Jack Leblond
Jack Leblond is a SEO/SEM professional working for a large corporation full time in Austin, TX. He is not a Realtor, he is our in-house SEO expert.
Jack is the Director of Internet Strategy and Operations for TG (www.tgslc.org). In addition to managing the team that develops and maintains the company's multiple Web sites, he focuses on Search Engine Optimization (SEO), e-marketing and Social Media. Jack's background ranges from Submarine Sonar Technician/Instructor for the United States Navy, technical writer, pioneer in internet/intranet creation for McGraw-Hill and Times Mirror Higher Education, former Adjunct Professor for two Universities teaching web-related courses, has served as a city council member and co-founded Net-Smart, a web design and hosting company, where he managed networks and oversaw the development of hundreds of Web sites. As a free-lance SEO consultant, Jack performs SEO Site Audits for small/medium businesses that want their web sites to perform better in the search engine listings.
By Jack Leblond on December 19, 2009
Time to find out who’s been paying attention
This week we are not having a tip, this week it’s time to see who’s site is doing well, and who’s needs some more help. After all, how can I possibly know what kind of help (or how much) you need without testing your skills?
But, this is not a pencil and paper type of quiz, I’m going to review your sites, see what you can improve on and what you are doing well.
Obviously I can’t test all of your sites, that’s alright, I suspect there are some who don’t need it,…
Posted in Real Estate
By Jack Leblond on December 12, 2009
You Can’t Keep up with the Jones’ if you don’t know what they are doing.
Welcome back to the SEO Tips series, I’m glad you’ve stuck with me and hope you have learned a thing or two to help your Web site perform better. This will be the last tip in this series for a while. Next week we’ll do a review of what we’ve covered so far, and then we’ll be taking a short break.
Over the last several weeks we have covered many ways for you to help your site to perform well. However, a big part of SEO is…
Posted in Real Estate | Tagged SEO, seotip
By Jack Leblond on December 5, 2009
Use some of Google’s muscle for keyword research
Welcome back, hope you had a safe and enjoyable holiday break. My wife and I used our time to put in new kitchen counters and tile….but, that’s a whole other post. Let’s get to today’s SEO Tip.
Keyword research can be both intimidating and time consuming, but why should YOU do all the heavy lifting? Google has a fantastic tool made specifically for doing keyword research. And…. IT’S FREE! Of course, they hope you’ll use it for an AdWords campaign and send them some money in return, but that’s not required.
It’s not…
Posted in Coaching, SEO | Tagged SEO, seotip
By Jack Leblond on November 21, 2009
You need more than just curb appeal to make Google happy
Welcome back, time for another SEO Tip.
Is your Web site like a Hollywood back-lot? All snazzy looking up front, but nothing on the inside? More importantly, does Google think that’s what it is? I’ve hinted at this a couple times before, but it is very important that you don’t ignore the interior of your sites.
It’s nice to have a pretty front page that displays some good content, and maybe shows your blog posts when you add them. But what happens to those posts when they roll off the…
Posted in SEO | Tagged SEO, seotip
By Jack Leblond on November 14, 2009
Sitemaps help make your 100 acres easier to navigate
Welcome back. My series of SEO Tips is winding down; I hope you have gotten a lot out of them. If you have questions about this, the earlier tips or something I have yet to cover, please don’t hesitate to ask.
How could Christopher Robin ever find Pooh or Tigger’s place without his map of the 100 acre woods? Without a map, how easily could you get around in a town you’ve never been to before? Sure, you could drive up and down every street until you found your destination, but that…
Posted in SEO | Tagged SEO, seotip
By Jack Leblond on November 7, 2009
It’s Saturday morning, so you know what that means – time for another SEO Tip. This week’s tip is so simple some of you may wonder if it’s even true, others may wonder why they haven’t been doing it already.
You have all been told for years that you must add lots and lots of images to your sites. You’ve learned that visitors enjoy looking at pictures of houses, that blog readers are pulled in by having large images at the top of a post.
But is it possible to bring more traffic in from the search engines because of…
Posted in SEO | Tagged SEO, seotip
By Jack Leblond on October 31, 2009
Hyphens and underscores and pipes – OH MY!
Welcome back, hope you are learning lots from my series of SEO Tips. This week we’ll take a look at some common methods of separating words in your URLs and page titles, and which should provide you the best results in the search engine result pages (SERPs).
Separators in URLs
Depending on how long the developer has been creating pages, how they were trained and the system they use, they often develop a favorite method (right or wrong) and stick with it. Unfortunately for me, my coding skills were developed before the ‘net took…
Posted in SEO | Tagged SEO, seotip
By Jack Leblond on October 24, 2009
Welcome back, hope you are finding this SEO tips series helpful. A few weeks ago we discussed how to properly link to your site and the documents in it. Today, we’ll learn how to discover what other sites link to you, what pages they link to, and what words they use to do it.
You may recall from my SEO Ranking Factors article that the item believed to have the most positive affect on your search engine rankings was the anchor text used in links to your pages. If you are able to influence that text, you have a better…
Posted in SEO | Tagged SEO, seotip
By Jack Leblond on October 17, 2009
Hopefully last week’s SEO Tip didn’t make your brain hurt too bad – I promise not to get that geeky again for a while.
I know some you of are already thinking up snarky comments about how useless you think the META Keywords are – take a deep breath, count to 10, and read on. I bet I can change your mind. Before we get into that though, if you are not familiar with them, you should review my META Tags article from a few weeks ago.
In early the days of the internet, META Keywords were a great way…
Posted in Coaching, SEO
By Jack Leblond on October 10, 2009
In last week’s SEO Tip about linking to the home page correctly, I promised to tell you how to do “canonicalization” (just don’t ask me to pronounce it). As a quick refresher, canonicalization is a fancy word that means to direct traffic from multiple, possibly undesirable addresses, to a single preferred address.
The most common use for this is for telling your web server to only display pages either with the “www.” or without it, but not both. This is typically done by editing a special file named “.htaccess” located in your web servers “root” or top most folder. If…
Posted in SEO | Tagged SEO, seotip
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