Jill Whalen

Jill Whalen is the owner of High Rankings and moderator of the free weekly email newsletter, the High Rankings Advisor. Jill specializes in search engine optimization, directory submissions, SEO consultations and seminars. She has obtained hundreds of number 1 and 2 spots for her vast array of clients throughout the years. Clients include multi-million dollar companies, major universities, real estate agencies, attorneys, surgeons, dentists, and small-medium sized businesses.


67 Ideas for Blog Topics

You’re likely sick of hearing about the importance of having great blog post content. But you know you need it in order to have something to promote via social media. And you know that great blog posts can bring in lots of long-tail search engine visitors. What you may have trouble with is what to write [...]

Continue Reading

The Meta Description Tag

The keywords and phrases you use in your Meta description tag may not affect your page’s ranking in the search engines, but this tag can still come in handy in your overall SEO and social media marketing campaigns. What Is the Meta Description Tag? It’s a snippet of HTML code that belongs inside the <Head> [...]

Continue Reading

Ending Social Media Marketing Confusion

Consider this scenario: You know you’re supposed to get on Twitter to somehow promote your website. So you start randomly tweeting out links to a product or service page on your website. But who is going to care? Sure, you could do some Twitter searches and find people who are asking their own Twitter followers [...]

Continue Reading

Deceptive Marketing: A Necessary Evil for Search Marketers?

A few years ago, I read a good article by Canadian SEO Melanie Nathan called “The Reciprocity Link Building Method” in which she outlined a technique she sometimes used to build up high-quality links for her clients’ websites. The gist, as I understood it, was to first find a website that would be good for your [...]

Continue Reading

The ultimate goal of most websites is to collect leads and/or make sales. Which makes them important conversion points to measure with your web analytics program. Leads and sales are also the reason why I’m a huge proponent of optimizing services and products pages. If a Google searcher lands directly on a page that is [...]

Continue Reading

A few weeks ago I learned that I was chosen as one of the “Top 25 Online Marketers to Follow on Twitter” by David Vogelpohl over at Marketing Pilgrim. (I’d like to thank my family, my 2nd grade teacher…) While it was cool to be chosen, more interesting to me was how David characterized my [...]

Continue Reading

Does Google Spam Still Work Post-Panda?

It’s been more than 5 months since my open letter to Google lamenting the state of their search results and how web spam was getting the best of them. And it’s been a mere 3 months since I wrote about how much Google (and Bing) loved anchor text spam. Since that time, a number of [...]

Continue Reading

In my day-to-day reviews of client websites, I see lots of things done to websites in the name of SEO that in reality have no bearing on it. In an effort to keep you from spending your precious time on supposed SEO tactics that will have absolutely no effect on your rankings, search engine visitors, [...]

Continue Reading

While many bloggers and the media are calling Google’s search results out lately, most of the focus has been on the somewhat low-quality pages that show up for informational long-tail searches. My concern for Google’s search results is different, however. As I touched upon in the last newsletter, I’m tired of Google (and Bing) returning [...]

Continue Reading

Most of the time when I have a bit of a rant in the newsletter or elsewhere it’s because I’ve seen or heard things that bug me or are just plain wrong. Writing about it gets it off my chest and that’s usually the end of it. Unfortunately, that hasn’t been the case with the [...]

Continue Reading

SEOs have been getting a bad rap for a long time. Unfortunately, in many cases, their bad reputation has been well deserved. When a client hires an outside SEO consultant during the design and development of a new website, it’s often not looked upon kindly by the development team. Chances are the team has had [...]

Continue Reading

Just Say No to SEO Articles!

Published on 01 December 2010 by in Internet Marketing

Just Say No to SEO Articles!

Last week I was speaking with a potential client in need of SEO consulting who told me that they had been working on their product part e-commerce website over the past few months by adding “SEO articles” to it on a regular basis. “SEO articles?” I thought. “Why would an e-commerce site that sells product [...]

Continue Reading

…If you don’t keep your SEO abreast of website changes. The Client Perspective: “There are lots of changes needed on our website for branding, marketing or technical reasons. We don’t want to run each and every one of them past our SEO consultant because they shouldn’t concern him or her.” The SEO Perspective: Imagine this…You’re [...]

Continue Reading