your sites search presence. This post will outline 9 simple "Go-Live" SEO tasks that everyone should do to their site before it goes live. Will these techniques guarantee you number one rankings and a hefty sack of cash? Probably not... but it sure will set you up for future success. http://www.dkssystems.com/dont-have-to-be-an-seo-to-optimize-your-site.html Ever wondered exactly how many people visited your website? How many orders were placed or how your visitors even found your website? This post is dedicated to the analytics service that Google offers (for free) to anyone who owns a website. This write up will explain Google Analytics to the people who aren't familiar with Google's service or how to best interpret the data thats available. This article isn't short so feel free to use some of the links below to start reading from a particular topic. http://www.dkssystems.com/how-to-use-google-analytics-for-beginners.html A part of what makes an SEO good at what they do is their knowledge of what makes certain ranking techniques good or bad. Many of you are familiar with the rel="canonical" meta tag. Incase you are not familiar; it's a meta tag that helps consolidate duplicate versions of a page to one URL. Many of the times you will see the canonical tag implemented on E-commerce SEO projects. E-commerce sites are notorious for having huge duplicate content issues which can have a direct correlation with indexation and search engine rankings. http://www.dkssystems.com/how-canonical-tags-are-being-abused.html Merry belated Christmas and a happy early New Year! This article is a follow up to the one I wrote last month about what to do with dead e-commerce product pages. Just like product pages, there are good ways and bad ways to deal with your sites seasonal content. The first step in dealing with your seasonal content is to answer these questions. http://www.dkssystems.com/what-to-do-with-seasonal-holiday-content.html