Tad Chef - cognitiveSEO Author

* This is the third post in our weekly column - Link Building Technique 3: Hunt for Blunders. The probably most positive aspect of mistakes is that you can learn from them. Unfortunately in most cases people only learn from their own mistakes if at all. Learning from mistakes made by others seems to be too difficult. We rather repeat the mistakes from the past. On the Web the situation is completely different, it's much better. You can see how other people fail in real time and not only l [...]

* "Content is king" is one of the widest spread Internet memes. Whether you agree or not you will see the phrase referenced all over the place. For several years Google was one of the most ardent supporters of the "content is king" philosophy. Why does Google want you to "create great content" and lots of it? In order to explain why I wanted to track the first mention of "content is king" just to find out that Bill Gates declared in January of 1996. Also Sumner Redstone of Viacom said it [...]

* This is the second post of our weekly column - link building technique 2: go where the attention is Bloggers in most cases do not break news. Unless your plane has crashed and you have survived to make the first photo of the aftermath you won't have the opportunity to be the first person to report something very often. The few big press agencies in most cases decide what's "news": Reuters, AP or DPA. Some stuff that gets reported is actually not really news at all, the latest Apple pr [...]

* SEO has been pronounced dead ever since inception, in recent years the number of people claiming that SEO is dead for one or another reason has grown significantly though. One explanation for this trend is that publishers want to gain attention by badmouthing a whole industry, especially as it works really well with SEO practicioners and their enemies. Both cried foul each and every time like some dog which barks once you cross a line entering its territory. The second major explanation [...]

* Social sites come and go. I've been active on social media from around 2007. This was already the second or third wave of social media services. At first sites like Delicious Slashdot Friendster were all the rage. They were already almost forgotten by the time I started connecting with people on social media. Digg has replaced Slashdot and MySpace was already more popular than Friendster. I've been mostly participating on StumbleUpon and later joined Twitter to move most of my ac [...]

* Somewhere around 2005 SEO practicioners have started to hail social media sites like Digg as the new holy grail of link building. Others even started to use a new acronym for this new way of getting numerous links and high website traffic fast: Social Media Optimization or SMO. Today everybody does SMO in some sense but almost nobody uses the term anymore. Social Media Marketing or SMM seems to be a bit more popular by now but similar to the SEO/SEM differentiation it reflects paid advert [...]

* This post has actually two headlines but Wordpress allows just one. The other headline is "Link Building Technique 1: Return for More". From now on we will cover one link building technique or tactic each week. Today I want to talk about one of my favorite topics, link love. As the second part of the term implies link love is about long term relationships. In contrast many traditional SEO practicioners and link builders act as if link building is a one night one stand. It isn't. I don' [...]

Many people don't know Blekko yet but already feel the influence of the search engine start up that offers customizable search results for advanced users. Blekko is actually the driving force behind much of innovation in the search industry right now. Blekko bragged to be spam-free by removing so called content farms that were flooding Google with low quality pay by the dozen content created solely for the purpose of getting search traffic. While Google claimed to have worked on [...]

* Like most average people out there Google hasn't yet let me test the new social network Google+. Only tech pundits, influencers, social media mavens and other early adopters have been allowed to use G+ at the beginning. Thus I have to trust their reviews of the Google+ service. Google's tactic of allowing only cheerleaders in has seemingly paid off. Most reviews are positive. Why? There are different reasons. Let me cite some of them. Gina Trapani of SmarterWare what I a [...]

* While most people argue that SEO is either white hat or black hat in reality much of it is more or less gray. In fact most people don't even know when some technique ceases to be white and starts to be black. Some techniques considered by Google to be black hat are seen by people in the SEO industry as only gray. Why is there so much confusion whether a given technique is black, gray or white? Well, the reason is simple, in spite of all so called transparency by Google the Go [...]