SEO Horror stories recently hit trending over the Halloween weekend using the #SEOHorrorStories hashtag. I had to laugh at a lot of them and then I thought of some of my own SEO horror stories. Prior to going agency side 4 years ago I spent a few years in the frontline trenches of freelance small biz…
Category: Blog
How to Fix WordPress Blog Stuck in Maintenance
I’m stuck on WordPress as my blog platform of choice because of it’s ease of maintenance. With a few clicks I can maintain not only the core WordPress CMS but also plugins and a myriad of themes. This morning however I had a bit of a panic. I logged on to newmediamike to approve some comments…
Top 10 Lies from SEO Gurus
Every morning my mailbox gets a new set of offers from SEO gurus offering to get me a number one ranking. It’s quite sad that the SEO industry is still plagued by charlatans such as these who have one goal. Separate hard working small business owners from their even harder earned money. Business owners may…
Making your website mobile friendly
Is your website mobile friendly? What are you waiting for? Think of how you use your mobile device to conduct research. Your potential customer is also seeking answers to questions and quite often, they’re doing it from their mobile device. Consider this: More than half of American adults own smartphones and one-third own tablets, according…
Abandoned SEO Best Practice Tactics
These abandoned SEO Best Practice tactics never made for a better user experience, they were strictly used IMO, to game the search engines. Abandoning tactics that were designed to game the engines and that no longer work due to the constant changes Google makes to the ranking algorithm makes sense. For in the world of…
Stop Blogging to lose traffic
What happens when you stop blogging? You lose traffic. About 6 months ago I started receiving odd emails asking me to approve comments, but the data was blank. Then I tried to post a blog post and it wouldn’t take. It turns out my SQL database had maxed out. The database only had 100 Mb…
Phishing Follies
Phishing season seems to be upon us. My partner’s Hotmail account has been hit with a number of phishing attempts. Some of these phishing attempts are rather elaborate and could easily fool someone who doesn’t know better. The purpose of this post is to hopefully prevent you or your loved ones from falling for two…
How to Bury Negative Search Results of Your Name on Google
Negative search results of your name on Google can be a detriment to career advancement. Perhaps you were wrongfully accused of non-professional conduct and later exonerated, but those false accusations are at the top of Google every time you search for your name. Not only can this limit your career potential, it can be frustrating…
How to recover from an extended server outage
newmediamike.com recently experienced an extended server outage thanks to the Ice Storm that hit Toronto just before Christmas. newmediamike.com was offline from December 22 until January 5. I conducted a search for my most popular posts to see if I had been hit in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) and sure enough, none of…
Creating Compelling Content to Generate Traffic for Small Local Businesses
Creating compelling content to generate traffic for small business has been on my mind a lot lately. Between Google’s recent Hummingbird update to the algorithm and Google pulling all keyword data there has been a seismic shift in the SEO industry and most search professionals are scrambling to come up with solutions. I say “most”…