I spent the better part of this morning running recursive audits on some of the biggest tech brands in the world. On paper, these companies are winning. They own the #1 spots on Google for their most expensive keywords. Their SEO teams are probably high-fiving in the breakroom. But then I looked at the “Answer Engines.”
Google vs. AI: “Here are your options” vs. “Here is the answer”
If you want to understand why the search landscape is shifting so violently right now, you only need to look at one thing: the difference between an option and an answer. For twenty years, Google’s job has been to say: “Here are ten blue links. Good luck picking the best one.” It was a choice engine. But in 2026, the … Read More
Technical Project Management: Should Technical Project Managers Be Technical?
This is a question that challenges many technical consulting companies: Should technical project managers be technical? In other words, if you are managing a technology project, do you need to be well-versed in the technologies of the project or do you just need to be a great project manager?
A Career in Technical Training: Is It For You?
Not everyone is cut out to be a great technical trainer. In fact, the industry is littered with sub-par technical trainers who do little more than recite text from a book. The industry needs great trainers, but is it a career that is right for you? There are two characteristics that make someone a great technical trainer: Most trainers have … Read More
Thinking Tangentially: How To Succeed Online In a Competitive Environment
When individuals or companies are trying to succeed online in the face of heavy competition, they often do one of two things: They either give up or they employ the same strategies as their competitors. In this article, we take a look at a concept called tangential thinking, which will enable you to succeed in competitive markets that offer great returns.
Project Management: Creating Self-Managed Employees
In this article, I am going to talk about to create self-managed employees. We will look how to motivate employees to get the job done by having the employees tell you what they are going to get done.
Technical Training: How To Engage the Class from Day 1
As I wrote in A Career in Technical Training, many technical trainers do little more than recite what you can easily read in the text book. In this article, we will take a look at how you can create an engaging technical training class from day one.
SEO: Keyword Competitive Analysis
If you want to create a web page that will generate traffic, you need to do so using popular keyword search terms. However, the more “popular” that a keyword is, the more keyword competition you are going to have. In this article, we will take a look at how you can analyze the competition for a keyword and whether it is worth the effort to try to place for that keyword.
SEO: Creative Keyword Strategies
If you have done your proper SEO keyword research, you will have selected keywords to use with some frequency in your articles. But did you choose the right keywords? And, importantly, how will you use these selected keywords as anchor text? In this article, we will look at creative keyword choices and how you can use these keywords as anchor … Read More
SEO: The Seven Deadly Sins
SEO seems relatively easy at first, but danger lurks around every corner. One false step–one SEO mistake–and all of your SEO work vanishes into a de-indexing or the dreaded Google sandbox. Early Christians defined the Seven Deadly Sins that one should not commit lest they burn in the fiery pits of hell. In this article, we’ll explore the Seven Deadly Sins of Search Engine Optimization.
SEO and Golf: They Both Look Easy…Until You Try Them
SEO is a lot like golf. It appears easy at first, until you start to play the game.
WordPress Category Pages: The Most Overlooked SEO Gem
Do you know what most bloggers and web designers do with their WordPress Category pages? If you answered nothing, you are correct. And by doing nothing, they are missing out on lots of potential traffic.
Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) and SEO: New Methods for Choosing Keywords and Inbound Link Strategies
A relatively new concept called Latent Semantic Indexing will change the way that SEO is performed. If you stick with your “older” methods of choosing keywords and creating inbound links, you may find your pages slowly disappearing from the google index.
Heading Tags and SEO: What You Don’t Know DOES Hurt You
The SEO value of well-used Heading Tags cannot be understated. And, the fact is, most people do not employ heading tags to their advantage, especially in blogs.
Richard Cummings – Writing Portfolio
Greetings everyone! Below, you will find 20 sample articles that I have written on SEO, marketing, and beyond. If you would like to hire me as a web content producer/writer, just fill in this contact form and let’s have a conversation.
PHP: Return First Character of a String
In this quick post, I will tell you how to return the first character of a string in PHP.
Convert External CSS to On-Page (Inline) CSS for Emails
If you are looking to convert your CSS to on-page (or “Inline”) CSS for use in email campaigns, I will tell you how I did it. The Problem: Effective HTML in Emails Most websites now-a-days use CSS to style their web pages and, in doing so, they typically call an external style.css file. Ideally, you could then structure all of … Read More
PHP: Capture Referring URL And Truncate It To Domain Name
This is a quick technical post on how to use PHP to capture a referring URL and truncate it to a domain name. In other words, we want to determine the exact domain name from which our visitors arrived. The reasons for doing this are numerous. Many use this referring information for statistical analysis while others use it to perform … Read More
Google Panda Webspam and Exact Match Domain Searches
There are a couple of new updates to the Google algorithm that have just been released, one a Panda update and the other labeled the “Webspam” update, and these latest algorithmic changes are affecting several sites that use exact match domain searches…among other things.
Managing Social Media Accounts: Business vs Personal
Today, we are going to look at social media accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn and ask the question: Should you mix business and pleasure?