Courtney Heard

About Courtney Heard

Courtney Heard is the founder of Abalone Designs, an Internet Marketing and SEO company in Vancouver, Canada. She has been involved in web development and marketing since 1995 and has helped start several businesses since then in the Vancouver area. More of Courtney's articles are available at www.abalone.ca/resources/.

Why Your #1 Ranking Isn’t Bringing You New Traffic

You’ve watched your web site grow, gain a higher PR, and more incoming links. Your ranking has steadily increased for keywords that relate to the product or service your site is selling, until finally you reach number one. You’re ecstatic!
Date Posted: August 26, 2005

13 Steps to Increasing Your Link Luck

Link development can be an absolute nightmare. It takes up most of a marketer’s time and the yield isn’t always what we originally hoped. Worrying about PR, one way inbound links, triangle linking, where to find quality sites to exchange...
Date Posted: February 13, 2005

Has Google Lost the Plot?

With the help of MSN, recently I’ve been reminiscing about the Google of old. Remember those days? When you could take a good quality site, add a few keywords, get a few incoming links and bada-bing, bada-boom, it’d be #1 on Google?
Date Posted: February 06, 2005

Link Popularity - A Thing of the Past?

I've found myself involved in a lot of discussions about the dropping importance of link popularity lately. Numerous people have said to me that they think incoming links no longer hold as much weight as they once did, and that the only links...
Date Posted: January 29, 2005

Source Code: Places You May Not Have Thought To Put Keywords

We all know it's good practice to put in-context keywords into page titles, meta tags and alt tags. But here are a few places you may not have thought about. Tables - You're most likely familiar with what a table tag looks like.
Date Posted: January 18, 2005

The Top 10 Most Ludicrous Things You Can Do on Your Web Site

We have a running joke in our office that one day we’ll load a page and it will say “You have reached the end of the World Wide Web” and it will be the truth. I’ve visited so many web sites in my time, it’s unreal.
Date Posted: January 11, 2005

The Search Engine Showdown

If you're anything like me, you have a favourite search engine and you're loyal to it. You never use any others (which made this research difficult for yours truly), insist yours is the be-all and end-all and you even go so far as to deny...
Date Posted: January 04, 2005

Toolbars, Desktop Search and Mac Users

Desktop Search, Toolbars and Mac UsersThese days, it seems everyone is releasing a Toolbar and Desktop search, from Google and MSN to Search Engine Optimization companies and Internet Service Providers.
Date Posted: January 04, 2005

All About Google

If you read The Search Engine Showdown at www.abalone.ca/resources/searchenginetest.html, you know Google is my favourite search engine. Why? Google always offers the most results for any given search (they currently have over 8 billion pages...
Date Posted: December 18, 2004