SEO Blog & Articles

Cheap SEO

2009-07-16T15:58:00.004-07:00

Cheap search engine optimization (SEO) works, up to a certain point. If you have a website in a field that isn’t competitive, such as a specialized business in a limited geographic area, then a few directories and some changes to your meta tags might work wonders, even if you have a new website. For instance, if you’re a neurosurgeon in Crab Apple Cove, Maine, then you probably don’t have too many brain specialists in the general area to contend with, so your website will show up for all kinds of searches (if there are any) related to what it is that you do.

Cheap SEO fails miserably in any competitive environment. Why? Because your competitors are using the same cheap technique that you are, albeit as a small component of a more aggressive campaign. Whether or not your competition is using an SEO expert or has spent enough time to become advanced in optimization, your inexpensive approach is going to get limited traction. Even worse, if you invest in spammy techniques (like multiple submissions or buying links on sites that already have multiple other links to questionable companies) you may find yourself in a worse position than if you did nothing at all.

Low-budget optimization usually gets poor results because it can’t build an internet presence that is worth a search engine’s time. Cheap backlinks are only enough to tell a search engine that you exist, but trusted links (which cost more) are going to be an endorsement of your product or service. While SEO outsourcing is not necessarily a bad thing in itself, a 100% offshore optimization program may not get be the best match for semantic rules designed for US English results. Some of the better optimization programs incorporate content editing with title and description creation, and all of these should be matched up by native speakers whenever possible. Likewise, if you are doing search engine marketing for European sites, you should get foreign language speakers who know how to match up the site with the most relevant idioms and phrases for the language.

Cheap SEO techniques also don't get a lot of credibility in search engines. Giants like Google, Bing, and Yahoo have a vested interest in keeping up their market share and stock price, so they want to provide highly relevant results to users, who in turn keep coming back, and will click on sponsored ads as well as the natural search results. Low quality links to poorly optimized sites are a sign that the website may not be a good value for the search engine's audience. Part of a premium SEO package will include advice on making your site a better resource for its subject matter, while acquiring top level links to show the search engines that you are worth indexing in the top 10. Very few cheap or DIY SEO packages will even include human support, let alone advanced optimization advice.

Good SEO is worth the investment. This is not to say that you shouldn’t shop around, compare pricing, and see what you’re getting for the money. You might be overpaying for cheap SEO without even knowing it. Any SEO program worth its salt will have reporting, account management, and link building features that are consistent with search engine best practices. You should also get realistic advice about what you can expect for your budget, and scalable campaigns that can get you local results or an international search engine presence, depending on what your goals are. For a few thousand dollars, you can get traffic to your website every month that is worth many times that amount, and you can make quite a bit of money online. However, if you are looking at an SEO program that costs less than $100 per month, you should not expect measurable results, and may want to re-think your business strategy.

Get a Piece of Bing’s New Market Share

2009-07-16T07:59:00.004-07:00

Over the past month several of our customers have been interested in how Microsoft’s advertising push for Bing has affected their site traffic. Overall, there have been more Bing searches, but this doesn’t mean that overall search engine volume has gone up. This is because Bing is siphoning market share from its rival Yahoo, but it is not necessarily adding to search volume. This is because search engine use is demand driven, so people have to have something in mind before they make a query. Bing has made itself newsworthy through an advertising push that even includes buying Pay-Per-Click on Google for the term "search engine" and recent media reports indicate that its initiatives are succeeding.

How can the average ecommerce company profit from this news? If you haven’t established natural search engine positions on Bing (which are somewhat volatile on a week-to-week basis) then you can take advantage of the relatively low cost of pay-per-click advertising on MSN Adcenter.

Over the past few years, online stores with limited budget have put most or all of their dollars into the Google Adwords program. By expanding out into Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN Adcenter, which places paid ads on Bing, there is an opportunity to get a foothold on search traffic that similar sized competitors may have neglected. There are even some very large companies who aren’t buying Yahoo and MSN ads, so small and medium B2B and B2C enterprises can get good conversions for a comparatively lower cost. Overall, Web.com Search Agency customers experience a higher conversion rate on Yahoo and MSN PPC platforms, due to a variety of demographic factors.

As a recent CNN report shows, Google dominated 65% of the search engine market for June 2009. However, this means that 35% of search engine traffic was being served through other channels. Bing and Yahoo comprised a combined 28% of online searches in the US, which is still a huge opportunity for big and small businesses. (Bing had 8.4% and Yahoo had 19.6%) Considering that competitive terms may get millions of searches every month, a presence on these engines makes economic sense. Even if you are going after terms that only get a few thousand searches a month, missing 35% of them could be the difference between prosperity and bankruptcy. There are some nuances to each platform that take time to learn, but any qualified search engine marketing agency should have no problem setting up a campaign for all major search engines.

Link Exchanges – Why We Don’t Sell Them

2009-07-14T14:07:00.005-07:00

A recent CNET article about link exchanges got picked up by CNN.com. The article referenced them as the “poor man’s SEO” which is accurate in the sense that they are a low budget way of getting site links. Unfortunately, most of the savvier “poor men” have also abandoned link exchanges because they are not effective. If you read the entire article, you will even see that link exchange is not a recommended method of optimization. Given that link exchange practices have been devalued for several years, posting an article like this one is akin to recommending adjustable rate mortgages as the “poor man’s path to home ownership.”

Until about October of 2005, link exchanges were a great way of improving link popularity and PageRank. (Note that PageRank is not an effective measurement of rankings because link popularity needs to be tied to relevance to be useful.) You could use off-the-shelf software or a service to solicit link exchanges, and they would be posted on your site through a dynamic script. Usually the links would appear on a page called “links” or “resources.” Some of the smarter and less ethical people running exchanges would use rules to ensure that the search engine did not see the link listing on their own site, so all the links would appear to be “one way” links, which have more value. The October 2005 update to Google left a lot of people without search engine rankings because their entire linking strategy involved link exchanges, so they suddenly noticed a drop in search engine traffic right before Christmas. SEO conspiracy theorists everywhere once again noted that this was the perfect excuse for Google to make money off Adwords for anyone running an ecommerce site that depended on search traffic.

By the way, if you are still running non-relevant links on your site through outdated links pages, you should probably delete them from your site. Removing the link to a link exchange pages does not take them out of the search engine listings, since the engine already knows where the page is, and no longer needs navigational help finding it. If you have people in your field who are worth linking to, you can always create a specialized page called “partners” or “related sites” with those links. Trading links with relevant sites and linking to resources is a good way to make your site look like a better resource.

As the article mentioned, many people find out about link exchanges through emails. Most of these emails are poorly written, or come from a template, and start out with sentences like “I saw your site on …” If you’ve gotten an email like this, you should know that several hundred other sites like yours got the same one, so you may as well ignore it. Most link exchange software starts by scraping top results in search engines for a word or phrase, then spidering relevant sites for email addresses. They then send out mass emails to all of the webmaster emails on the list, dynamically inserting your site name into the body of the message.

Some link exchange emails propose 3 or 4 way link exchanges, but usually these are the most suspect. In exchange for a low quality link from a questionable web directory, you are expected to send a high quality link from your site to someone else. In almost every case, you are getting less than you are giving. Third party linking can still potentially be discovered by search engines, but the value of the link to you probably isn’t worth penalizing. Even so, there are some theories about “co-citation” where your site may be getting defined by links from other sites, so you are better off not taking the risk.

As a disclaimer, we wanted to point out that link exchanges don’t necessarily get you penalized, but they aren’t well known for adding value. When people lost ranking in 2005 due to Google’s Jagger Update, they thought that a penalty was in place, but search engine penalties tend to do more than just take away link value. It turned out that the value of exchanged links dropped to near zero, and people who had diversified linking strategies were able to recover quickly, or even excel against competitors who were getting all of their site rankings from link exchanges. Any linking strategy should include various link sources, in the event that one channel or link group becomes discredited as time goes on. Even if you rely on 100% white hat linking, you can still take a hit in the search engines if your inbound link sources lose their own value, so you should make sure your white hat link building does not depend on a single method.

If you have a limited budget but still need search engine optimization for your website, there are better ways to spend your money. When it comes to SEO, you may want to acknowledge that link exchanges are the “poor man’s optimization” because you will be just about as poor tomorrow as you are today if you don’t invest in good search engine optimization. Good links from places like the Yahoo Directory, Business.com, and recognized directories are a great first step that cost about the same as link exchange software. If you shop around, a search engine optimization agency (like ours, the Web.com Search Agency) can get you started on SEO with growth in mind, so you can concentrate on a limited set of keywords and funnel your revenue growth back into search marketing. In any case, using an outdated SEO method is not recommended since it may not hurt your rankings, but it won’t do anything for them either.

Get More Visitors to Your Blog With The Google Keyword Tool

2009-07-09T08:30:00.004-07:00

Lots of people out there are trying to make money by blogging, with varying degrees of success. For bloggers who have already gotten a small foothold in the search engines, the question of building an audience becomes the next big challenge. One of the true keys to success in blogging involves building a critical mass of readers who will recommend your blog, so it gets a market share that attracts advertisers or syndicators who are willing to pay you for your work.

One of the better ways to get an audience is through market research, and the top free market research tool online is the Google Keyword Tool (AKA the Google Adwords Keyword Tool). This tool actually tells you what people are looking for, and even gives seasonal search trends information if you know how to look for it. The keyword tool also suggests alternative keywords that may get you an even bigger audience, or new set of topics with a guaranteed interest base.

For example, let’s say that you want to get more readers who are interested in “online marketing.” Using the Google keyword tool, you would type in the phrase, and make sure to click the box for “use synonyms.” After waiting about 10 seconds for results, you should get two lists. The first will be more relevant matches, and the second will have related terms. There are also columns for local and global search volume. If you click on the top of either column, the results are sorted by popularity.

Our search revealed the top 10 terms to be:

online marketing
online marketing business
online advertising marketing
online marketing promotion
online marketing services
online marketing company
online marketing media
online marketing search
online marketing strategy
online marketing agency

Meanwhile, the top 10 related terms were:

marketing
internet marketing
business marketing
marketing advertising
website marketing
branding
email marketing
internet marketing tools
marketing services
web marketing

For a blogger, the keyword tool can be a goldmine, since the June 2009 results from this tool showed that “internet marketing” gets 1.8 million searches per month vs. 673,000 for “online marketing.” For a power blogger who is looking for an audience, either one of these terms would be fine for inclusion into a blog, but one term gets nearly 3 times the audience of the other one. Aside from the small sample of results here, there are also several dozen keywords and variations in the rest of the list that make for good blog topics.

The keyword tool also lets you see a diverse selection of ideas and desires built around these words. You can look through the list of search results and find out how many people in your sample base are thinking about something else when they type in “online marketing,” and you can hone your subject to capture the audience that is best for you. If you are blogging about “online marketing strategies” you can feed the keyword back into the search tool, un-check the synonyms box, and see more relevant results.

There are also ways to use the keyword tool to see the relative value of a word or phrase. For people who make money off their blogs with Google Adsense, this can be a critical way of increasing the average payment for every click. Under the dropdown that says “choose columns to display” you can pick the “show estimated average CPC” column, and you will see a relative keyword cost next to each phrase. In the June 2009 results, “online marketing programs” has an average cost per click of $13.72, so that may be an attractive one to go after. Conversely, if you are an eccentric billionaire and want someone to visit your blog, you can actually buy this term on Adwords and send people there.

The “Search Volume Trends” column is also quite valuable for people who are blogging about seasonal topics. (You should always mouse over the months on the graph, because they are not presented in a January to December format.) It would appear that marketing terms peak in May and June, but drop in August. Given that blog postings sometimes take a few weeks to get traction in the search engines, you can plan out your topics so they get cached and indexed in the search engines during these peak periods. If your blog gets picked up and indexed more quickly, you could even have a series based around a topic that keeps people interested and gets more search saturation.

Prior to keyword tools like Google, research was based on surveys and focus groups. The problem these information gathering methods is that they can be skewed by the way questions are written, the presence of dominant focus group members, or even the attractiveness of the person asking the questions. People might even be afraid of expressing their true opinions to someone on the other end of a phone. In some cases, a market research firm may be told to come back with a certain conclusion, and it can structure questions and focus groups to return the “right” answer. Search engine queries, for the time being, are based on actual user interests. Nobody feels the need to impress a search engine or lie to it , because the engine is delivering results that they “want.” When it comes to picking an audience for your blog, of finding out a level of interest, keyword research tools will likely give you a better sample than any opinion poll, and give your real numbers at the same time.

Once your blog gets a respectable audience, you can also use keyword research to measure your own popularity. For instance, you could put your own name, or the name of your blog, into the tool to see how many people are looking for you. Just remember that your core audience already remembers your URL or has you bookmarked, so the results you see are more likely to be people who have heard about you and want to know more. Even better, you can track the popularity of your ideas if you have original topics that are not based on current keyword trends. Every day, people read blogs and then go back to the search engines to research concepts that they have learned about, and you can go back into the tool the next month to see if your concepts are gaining a market share. For people who are blogging to change the world “one reader at a time,” there is a lot to be said for this kind of intellectual market intelligence.

Meta Tags and Search Engine Optimization

2009-07-08T10:18:00.003-07:00

Note: We have a free Meta Tag Generator for DIY SEO Enthusiasts . This article does not show actual meta tag HTML because the examples were confusing the blog software template. You can see some meta elements here.

For people who are just getting started in the website optimization world, meta tags are generally the first element addressed in the SEO (search engine optimization) process. Unfortunately, they are sometimes the only SEO attention that a site gets, which is unfortunate, since metatags alone won’t create rankings. SEO professionals do not hold metatags in high regard, despite the basic importance of having good tags. This is because there are many other elements that determine search engine rankings, like on-page content and links. However, the right meta tag choices will definitely improve your search engine standings.

First and most important is the Title tag, which doesn’t use the word “meta” in its HTML designation, but is part of the metatag group given that it is written at the same time as other tags. Proper title tag writing has a significant impact on search engine rankings. In some cases, all you have to do is change your title to get better search engine positions. There are many multimillion dollar enterprises that have not caught on to this fact. Normally the first 60 characters of the title tag will show up in search engine results above a description or snippet of page content. The most important keywords should go near the beginning of your title, especially on the homepage.

Second is the Description tag. This should be a concise (between 200 and 250 character) description of the page contents and your business. A snippet of this tag is likely to be used in search engine results, although the search engine has the prerogative to grab any piece of text on your site for the snippet. Make sure to use the page’s most important keywords in the description, and write it so it grabs a reader’s attention. A description tag should have sentence structure, and should not be a list of keywords separated by commas.

Third is the Keywords tag. The keywords tag should be a list of keywords separated by commas. It should not be longer than 500 characters, but you should assume that the search engines aren’t going to care about the keywords tag anyway. This is because people abused the keywords tag when it first came out. We have noticed that Yahoo still reads the keywords tag (we found this out when we put common typos into the keywords tag, and nowhere else, and the pages got indexed in Yahoo) and even a fractional amount of traffic can sometimes bring in good sales. From an SEO standpoint, many people leave the keywords tag out entirely, with no ill effects, but it may still have an incremental value. In general, put keywords in order of importance, and don’t repeat any keywords in the list or you may be suspected of spamming the search engine.

For the first three metatag categories (title, description, and keywords) it is important to prevent duplicates. Each tag should be unique. Titles should be relevant to each page’s content. Descriptions can have a single unique sentence at the beginning and a common tagline for the next two sentances, but ideally they should be 100% unique. If you are monitoring your site in Google Webmaster Tools, Google will indicate duplicate descriptions and titles. These should be addressed as quickly as possible. If you have a site with several thousand pages, there are ways to use dynamic insertion to make each title and description unique.

There are multiple other meta tag designations, like rating, author, city, state, and copyright, which may be used by search engines, but aren’t treated as highly as other tags. If you are going to use a “rating” tag, it should be appropriate for the content, so you don’t exclude people from all-ages sites and you do exclude them from sites with profanity or adult content. There is a revisit-after tag, but normally we don’t recommend using this one because you may be telling search engines to only look at your site periodically, which means that it takes longer for changes to your website to get noticed.

Some metatags can hurt you if they are not used correctly. If you have a “robots” metatag that says “noindex, nofollow” then search engines are going to ignore every page that contains the metatag. If you use meta refresh tags on pages with minimal content, your site could be mistaken for having “doorway pages” which are an old SEO trick that creates serious penalties for your site.

Sometimes a meta tag is necessary if Google or Yahoo is showing a site description based on your listing in the Open Directory, or DMOZ.org. Normally this description is not up to date, or may be very brief. The way to fix this is with a “noodp” tag which tells the engines to use your own meta description or a snippet instead of this tag.

The big rule for meta tag usage is to make sure that the tags match up seamlessly with the content you have on the relevant webpage, and with the links that are pointing at your site. The title tag, above other tags, describes what the page is about, so it should match up with actual searches for your product, service, or message. Properly focused meta tags improve rankings and click volume. Consistency goes a long way with people and search engines, since the engine gets its credibility from serving up accurate results, and people will jump off a site (or “bounce”) if they don’t see what they are looking for. By having the right metatags based around the best keywords, you can increase traffic, make more money, and build your brand in the search engines. Even though metatags are just the first step in the journey of search engine optimization, they will have a definite impact on everything that comes afterward.

Competitor Backlink Analysis

2009-07-07T08:27:00.005-07:00

If you’re trying to get first page placement on the Google search engine, you need to know what you’re up against. Several years ago, the standard way of getting good website rankings was to look at the top 10 results for a competitive search term, and examine the structure of the sites that had the best rankings. Google changed the game by placing greater emphasis on links to your website. In the search engine optimization (SEO) industry, these are known as “backlinks” and they play an important role in Google and Yahoo positioning. If you want to find out what it takes to get a top ranking, you need an SEO tool that tells you how many back links your competitors have.

Our SEO Competition Report shows you the top 10 sites in Google, along with other information you may find useful. The reporting system also lets you download a PDF copy once it is finished, so you can save it for later.

Here is the information that the SEO Competition Report will give you:

Google Ranking – As expected, the rankings will be listed from 1 to 10.
Yahoo Ranking – Yahoo rankings vary, especially given that Yahoo still practices paid inclusion, which effectively lets you buy your way into the “natural” results. Don’t be surprised if some competitors rank highly in Google but are nowhere in Yahoo.
Number of indexed pages – The number of pages that the search engines have found for the site. Note that big sites may have thousands of pages, but you can still get good rankings with less than 10. If you know that you have more pages, you probably have a problem with your website that is preventing search engine spiders from reading it.
Backlinks – The number of links pointing at the site. If your competitor has a high number of links, keep in mind that relevance is a highly important factor. For example, Wikipedia usually has about 3.7 million links, but only the relevant links play a part in rankings. Another big factor in its rankings involve on-page relevance and trust factors. One of the great things about SEO is that you can get a handful of relevant links from trusted sources and beat sites with thousands of low quality links.
Registration Date – When the domain name for the site was registered, or renewed if it lapsed. Older sites generally have a better chance of getting good rankings.
Archive Date – The site’s first appearance in Archive.org. Note that if a domain name lapsed, you can see an archive date older than the registration date. In general, search engines should have found the site around the same time, and a site’s trust factor “clock” starts when it is cached by the engine. If you buy an old domain name that never had a site on it, you are effectively starting now.
PageRank – Also known as the “toolbar PageRank,” this is the relative value of all the links pointing at the site. As always, note that PageRank is not an endorsement about anything else on the site, especially relevance. As we say in the SEO business, “PageRank is a good place to start, but a bad place to finish.” Still, you may notice that all the competing sites have high PageRank, which means you should be building a robust link structure to counter the weight of the links against you. A general rule about PageRank is that high PR sites tend to get crawled more frequently, sometimes as often as every few minutes in the case of a PR10 site like CNN.com.

These results may differ slightly from the Google results you see because they are taken from a Google datacenter closer to our own IP address. Google shows different results to different searchers, because it tries to provide the best information based on the searcher’s geographical area. Someone in Salt Lake City searching for “Jazz” may get basketball team information, while someone in Nashville doing the same search will probably get more results about musicians and jazz clubs.

If you find that you are trying to get into a field that has a high rate of competition, or that your site is not as old as most sites on the list, then Web.com Search Agency can help you evaluate your options. We have several different custom SEO and link building packages that can level the playing field. As always, the most profitable keywords require more advanced and aggressive level of optimization. Some of the top players in the SEO field may be actively adding links and optimized content on a daily basis in order to keep their clients in the top 10. Even without the head start, it is still possible to position your site among strong competitors, assuming you have the resources to do so. In any case, hiring a search engine optimization agency is highly recommended, given that advanced link building must be done in a strategic and search engine friendly manner.

How To Get Your Site on Google Local

2009-07-06T10:41:00.005-07:00

Many of our customers have businesses that serve a limited geographical area. Over a year ago, Google started adding a selection of local results into its search results when searches were done on specific geographical areas, or for specialized terms. For example, if you type in “roofing contractors” you may or may not see a map of roofing contractors in your general area.

Naturally, the big question is how to get found in this space. Aside from the techniques used by spammers to dominate map listings, Google makes it possible to achieve results by adding your site to the Local Business Center , which lets you put multiple local locations into your map results, so people searching in a nearby suburb will see one of your branch offices.

Claiming your business in Google Local is also imperative for any business owner. This is because there are people who will impersonate your business or hijack your listing and put their own information on it, which is not only confusing for potential customers, but also could be a black mark against you if you’re being impersonated. Florists and Locksmiths have found themselves victimized and pushed out of listings by shady operators who replace legitimate phone numbers with local ones that forward to out-of-state call centers. In the case of locksmiths, a random “free agent” is often dispatched to your location and the price is invariably higher than the quote you received when you made the call.

One way to make sure your business is considered legitimate is to have an established local address, so Google can confirm your business identity through one of three verification methods. Verification is an important part of claiming your account, and it gives you the ability to use the many advanced features available with this free service.

By being registered in the Local Business Center, it is possible to add features like hours, alternate phone and fax numbers, a description of your business, and other information. One tip for savvy small businesses involves using the Google Keyword Tool to discover the most common search terms relative to your local business. This lets you write a business description that incorporates the high quantity and quality phrases that are more likely to bring customers. It also gives you competitive market intelligence on what new services you can offer, and the relative demand for service offerings that you may already have.

Some of the new features of the Google Local Business Center include traffic statistics, keyword usage, and even requests for driving directions. Information of this kind allows for the business owner to understand the local demand for products and services, and identify opportunities for expansion relative to customer growth. For services that have mobile dispatch, this kind of information lets you know what part of town to “loiter” in while awaiting the next service call. This saves on fuel costs while improving customer satisfaction and overall efficiency, since less time spend on the road equals more time servicing multiple clients.

Aside from the local results incorporated into Google maps, local and geotargeted pay-per-click (PPC) are also great ways to make sure you show up when people are looking to patronize local shops and trades. City targeted PPC campaigns generally have a lower cost per click (CPC) than national campaigns, and the customer conversion rate is higher because you can add local phone numbers and regional terms into your ads. By adding PPC ads to Google Maps, you also have the ability to put in small images and messaging that helps you stand out among the other red dots on the page.

One other secret to local results involves the ability for people to write reviews of the product, service, or (in the case of restaurants) food quality experienced. There is a school of thought in search optimization that says you will get better results if your listings have reviews. Whenever possible, encouraging customers to review your business will set you apart from the listings that have bad reviews, or no reviews at all. We would not encourage people to write “fake” reviews for a restaurant, trade, or shop, but it is being done by people who want to stand out.

Finally, there are other important local listing services like Bing and Yahoo Local which are also very important tools for people who work out of limited geographical areas. By controlling your local online presence, you can ensure that your potential customers are finding out everything you want them to know about your business. Furthermore, improvements in local search matching are going to increase the presence and use of local results over the next few years. Staking a claim on these results can give your local business a competitive advantage in a slow economy, and a huge head start when conditions improve.

Web Design – Is it Search Engine Friendly?

2009-07-02T08:24:00.007-07:00

The relative ease of instant website design has its drawbacks. Plenty of novice webmasters have hung out a shingle for “web design” despite a laughable level of knowledge and experience in the web design trade. With the use of instant website creators, free templates, and borrowed designs, it is easy to make a website and sell it to small brick-and-mortar companies who are not knowledgeable about what a standard site should have. After a few months with no traffic, or no visitor conversion, many of these business owners start to wonder if there is a problem.

There are still a surprising number of web designers who do not take search engines into consideration when designing a website. At Web.com Search Agency, we know this because people come to us and ask why they aren’t getting any traction in Google. Normally it takes only a few seconds to see that the site has been designed entirely in Flash, or it has a bad title, or its on-page content has been embedded in images. Any one of these factors can effectively make your site invisible to search engines. A classic design mistake is to have a homepage title that begins with “Welcome to” and ends with the business name. Usually this mistake is repeated on every page. At a more advanced level (if there is such a thing as advanced incompetence) there are designers who use every JavaScript trick in the book, from flyout menus that can’t be read by search spiders, to cursor tricks that looked neat back in 1997. When we see a new site that looks like it was designed for a free web hosting space, we don’t usually have to look too hard to find readability problems.

At the other end are modern looking ecommerce sites with shopping carts that are definitely not SEO (Search Engine Optimization, or the process of getting your site found on search engines) friendly. This is kind of surprising to us because a search engine friendly shopping cart can be the difference between success and failure for a company, and we are always telling our customers to go back and ask the cart designer for SEO features like unique titles, search engine friendly URLs (also referred to as mod rewrites in PHP) and XML sitemap functionality. A proper shopping cart should also be able to spit out a Google Shopping feed (AKA a Froogle Feed) for Google Base, which adds your product list to the world of Google. Many open source shopping carts have available upgrades for a few dollars more, or built by third party entrepreneurs, but this is also an indicator of poor planning on behalf of the shopping cart designer. A truly competitive online shopping cart would have all of these features in place at the base level. Shopping carts that aren’t SEO friendly are a disservice to their customers, because the whole idea of selling things online involves getting found in the internet arenas where sales are made.

How do you find out if your web designer does SEO friendly work? How can you tell if the shopping cart you want is search engine compatible? Ask for working samples. Even if you don’t know what to look for, most search engine optimization companies can look at the sample and tell you what would be lacking if the same model was applied to you. For shopping carts, you can always do a query in Google with the question “Is (shopping cart name here) SEO friendly” or “(cart name) SEO problem” and see what comes out. Many shopping carts have updated themselves over the past few years, so if you see forum postings that are old, find out if upgrades have been made. Finally, if the shopping cart salesperson tells you that the cart isn’t friendly yet but an update is on the way, you may want to look elsewhere, since such updates can take years and may not bestow full functionality. We had one customer find out that the update worked for the "new build" of the cart, but he could not update his cart because he had the "old build" and making a change would ruin his existing rankings.

(Special note: Given that our parent company Web.com practices SEO friendly web design, we would be remiss if we did not make a note of that fact in this posting.)

Finally, you should see if your web designer has basic SEO knowledge. Many self-styled webmasters will claim to know everything about SEO, in which case you should ask for examples of superior placement. Search engine optimization firms usually will work with your webmaster for updates, but there is often friction when a webmaster says that the business owner “doesn’t need” to add content, change titles, add analytics, or fix several small items that slow search engine spiders. Sometimes a webmaster will be using SEO tricks that worked five years ago, but will get you thrown out of the Google rankings today. A certain degree of SEO knowledge on the webmaster’s behalf will ensure that basic tenets of search spiderability are in place during the design phase. Advanced agency advice can help in the naming of files, pages, and images. Agencies can also write or edit SEO content in order to ensure that “keyword blurring” does not confuse the search engines and leave you with artificially low rankings. No matter what the size of your new site or redesign, an SEO compatible site design produces dividends in the form of cheap daily traffic for your business website.

SEO for Bing – Optimizing for Microsoft's New Search Engine

2009-07-01T09:07:00.005-07:00

Many of our customers are curious about SEO (search engine optimization) for the Bing "decision" engine. The short answer is that if you were found on MSN Live Search, you are likely to have the same positions on Bing. This is because Bing’s search results are nearly identical to their previous incarnations on Live Search, but Bing’s interface and functionality have been upgraded to present people with more choices in the “related search” menu at the left of the page, and also shows you previous searches in the same area. The related search feature is the "decision engine" factor, but overall you still need to show up near the top of the list of results if you want to get found.

Over the past few weeks, one of the differences for our customers involved an increase in traffic compared to previous MSN Live Search data, which was noted once Google updated its Analytics to track Bing as a search engine. The traffic increase is likely due to the fact that Bing has quickly taken a bigger market share over Yahoo search, probably because Microsoft is spending a few hundred million dollars on advertisements. How long Bing keeps its share of the marketplace is anyone’s guess, but overall people seem to be having a positive search experience.

One of the problems with Bing and its predecessor Live Search has to do with the volatility seen in search results. Web.com Search Agency tracks results for several clients, and their competitors, and MSN’s volatility has been noticeable for multiple sites, not all of which are even using SEO practices. Keywords will move several spaces up or down, even from week to week, with a churn rate that almost always exceeds Google or Yahoo search results. Combined with the fact that MSN was always the #3 search engine, there was little interest in optimizing MSN over Google, or even Yahoo for that matter. One of the differences between Bing and other engines is that its algorith is not necessarily as dependant on link popularity, so on page factors are more paramount.

For people who want to be found in Bing, several of the old MSN Search rules apply. First, you need to cached by Bing, which is done by submitting your site. MSNbot is still the crawler that will visit your website, so make sure you aren’t excluding it in your robots.txt file. MSN also has a Webmaster Center, which is not as famous as Google’s, but still highly recommended if Bing is important to you or your clients.

Second, you want to make sure your site has fresh content. What is fresh content? Essentially, updates to pages, added functionality, and more information about products or services will give you a boost. One way to keep content fresh involves updating a blog regularly, or referencing new press releases from your homepage. You should also be doing periodic keyword research to see if there are any new phrases that are worth going after, and then build fresh content around those keywords. Many sources on the internet report that MSN’s algorithm is more keyword oriented, but you should still keep in line with rules that Yahoo and Google use to prevent keyword stuffing.

Third, ensure that your metatags are descriptive and reference your major keywords, since the general SEO consensus is that Bing and its predecessor use these as part of their indexing. As always, try to avoid keyword stuffing and keep in mind that you don’t want to go too deep into any gray areas, because Bing may also be spending more dollars on algorithm improvement in the future, which will help it to filter out lower quality sites. One potential advantage you may have with Bing is that you can look at the “related search” menu and see if you have any relevant topics that you can build into your own site. Assuming that people who search for general topics will follow this menu, you have a chance to sharpen your relevance in one or more of these fields. If Bing retains its position over Yahoo or takes a greater market share, you will have the opportunity to get in on the ground floor. Another topic of note is that Bing, like Google, has a certain preference for exact match domain names, but it also will list .tv and .cc domains among its results, which is less common for Google. Therefore, a truly competitive or low volume/high margin term from one of these extensions may be profitable.

As a rule, a site that is good for Google will fall into line with Yahoo and MSN, but new content appears to get a better boost, at least for awhile. New sites almost always show up first in MSN/Bing, which may create a credibility gap because there are a lot of new sites that aren’t good resources for their topic matter. For people who try out different search engines, the quickest correct answer is going to be the determining factor in market share longevity. Any improvement to the search experience is going to keep internet users coming back, which means that search engines are always going to be looking for the best possible resource related to the topic typed into the search box. Aside from all the talk about semantic matching, link-based algorithms, and domain trust, the main takeaway for anyone interested in optimizing for Bing (or any other engine) is that creating a useful, readable site is the first step to SEO success.

Update (7/15/09) : CNN posted an article that breaks down some of the differences in Google Search vs. Bing which also incorporates observations on market share and upcoming software platforms.

Search Engine Positioning

2009-06-30T16:41:00.002-07:00

Though the term “search engine positioning” is a little more antiquated sounding than “search engine optimization,” it has some interesting connotations that may bridge the gap between marketing people who are savvy about the internet and those who aren’t up to speed on the ever-changing face of the search marketing world. It may also help people in the search engine optimization (SEO) business sell their services to the brick and mortar marketing departments who understand the old “positioning” concept vs. its meaning in the world of SEO.

Classic marketing students will be familiar with the concept of positioning as it relates to how a brand name is perceived. Most marketing school graduates were required to read the book “Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind” by Al Reis and Jack Trout. Briefly summarized, the book contends that your brand image tells people what your capabilities are. In an example from the book, it was noted that Xerox did not compete well in the computer market against IBM because people associate IBM with computers and Xerox with copiers. Since the book’s publication, “positioning” has itself become a buzzword so it creates a clear idea in the mind of a listener who has been exposed to the concept. Therefore, “search engine positioning” may be a bit deceptive (are you trying to position a search engine?) as a phrase, but it is possible to clarify the idea in a way that clears up its real meaning and gets potential customers on board with its possibilities.

Any SEO expert will consider “search engine positioning” to be synonymous with optimization. Additionally, the marketing concept of “positioning” on the internet doesn’t really work because search is demand driven, and branding involves sending a repetitive message through various channels until someone understands the connection between the brand and its service offering. However, the process of relating the concept of SEO to people who don’t work in the search engine trenches is difficult, and takes many different approaches. With a word like “positioning,” it is possible to relate that your spot in the search engine rankings is going to build brand equity (albeit more slowly) by creating an association between your company and the “what you do” searches made by the average searcher.

Many people in SEO have no interest in brand building, but traditional marketing types may seem to think of nothing else. Therefore, it is necessary to show brand-conscious SEO prospects how you can use optimization and PPC to build brand presence while simultaneously creating a profitable sales channel for non-branded searches. One of the keys to creating long term customer relationships in the SEO world is to show value month over month, and the residual aspect of good keyword optimization is that people will come back to the site by searching for the brand name once they know it, assuming the brand name matches up with the URL.

Finally, there are people who only want to build a brand presence on the search engines, and don’t necessarily have an interest in the potential for all of the traffic generated by search terms. Many clients want to have a presence on the web that takes people to a site and presents information in the same manner as a billboard or commercial. These are not always bad clients to have, as they may spend their advertising dollars in amounts comparable to radio and television campaigns. By adding value and creating better search engine positions for keywords relative to the brand being built, a search engine marketing agency can prepare for the day that the customer’s strategy changes into a keyword conversion model. This usually happens when a shakeup or merger brings in a manager more familiar with the internet and the potential of search. In cases like these, showing tangible value in combination with online branding expertise generally creates an opportunity for your agency to be retained.

PPC Glossary

2009-06-29T15:03:00.005-07:00

If you’ve got someone managing your Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign, then you probably are hearing a lot of jargon and acronyms. The world of PPC is similar to search engine optimization when it comes to abbreviations and tech-speak, but it is still important for a customer to understand what is being referenced in a conversation, since your PPC agency is using your money to make the best possible purchases. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) agencies generally use a whole raft of terms in their internal reporting, and unfortunately they don’t always tone down the jargon when speaking to customers.

Here is a by-no-means-definitive list of common PPC phrases that are used in the world of search engine marketing:

Adcenter – MSN’s PPC marketing platform, which shows ads on Bing and Microsoft properties.

Ad Group – A specific set of keywords associated with a related ad or group of ads. It is possible to have multiple ad groups in a campaign.

Adwords – Google’s Pay-Per-Click platform, which shows ads on Google, AOL, Ask.com, and multiple custom search engines.

Average Position – The average placement position of your ad over all its impressions. It normally takes several weeks for your average position to rise to the top in Adwords, even with high bids.

Bid – How much you are willing to spend on a click. A bid can be a “default” bid on a group of keywords, or a specific bid on a single keyword.

Broad Match – A type of keyword matching that will show your ad for the widest variety of terms deemed relevant by the search engine. In general, broad match keywords give a higher volume with a lower conversion rate.

Campaign – A set of ad groups. Even though each ad group can contain different keywords and ads, the campaign has a daily budget, geographic targeting, and other settings which will be effective for all the ads in the campaign. Once the campaign’s daily budget is exhausted, all the ads in the campaign stop appearing for their relevant keywords.

Channel – In content match, one of the websites where your ad is showing. You can choose specific channels or sets of channels, so you can choose to be on Facebook, or on certain sections or demographics where your ad is likely to get better results.

Click Fraud – Clicks from fraudulent activity. Some fraud comes from competitors intentionally clicking on your ad. Other fraud involves using automated tools to collect commissions for clicks (via channels like Google Adsense) or to exhaust your daily budget.

Content Bid – The default bid for a set of keywords on the content network. Note that this should be a fraction of your search bid.

Content Matching – The placement of PPC ads on websites. Ideally, these sites should have content that is relevant to the service offering of the company running the ad. Google runs content matching on its “content network.”

Contextual Advertising – Essentially the same thing as Content Matching, given that your ad is triggered by keywords in context on a news, article, blog, or content page.

Conversion – A desired action taken by a website visitor. With PPC, it is relatively easy to measure conversions on form fill-outs and purchases, but it is more difficult to quantify dollars earned from phone calls triggered by online ads. Search engines track visitors for up to 30 days, so your conversion may not happen until a subsequent visit several days later.

Conversion Rate - The percentage of times your ad resulted in a form fill-out, sale, or action. To calculate conversion rate, you take the number of actions divided by the number of clicks. A typical e-commerce conversion rate may be 2.5%, but a form fill-out conversion rate could be 10-20%. A very low conversion rate indicates problems.

Cost Per Conversion – The dollar cost associated with the conversion rate. If you had 100 clicks for one dollar each, and had a 5% conversion rate (5 conversions), your cost per conversion is $20. The formula is essentially the dollar cost divided by the number of conversions.

CPC – Cost Per Click. How much each click cost you. Because bidding is based on many factors, this amount is generally expressed as an average of multiple clicks. When applied to “advertising” it is synonymous with Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

Creative – The text of a PPC Ad. In Google, the first line of your creative is 25 characters, the second and third lines are 35 characters.

CTR – Click Through Rate. The actual number of clicks on your ad divided by the number of impressions.

Day Parting – Setting your ads to appear at certain times of day, or certain days of the week. Many B2B customers will day part so their ads run during business hours when they can answer the phone.

Dynamic Keyword Insertion – The placement of a variable field in ad text that will show a searcher’s actual search phrase (within limits) in the body of the ad.

Exact Match – A keyword setting that only lets your ad show up when a precise keyword is searched upon. In Google Adwords, brackets are used for an exact match, so a keyword like [vegetable man] would only trigger an ad when that phrase is typed in with no words before, after, or between those two words.

Geotargeting – In a campaign, setting your ads to appear in a certain city, state, or country. Also called Local Matching.

Keyword - A word or phrase that triggers an advertisement. Keyword matches can be based on broad match, phrase match, or exact match. Negative Keywords can be used to keep ads from showing for the wrong searches.

Impressions – Number of times your ad is served up, either as a search match or through content placement.

Landing Page – The web page that the display ad or keyword “lands” on when an ad is clicked. If there is not a specific page assigned to an individual keyword, the landing page is determined by the “default URL” in the ad.

Negative Keyword – A keyword that is used to determine when an ad should not be shown. For example, if you have a campaign about computer keyboards, but don’t sell wireless keyboards, then you would add “-wireless” to your list of keywords. Anyone typing in “wireless keyboards” would not see your ad because the negative keyword excludes it.

Phrase Match – A keyword matching type that only shows your keyword when someone types in the specified phrase in a search query. With phrase match in Google Adwords, quotes are used around the keyword, so a phrase match designation for “dog food” would trigger an ad when someone typed in a search for “best dog food recipe.”

Position Preference – A setting that specifies the desired position of your PPC ads. Note that this can sometimes keep your ad from showing.

PPC – Pay-Per-Click. A model of serving ads where you only pay when someone actually clicks on the ad.

Quality Score - A somewhat complex formula used by search engines to decide whether your keywords are relevant to the landing page, how much trust your campaign has, and the click through rate on your ads. Changing an ad can change its quality score, so it is usually best to copy the ad and edit it, then pause the old one when the new one has gained its own quality level. There are also geographic and bidding factors.

ROI – Return On Investment. There are various ways to calculate the value of a PPC campaign. Normally it takes at least a month to ramp up a campaign and gain a quality score, and more time to determine buying patterns and seasonality. PPC ROI can be tough to track beyond the simple cost/benefit analysis, but if clicks are not resulting in profitable sales, then improvement is called for on the site and in the campaigns.

Yahoo! Search Marketing – Yahoo’s PPC platform, previously known as Overture, previously known as GoTo. It shows ads on Yahoo! and Altavista.com.

Some of the more advanced features of PPC management have not been touched on in this glossary, given that a tutorial would be a better spot for showing people all of the features available in Pay-Per-Click. Google offers video tutorials for its Adwords product which are highly recommended for any DIY PPC enthusiasts. The world of PPC management can be very expensive, and anyone who is in charge of an account (or a liaison to an agency) should be cognizant of the different aspects of pay-per-click, and their relative advantages or pitfalls.

What Does “Above the Fold” Mean?

2009-06-26T10:02:00.004-07:00

“Above the Fold” is a newspaper term that has been adapted to web design. Originally, it referred to the information that was on the front page of a newspaper on the top section. Newspapers are sold on street corners, in vending machines, or at newsstands, so the biggest stories had to have easy to read headlines in an obvious place in order to get purchased. In website design, “above the fold” is equally applicable in the sense that the most important or actionable information should be visible without people having to scroll down.

As a selling point, having a clear message above the fold on your website is more important than it ever was for a newspaper. Most ecommerce and lead generation websites pay far more than the cost of a newspaper to get one person to visit the site. Whether you are purchasing traffic through an agency or Pay-Per-Click (PPC) service like Google Adwords, you will quickly find that the best converting keywords can cost anywhere from fifty cents to twenty seven dollars per click! If you’re investing this kind of money in one set of eyeballs, you should make sure that the landing page (the relevant page on your site, which should be the best match for your keyword) presents information to the reader quickly and encourages them to take action right away.

Eye tracking studies on popular sites like Google show how much value the top of a webpage contains. On a search engine, 100% of the people see the first three results, which is why people use search engine optimization techniques or Pay-Per-Click marketing to appear in these spaces. The shape of the “heat map” for eye tracking on Google is called the “golden triangle,” because of the value found in that section of above-the-fold space.

On a regular website, people have been conditioned to look for information in the center for information, and the top right for phone numbers, so there should always be a clear message at the top of just about every page on your website. Remember that you don’t have a lot of control over how or where people land on your site, so useful information should be built into the top and center of every page. As a side note, it has been observed that placing a contact form on the right margin “marginalizes” it, so it gets less attention than it would get if it were closer to the middle of the webpage. For people who get most of their customers through form fill-outs, even a small increase in conversion rate can be the difference between profitability and bankruptcy, so this should be one angle that is exploited whenever possible.

Another industry term used in website conversion optimization is “hero shot” which essentially refers to your product or service as the “hero” of the page. Logically, the image should convey that the product/service is the heroic solution to whatever problem or need that the customer wants addressed. People respond to images more quickly than they do text, so a picture showing how the product solves a problem will get a reaction. Depending on the landing page, the hero shot should be as relevant as possible to the search term. It generally goes in the upper center of the page below the header, which is sometimes called the "hero space."

One way to find out how well your on-page content is working is to use click tracking and analytics tools. Google Analytics has an overlay feature that shows which links people click on. Crazyegg and Clicktale offer even more advanced features which will either show you a heat map for user behavior or actual movies of mouse movement. This kind of advanced analytics is invaluable for testing site design and conversion features, because you can get unbiased information about how your site is performing.

The best information to put above the fold is your phone number, a brief contact form, or your top product categories and pricing. Secondarily, trust is a huge factor in turning visitors into customers, so you should be showing trust indicators like secure site logos, accreditations, and BBB membership information where people will see it right away. If you take credit cards and PayPal, you should have the logos visible right away, since acceptance of certain cards may be the difference between a sale and a lost visit.

The most important takeaway for the “above the fold” philosophy is that you want to create a quick value proposition that encourages people to stay on your website and get the information that they need. In the same way that newspapers offer a concise and attention grabbing headline to sell all the pages inside, your landing page’s above-the-fold (or "above-the-crease") space should do the same thing. No matter how traffic comes to your site, or what pages people land on, the "above the scroll” information is going to be the factor that determines whether you keep your audience or lose a potential customer.

SEO Tips

2009-06-24T10:14:00.005-07:00

There are multiple places online to get tips for SEO. In fact, some sites pride themselves in giving up to 55 different tips on aspects of search engine optimization. If you’re new to the game, or just a small business looking to build SEO into your website, these tips can be overwhelming and jargon heavy. Here are a few basic optimization tips for the casual web designer.

Don’t just copy other people’s metatags. This was the preferred “poor man’s SEO” practice for a long time. Sites would grab the top titles, keywords, and descriptions, make a few minor edits, and publish. This was based on the fallacy that on-page optimization was the source of search engine ranking. You should make your site relevant to today’s search demand, not a copy of a copy of a site that was somewhere 5 years ago.
Find out the best keywords by using the Google Keyword Tool. Look at the “related keywords” list to see if people are typing in synonyms or are looking for a specific service that you can provide.
Make every page title unique. Page titles are the key to how a search engine will rank the site. There are many other factors, but sometimes you can get great results on an existing site just by changing the title.
The home page title should cover the broadest possible topic matter, and interior pages should be more specific. A roofing contractor in Phoenix would start with a homepage title containing “Phoenix Roofing Contractor” and interior pages would have things like “Flat Roofs” and “Leaky Roof Repair” as topics.
Each major page should have at least 250 words of readable content. "Readable" means that you can read it out loud without sounding repetitive. Even though there are plenty of ranking pages with less than 250 words, they usually have other factors in play.
Put your site up now, submit it to search engines, and get links to it. After that you can add pages. In many cases people are afraid to launch a site because they are afraid that thousands of visitors are going to stop by and notice that the site is not perfect. This is not going to happen. Search engines need time to index your site, and traffic is going to go from zero to trickle in about 2 months, so you need to get the ball rolling right away.
Follow Google’s Guidelines, Install Webmaster Tools, and Install Analytics. These tools are powerful and free. Sometimes people are afraid to give Google so much information about site traffic, but Google pretty much already knows, so you might as well be a part of the intelligence gathering.
Compare advice from different “SEO Experts” and ask questions. Don’t be afraid to ask one optimization expert about the claims, advice, or techniques of another, without naming names. Nobody has a special relationship with Google, and if anyone says they have a proprietary or secret technique, it is probably not as good as the transparent one sold by reputable agencies. Agencies similar to Web.com Search Agency may not have esoteric SEO knowledge, but they do have experience in working with hundreds of sites, plus proprietary tools that make agency-based optimization much cheaper and less risky than DIY SEO.

Search engine optimization firms can help you get started with basic SEO and usually are able to offer products like link building, site optimization, and content writing which are above the skill level of the average webmaster. In fact, we have a network of webmasters that partner with us to provide SEO services during the site creation or redesign process. We have even had many site designers hire us to work on an optimization project for them so they could learn the basics of SEO and then build it into their own sites. The educational value of hiring an optimization firm can be very high as long as it involves clear account management and reporting. It is also very profitable for the SEO firm, since knowledgeable customers renew their contracts as their online business becomes more profitable, and they need to spend more time on making sales than maintaining their own SEO.

SEO Checklist If You Can't Find Your Site Google or Other Search Engines

2009-06-23T09:44:00.007-07:00

“Why can’t I find my site in Google” is obviously a very common question in the world of search engine optimization. In most cases there is a stock answer involving the age of the site, the number of backlinks, or the lack of content on the site. The title of the web page may not match up with the overall context of the page, or it may be “index.html” or “Welcome” instead of something descriptive. If the site isn’t being found at all on the search engines, here is a list of what to look for:

Robots.txt file exclusion – Every once in awhile a webmaster will create a development site and use the command “Disallow: /” in the robots.txt file, which can usually be found at: http://www.[yoursitehere].com/robots.txt . If you don’t have a robots file, that won’t stop you from getting found. Sometimes, webmasters and amateurs put the same wrong command in the file, and the result is a quick vanishing act in the search engines. (Note: If you use Google Webmaster Tools, it will tell you about robots.txt commands like this one, by saying that Google is not being allowed to index your site.)

Metatag exclusions – On your source code, which you find by going to your website and selecting “View” and “Source” in the menu bar, you should look for a line that says something like "meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW" in the code on the page. If this command is there, and you want your site to be found, this should be removed.

Duplicate On-Site Content – Do the pages on your site have the same content on multiple pages? Are the titles all the same? If so, the search engines may not know which page deserves the most attention. All content on your site should be unique, unless you need to have a standard piece of boilerplate on some pages. Even so, there should be plenty of content built around the boilerplate.

Duplicate Websites – A few years ago, our customers would independently come to an amazing revelation. Since our SEO worked on one website, they figured that they could copy the entire site onto a .net or .org domain name and hold down more than one spot in Google’s top 10. Unfortunately, this did not work because duplicate websites essentially get ignored in Google. If you are substantially copying the content off someone else’s website, or just scraping and pasting it, you are also unlikely to see results.

Content embedded in images, Flash, and JavaScript. Search engines have done a better job reading Flash files over the past few years, but there are still drawbacks. For one thing, lots of Flash designers embedded text in images, which can’t be easily read by search engines. In the same way, we have seen websites that looked like they had text, but were actually one big image. Search engines prefer text that is easy to read. When JavaScript is used, the search engines may be able to read it, but may not know what to do with the information or how to index it. In the same way, AJAX code is difficult for search engines to classify, or even find since it is delivered dynamically from a database.

Use of frames. There are still a few sites built in frames, and they still get the same poor results. Normally all the search engine sees is a homepage with a header, which is often just a picture. In this case the search engine doesn’t have anything to read other than a page title.

Copyright Violation (DMCA) – If you have been accused of copying someone else’s online or offline content, they can file a DMCA Removal Request with search engines. Normally these engines will attempt to contact you, but simultaneously they may remove your site content from their indexes. Most of the time you will get a letter in the mail from a law firm when this happens, but if your contact information is difficult to find due to private domain registration, then you may not get notified that way.

Bad neighborhood – What kind of content is on your site, and how do the search engines see it? Most of our clients would be considered “good neighborhood” sites, since we do not do SEO for adult, gambling, or offshore pharmaceutical clients. However, your content may have a keyword profile that is too similar to something that would not be found in safe search results. You may be linking to bad sites and not know it. In some cases we have had customers who had been hacked, and were hosting links to very bad domains, phishing sites, and the like. Once again, Google Webmaster Tools makes it easy to see how Google sees you, and by extension you can get a sense of how Bing and Yahoo are seeing your site.

Sending Malware and Viruses – Usually this is the result of having had your site hacked, but you may also be hosting software that does this type of thing on purpose. For some time, sites like Yahoo would take you out of their listings for a year if you were passing viruses, even unintentionally. Malware usually comes with “free” screensaver and chat programs, and normally you get a warning in Webmaster Tools, and a red notice on the search engine results saying “this site may harm your computer.” Experience with one client (hacked by sql injection http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL_injection) shows that the red notice cut off 90% of natural SEO traffic while the warning was up. Search engines have the choice of showing a warning or taking your site out of the index, and a new site is more likely to be removed.

Penalty/Filter – If your site is new, it may be seeing the “sandbox” filter, or it may not have been indexed yet. If you bought a domain name from someone else, it may have been banned for bad behavior. Lots of sites and domains for sale online are being sold because they tripped a spamming filter in Google, and no longer generate revenue.

If you believe that you have been penalized in Google, or Webmaster Tools has told you that you are, then you can always file a reinclusion request in Google, and Yahoo, but MSN’s reinclusion link is apparently guiding visitors to a search page with no information.

Most of the time, it is not difficult to get found in the search engines, but it is necessary to be patient. To see if you have been cached in Google, all you have to do is paste your domain name into the search box and see if your site is listed, or type in cache:example.com to see when your site was visited. Choose the “cached text” feature to see what Google can read.

Getting found by the search engines is the first step on the long road to rankings domination, but it is still the most important. Almost every other search engine optimization initiative regarding your site is going to be judged against how the web pages classified by search engine spiders. Advanced link building, content writing, pagerank sculpting, image optimization, and W3C compliance all take a back seat to being properly cached by the engines and placed somewhere among the billions of pages on the World Wide Web.

SEO Consultancy

2009-06-23T08:26:00.003-07:00

Web.com Search Agency offers search engine optimization consultancy for international clients and people who want to expand their domestic online presence. Our SEO consulting services can be customized and range from hourly analysis and strategy consultation to an intensive audit of your company’s SEO profile. Whether you’re looking to get an audience in a small geographical area, or dominate the global search market, Web.com Search Agency can create a strategic roadmap which can be implemented by people on your end, at Web.com, or any one of our website development contacts. Every year, we provide multiple specialized consultancy solutions to large and small companies looking to discover roadblocks and challenges to getting found in top positions on Google, MSN (now Bing), and Yahoo search engines in the US and abroad.

Job for an English Degree? Try Search Engine Optimization

2009-06-22T13:04:00.003-07:00

One of the toughest parts of having a liberal arts degree involves the job market. Even before the economy slowed down, degrees like Communications, Political Science, Psychology, and English were not necessarily the route to a high paying job. However, the increasingly semantic nature of search engines has led people with BA Degrees to find jobs in search engine optimization (SEO) which is widely assumed to be a technical field.

Even before search engines touted their “semantic” capabilities, the field was weighted toward English majors. This derived from the “content is king” philosophy in SEO which had the thesis that the content on a website was the prime factor in getting good search engine rankings. Content is still a very important piece of the puzzle, and for that reason SEO firms routinely hire writers and train them in search engine optimization.

To be sure, there is a great need for technical knowledge in the field of SEO. Most of the better agencies and consulting firms have programmers and webmasters on staff for internal and external initiatives. From an entry level standpoint in SEO, the requirements are a bit more basic. For instance, a general knowledge of HTML and experience putting together a basic website are a good start.

The process of search engine optimization basically involves matching up actual search queries (in search engines like Google) with relevant websites. Search engines gain their credibility by presenting information that is as germane to the search term as possible. The order of the words in the search is also an important factor, so people looking for Hotel Rooms in San Francisco will either type in “San Francisco Hotel Room” or “Hotel Room San Francisco.” Either way, a talented content writer can incorporate both phrases into a web page, and that same writer would have the skills necessary to format the meta content (what the search engine uses as a topic guide) to optimize the page.

Another important piece of the SEO puzzle is link popularity and link text. Essentially, the sites linking to your site are telling the search engines what you are about. If 100 sites say that you are about “orange widgets,” and you have made your site relevant to that term, you are likely to get a good ranking in the search engines. Once again, a person who has experience writing term papers and doing research will have an advantage when it comes to finding out good keywords, soliciting links via email, and determining the best word order in the actual link text.

Search engines like Google and Bing like to say that their ranking algorithms (the set of rules that determines how one site gets better placement than another) have up to 300 different factors in deciding placement. Many of these factors are closely guarded trade secrets, but to a certain extent the major rules are known to the SEO world. Given that many of these rules favor “natural language” in website design, and those rules are the same grammar and usage rules that have been drilled into the heads of most English Language and Literature graduates, there is a natural fit for people in this field. A testament to the power of this idea is the good placement for sites like Wikipedia and About.com, which almost always deliver very good results for any search. Despite challenges to the veracity of the content on these sites, there is plenty of information, lots of references, and each page is clearly formatted in a style that is useful to the reader and the search engine.

What can a Liberal Arts student do to improve their job prospects in the SEO field? First, do some research. Sources like SEOBook and PlanetOcean have useful guides for learning the basics of SEO. Search Engine Optimization for Dummies is a clear guide to the general principles of SEO, and helps people learn a few terms to drop during the job interview process. There are even plenty of YouTube videos dedicated to the topic. Second, creating a website and optimizing it is a real-world way to learn the ins and outs of search engine placement. The site doesn’t even have to sell anything, but it can function as a test case for SEO training. By learning first hand how to install free tools like Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools, you will be able to see how the search engine universe works, how to monitor traffic, and even how people find your website.

There is quite a bit of on-the-job training in the optimization world, and experience in working with diverse websites is key to getting a well rounded SEO education. By dealing in sites with sectors like health care, legal, real estate, retail ecommerce, and lead generation, you can learn more about the internet landscape than most business school graduates. Secondarily, you will get a feel for universal search engine principles and those that are applicable to specific niche fields on the World Wide Web. Eventually, your SEO knowledge can be a stepping stone to careers in online marketing and product development, which generally have a higher pay grade than other jobs open to people with BA degrees.

Finally, people with English, Psychology, and Communications degrees can benefit from the relatively open and growing status of the Search Engine Optimization industry. Experienced SEO professionals are still in demand despite cuts in other job categories. Many companies are only just learning that dollars spend on search engine marketing create a higher return than newspaper, radio, and TV advertising. These companies are scrambling for SEO professionals, or they are retaining the agencies that employ them. Given the natural fit between the skills needed for a BA degree and the semantic requirements of search engines, now may be the best time for graduates to consider a career in SEO.

Basic Robots.txt File Information

2009-06-22T08:30:00.008-07:00

On many occasions customers come to us with the complaint that they can’t be found. They either had rankings on all search engines and suddenly disappeared, or never were seen in the first place. Believing that they are the victims of a ban in the search engines, they come to us for search engine optimization advice. In many cases, the culprit is found in the robots.txt file, in the form of the classic:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

(Special Note: Using this command will make your site disappear in the search engines!) The forward slash after the disallow tells the engines to ignore all files. The soluton to this problem is to delete the forward slash, which tells search engines that everything is fair game. If you use Google Webmaster Tools, you will be told that the robots file prevents the indexing of your site. Many times a webmaster will upload this accidentally, or forget to take it down when a dev site goes live. The command effectively tells every honest search engine spider to stop reading your site and go away. Note that unethical spiders that scrape for phone numbers, email addresses, and content will not even bother to look at your robots.txt file, unless they are programmed to look for the files you don’t want found. If you are looking to block search spiders from dishonest people on the internet, the robots.txt file is probably not going to help you, so you should look to server level exclusions.

Depending on the complexity of your site, the robots.txt file can be modified to support your SEO initiatives. If you have a series of pages in a shopping cart, forum, or section that you want to exclude, you can disallow a specific directory:

Disallow: /Example

If you have multiple directories, you would just add them to the list:

User-agent:
Disallow: /Example
Disallow: /secret_plans
Disallow: /things_we_do_not_want_the_world_to_know

or you can use a newer wildcard format that disallows pages with certain phrases of string segments in them. If you wanted to disallow all the pages with a session ID in them, you could use a command that says:

Disallow: /*sessionid

Keep in mind that this will effectively shut out search engines for these pages, so you should ensure that your string is long enough that it does not accidentally blind the engines to pages that you want to get found. The wildcard robots disallow is ideal for people who may have bought sites and then found out that the site was a parked domain with thousands of “junk” pages installed by a previous owner. Even if you don’t have any of those pages on your site, it can take months for Google to notice that they no longer exist. By excluding them in your robots file, the removal of those cached pages can take less time.

In the past, people have disallowed the /images directory but normally we don't recommend this. Image and universal search features on search engines allow for your images to get indexed, and this leads to traffic. One of our clients made a substantial number of sales based on image search, so excluding this directory should be done with some thought.

If you want to exclude certain search engines, or direct them away from certain directories, it is easy to set up separate exclusion protocols in the file. For instance, excluding Yahoo! (which uses the “Slurp” robot”) from seeing a directory would be done this way:

User-agent: slurp
Disallow: /Example

If you want to see a list of all the useragents (a useragent is essentially the name of the robot) you can exclude, this site has a nice database.

Finally, you may want to tell the search engines about your XML Sitemap, if you haven’t already submitted it through Webmaster Tools. Doing this is easy, since all you have to do is add the command:

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

To the bottom of the robots.txt file.

For most people with a normal site, the whole robots.txt file should look like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

There are quite a few great online resources that will guide you through tips and tricks regarding the sitemap.txt file. Smaller sites only need a basic sitemap file, which only need to be modified if search engines have trouble finding pages, or crawl too deep and need to be excluded, slowed down, or properly directed. Larger sites will want to look into protocols that can keep the search engines on the right pages, prevent duplicate content issues, and even keep unnecessary files from getting added to search results. Even though the Robots.txt file gets overlooked by many webmasters, we have seen that Google and other engines may be looking at it many times a day, so any big changes to your site should at least include a review of the robots file. Finally, if your site vanishes from all three search engines at the same time, the Robots.txt file should be the first place you want to look before checking out potential new webmasters.

[Note:For more advanced information on the Robots Exclusion Standard, Wikipedia has some good information on this topic.]

Why Do Companies in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles Use Arizona SEO Firms?

2009-06-17T08:02:00.003-07:00

Many of our biggest customers come from outside the State of Arizona. Given the virtual nature of search engine optimization, this is no surprise, since SEO work can be done just about anywhere in the world, though results may vary. Since its inception in 1997, Web.com Search Agency has been performing SEO projects for firms in cities which have top level marketing agencies within the space of a few blocks. We service clients in Los Angeles, London, Chicago, New York, Miami, Houston, and around the world, and many of our Arizona SEO colleagues get a crack at the same prospects before they become clients.

What’s behind the “gold rush” for Arizona SEO firms? One consideration may be price. An expensive Park Avenue marketing agency has to pay a New York City price for rent, and higher salaries for people who need to live in NYC apartments, which are still not cheap despite recent housing price adjustments. As a result, the expense gets passed on to the client. A good deal of the talent pool for technology also finds itself priced out of “big city” living and finds the cost of living in Arizona more affordable, despite the air conditioning cost that comes with four months of triple digit temperatures.

However, price is not the only consideration for SEO work. There are plenty of far-east SEO firms who can do a project for a fraction of the cost in US dollars compared to prices charged by Phoenix, Scottsdale, and Tempe SEO companies. Some of our clients have gone this route first, and then come to us. Part of the problem with offshore search engine optimization is that its practitioners are not as familiar with US English vernacular, so the on-page content is in many cases inscrutable. Search engines are increasingly improving their natural semantic recognition features, so bad content gets bad results. Secondarily, offshore SEO firms are not necessarily as up to date on higher end linking and optimization practices. Many companies will use automatic tools to create content for your site, using scraped or “spun” information that approximates what you’d get when you put a dictionary in a blender. Lastly, the 12 hour time difference in communication means that emails don’t usually get answered until the next day, and you can’t have too many teleconferences where people on both sides of the phone are awake.

Outside of New York, one of the biggest sources of clients for Web.com Search Agency is Chicago. It may seem unusual for Phoenix firms to do Chicago SEO work, given that Phoenix is not windy, has no nearby lakes, and is rarely cold enough to require a jacket, but Chicago companies have been using Arizona optimization for years. Many of our Chicago SEO clients even fly out to our Scottsdale Airpark location in their own planes and pay us a visit. If they wanted to shop around for Arizona SEO, they would only have to travel a few miles to find several other agencies that do the same thing. The advantage of being in town with so many other agencies is the cross-pollination that comes with proximity. Secondarily, the many technology, website design, and hosting companies in Arizona provide a rich source of individuals who understand the HTML and programming techniques necessary for implementation.

Surprisingly, we also service SEO clients in London, where “optimisation” is the preferred spelling of the word. Some of these customers have a US or global presence, but other firms are looking for a global SEO experience base that may not be found servicing the comparatively lower number of sites in the UK. Other factors in play could be the cost of labor in the UK or EU, and the favorable exchange rate that makes it cheaper to hire a US firm and still get a higher level of quality and people you can ring up during working hours (albeit just barely).

What is not so surprising is the number of customers who come to us through search engines, and a scan of the top agencies in the nation would be weighted with SEO firms from Phoenix, Scottsdale, Mesa, Glendale, Tempe, and Chandler Arizona. Many of the most popular search terms bring up AZ agencies in the top 100 at the expense of larger cities. Given the lower population of the Phoenix metro area compared to LA or New York, this may seem unusual, until you consider that search engine rankings are a testament to the talent of the agency that got them, and Arizona has quite a few people who are good at search engine optimization.

SEO Consultant – What To Ask Before Hiring One

2009-06-16T13:52:00.005-07:00

The field of search engine optimization consulting contains people with varying skill levels and capabilities. When looking for an SEO consultant, you want an experienced individual or company who can give you advice that is useful and timely. Here are a few things to ask when selecting a search engine optimization consultant:

How many sites have you worked on? A good consultant should have worked a few dozen sites at minimum. Every site has its own nuances, and a well rounded SEO consultant will have come across different challenges with each site. Experience in problem solving and proactive prevention are two keys to making sure your site isn’t the victim of any “rookie mistakes.”
Can I call your references? It is not uncommon for optimization customers to demand non-disclosure agreements. However, there are generally a few people who are willing to be called as a reference, especially if the consultant delivered substantially good results.
What do you think of my site? Some consultants won’t look at your site without getting paid first. If someone is proposing an SEO job without at least looking through your site structure, you can put them at the bottom of the list of potential agencies. Several agencies, including Web.com Search Agency, will check out your site in order to craft a proposal that best meets your needs. Almost any good agency or consultant would point out glaring SEO obstacles before submitting a proposal. You shouldn’t expect to get in-depth optimization advice for free, but if your consultant did not mention a major obstacle, it is always possible that he/she did not notice it, which is a red flag in itself.
How much SEO do I need? Many consultants have fixed fees or a minimum hourly rate. The scope of your optimization project is going to be determined by factors like keyword competition, the number of pages to optimize, your current link popularity, and difficulties peculiar to your website. Some sites need extra coding, restructured URLs, or upgrades before SEO can be properly implemented. Even so, custom SEO consulting generally takes this into account before a proposal is generated.
Is implementation included? Most of the time your webmaster will be the one to add metatags, upload content, or make back end changes to the site. SEO professionals can often add this information in a pinch, but it doesn’t always make sense to have too many hands touching your website code. Moreover, webmasters may not be willing to share passwords, and should ideally be part of the process so search engine optimization work does not get blown out by the next update.
Have you worked on sites in my field? Despite the fact that SEO follows pretty much the same rules whether you’re selling baseball bats or music boxes, there is a certain advantage to having someone who already knows the keywords associated with your products and services. Admittedly, the structure of your site has to be search engine friendly no matter what you are selling, so SEO experience in your field is not a requirement, but it is a big plus.
What kind of techniques do you use? Even today, some advisors use tricks that are a few years out of date, and may harm your site’s search engine rankings. By learning about the type and kind of SEO processes being used, you can do some homework and make your own decisions.
What are the risks of your advice? Most of the time, bad SEO advice does nothing. In this case, “nothing” is expensive, but you aren’t directly being harmed. Search engines usually devalue bad links to your site, and ignore duplicate content, so you are paying for no progress. In extreme cases, bad SEO consulting will get you filtered, penalized, or banned in the search engines. Remember that you are responsible for your website, and search engine robots can penalize you automatically if you meet a certain threshold of “black hat” practices on your site.
How long do you expect it to take? The stock answer is that it should take months, unless you have a great site and link profile with a clear stumbling block. This is not common. New sites take longer to rank than old sites. New links to your site need time to “age” to get the best results. If someone tells you that it only takes 2 weeks to get top 10 results, then you should be wary.
How much will it cost? Keep in mind that this answer will be wildly different depending on who you ask. If someone is claiming great results for a few hundred dollars, this is unlikely. If the cost is in the tens of thousands of dollars, then you should get more bids and also get plenty of up-front information about what is required to get the job done. If you're selling airline tickets or online dating, the price will be quite high, but if you're selling a local service, the price should be lower. Search Engine Optimization should not be a high-pressure field, so if someone is too pushy about getting you on board, you should at least shop around.
How do you measure results? In most cases, results can be measured by search engine ranking reports and Google Analytics, which is a free tool available from Google which measures all traffic to your site. Your SEO consultant should set you up as the “owner” of the analytics, but have access in order to see how things are going, and generate custom reports to show progress. Counting backlinks and the number of pages optimized only works when results are achieved, so if you’re getting work with no progress, then it may be time to ask more questions.

Transparency is the key to any good SEO consulting relationship. Given that almost every known optimization technique is discussed online at length in blogs and forums, the consultant’s technique and experience are what you are buying. A good SEO advisor is worth several times the money you pay him or her, but the key to getting the best ones involves asking enough questions up front to ensure that you have made the best choice. Don’t be afraid to ask around, or even compare one person’s claims against another’s. In almost every case, a consultant should be able to talk about techniques that another vendor is selling, and discuss the pros and cons of any particular course of action.

Search engine optimization agencies usually pool the consulting job among several specialists, which allows for more vibrant and dynamic approaches to your particular website’s attributes. This also allows each specialist to determine the most relevant links, best content, and the ideal structure on your site for search engine robots. In turn, your site has become easier for the search engine to classify, so your rankings will noticeably improve over the course of your project.

Landing Page Optimization

2009-06-15T14:07:00.005-07:00

In most cases, getting people to visit your website takes time and money. Unless you have a popular site with built-in traffic, you are probably counting on offline advertising, pay-per-click, search engine optimization to bring people to your online business presence.

If people are coming to your website and leaving without buying anything, you definitely want to “optimize” the page for conversion, which is somewhat different than “search engine optimization,” which makes your site popular with search engine robots. Landing page optimization is the process of improving any page that gets direct traffic from search engines, banner ads, marketing initiatives (including TV and Radio), or email.

Here is a list of the most common landing page optimization factors that improve your conversion rate:

Trust Indicators. The most common indicators are similar to the Hackersafe Logo, which shows that the site is safe, and the Verisign Logo which tells the user that your transactions are secure. If you’re part of the BBB online program, then using their seal is highly recommended on the landing page. Note that a modern looking site with a clean user experience is a very big trust indicator in itself, so if your website has grainy images, stark shopping cart pages, and an antiquated look, it will lose conversions.
Credit Card Logos & PayPal – People want to see the cards that you accept and the PayPal logo (assuming you take PayPal.) Even though credit card acceptance is assumed by most people, they aren’t always sure you’ll take their card, especially if it is a Discover or Diner’s Club card. Better yet, if you do take card types that are less common than Visa and MasterCard, these users have more of an incentive to use you in the future.
Accreditations – Similar to trust indicators, accreditations give third-party evidence that you are a reliable source. If you’re a private school, there are private school associations that have accreditations. If you’re a university, you can reference the state or federal agency that accredits your school, library, laboratory, or instruction program.
Calls to action – You can never be too obvious when you tell people what you want them to do. If you want them to fill out a form, put it in the middle of the page. If you want them to call, say “call now” in the brightest colors on the page. Many sites have multiple elements competing for attention, but the call to action should be the biggest draw.
Phone number – If you take phone calls, you should make the phone number visible on every page of your website, and especially the landing pages. Sometimes the biggest key to online success involves adding a phone number, which can create more leads than a form or shopping cart.
Message Matching – If you’re running an online ad for “zebra shirts” then the landing page should have the same term prominently placed in the text above the fold, or a picture of a zebra shirt should be present right away. Site users should not have to look very hard to find the product that they are already looking for. No matter what the offer, product, or point of view, customers will stick with you if you can keep the promise you made in your ad text.

The optimization of landing pages is a continuous process which is well worth the effort. If your site is profitable, you can improve your margins by making the shopping process easier. If your site is getting traffic that doesn’t convert, you will want to test out different landing page configurations before giving up. If you are running different ads for the same product, you can test out messages, colors, image placement, and many other factors in order to see which approach makes the most money.

Finally, a landing page should convey the same amount of trust as your homepage, if not more. Most savvy marketers will land paid traffic on a specific landing page with messaging designed to match the offer or product in the ad. This page has to create instant confidence in the mind of the user, so many of the same things you would put on your homepage are applicable to a landing page as well. Similarly, the rest of the shopping process should continue the trust theme, right up through the order confirmation. By having confident customers who believe in your website, your conversion rate can beat that of your competitors, which allows you to expand your online business while improving profitability.

SEO for Real Estate Agents - Realtor Marketing

2009-06-15T08:38:00.001-07:00

Agents in the real estate industry usually have the hardest time getting rankings on search engines. There are a variety of factors which keep agents from getting first page rankings for common real estate searches, so it takes more effort and creativity to help brokers and agents get found in the search engines. As a realtor marketing initiative, search engine optimization is a tough but rewarding avenue of promotion for elite real estate agencies.

More than any other group, agents understand that “location” is important for getting traffic from search engines. Unfortunately, there are a lot of real estate agents out there, and most of them already have websites. By necessity, real estate websites are very similar, with community information, MLS functionality, and a standard page layout. There is a certain expectation among real estate professionals and their customers that agent collateral material (business cards, brochures, vehicle stickers, and websites) is always the same. For instance, almost every agent has a business card with their picture on it.

Breaking out of this pattern, at least on your website, is the key to successful search engine marketing for the real estate professional. Given that most real estate websites are ready-made from a template, search engines tend to ignore sites with content that is duplicated across multiple sites. By making sure that all of the content on your site is unique, you have an advantage over many of your colleagues who bought a template where the only difference between sites is the name of the broker and the communities that are serviced. Most importantly, the homepage of your website should have content that stands out in its originality, and exceeds 250 words in length.

SEO professionals will first advise realtors about the pages on their site before getting into advanced tactics. This is because real estate sites not only need original content on as many pages as possible, but also need back-end code that tells the search engines what the site is about. One way to stand out among most of the template sites is to have well structured title tags that don’t compete with each other. For instance, if your website is about “Scottsdale Real Estate” then you should not be overly repeating the term in the titles of your pages, or else the search engine will not know which page is the most important source for the topic. You can make the homepage about “Scottsdale Real Estate” and the interior pages could be about communities in Scottsdale, or variations like “Scottsdale Homes.” The title of your web pages is a very big factor in determining on-site SEO, and there are several strategic methods used by SEO experts to get as many valuable community terms by matching your site titles with content on the same pages.

A real estate site should also avoid the biggest SEO failure for sites built from templates, which involves “off site” content that looks like it is still on your website. For example, if you click on the MLS feature of your site, and you go from www.MyRealEstateSite.com to www.TemplateRealEstateSite.com/MyRealEstateSite then your site is not getting found for an important part of its content. If your main URL changes when you click on certain links, then you don’t get the same kind of credit that you would get from having the content hosted on your site. Your website can look incomplete, which doesn’t help it rank in search engines.

Successful SEO for real estate websites also includes factors that are not on the page. Search engines value links from other sites to your site, and this is even more true in the real estate game. In a popular community or big city, thousands of agents are vying for the same territory, and they are all trying to make their sites rank for the areas with big commissions. When all the on-page factors are the equal among a big group of sites, then a search engine like Google will need to make its judgment based on the “endorsements” that other sites provide through linking. A link from a trusted site relevant to real estate can be worth hundreds of times more than a link from a site that is not relevant, so selecting and soliciting links from the right places is essential for the realtor who needs search engine rankings.

One way real estate agents stand out in the online world is to have a specialty. If you specialize in foreclosures, luxury real estate, condos, apartments, buying homes, or certain properties, you have an opportunity to stand out. Moreover, if you have client services like buyer rebates or free multiple listing services, you are also better positioned to gain traction in areas that other agents aren’t working. Part of the standard SEO process for real estate agents involves keyword research, which shows the number of searches made in the past month for a particular term or phrase. By matching your site with phrases that have high volume, or better conversion rates, you can cherry pick your market and even weed out searches that may be looking for low value offerings.

What if your site can’t be changed or fixed? There is still an option in the field of search engine marketing (SEM) on the Pay-Per-Click side. While this is more expensive in the long term than optimization, it can get very fast results. Basically, you are paying for a small ad to show up near the search results. The cost for each click generally get higher as you move toward to the top of the list, but once again, having a site that stands out will give you an advantage considering that many people will click several ads before choosing an agent. You can put your ad in the fourth, fifth, or sixth position and still get traffic that yields results, especially if you study your competitors and present unique options to your potential prospects.

Even though there are fewer real estate agents than there were two years ago, the realtor marketing field is more competitive than ever. Given that buyers have the advantage and inventory is at an all time high, it is essential for realtors to get as many leads as possible. By using advanced SEO tactics, and having a site that stands out, it is still possible to get search engine traffic from interested buyers and sellers who need a good real estate agent. Even better, SEO can put a single agent ahead of agencies that may spend more on high-rent locations and multiple staffers. By understanding the search engine playing field, the average agent can have phenomenal results and search volume, and in many cases the process costs less than a single commission.

Internet Defamation

2009-06-12T13:27:00.005-07:00

Internet defamation can have a decidedly bad impact on your business and your personal life. Search engines make it possible to bring up information that is years out of date, completely inaccurate, or even about someone else who shares your name. You could be losing customers because a business with a similar name in another state gave its own customers a bad experience, and they rightfully posted complaints online for the world to see. You may even be the victim of malicious competitors who will libel your business in an attempt to mislead customers who would normally be inclined to buy from you.

There are a variety of ways to deal with online defamation. If you look up your name in the search engines and find out that there is false or distorted information about you, then some form of reputation management is necessary to restore your good name. Because we aren’t lawyers, we can’t give advice about legal avenues, but here are some alternatives to litigation that help people remove negative information from search engine listings.

Contact the site owner. In many cases site owners will remove negative or defamatory information from forums if requested. Sometimes the webmaster is someone with a real or perceived customer service issue with your company, and resolving the issue is one way of getting the posting removed. If the information is on RipoffReport.com, then you are not likely to get the posting removed.
Push the information down. If you can’t take the postings off the internet, you can improve positive reviews of yourself and your service. One way to do this is by creating new sites that sing your praises. Another way is to increase the search engine rankings for existing websites that talk about you in a positive tone. Good news can chase bad listings onto the second or third page of search engine results, where it is much less likely to be found.
Improve your public relations presence. Submit press releases through online channels. Add new pages to your website, and get positive news that outweighs the negatives. There are many charities that will thank you on your website if you make a contribution or help sponsor an event. Local and state governments often mention companies positively when they volunteer or help with an initiative. When all else fails, toot your own horn and ask employees and friends to add postings about you to their blogs and online social networks.

In the meantime, address the issue with your customers if it is false. Make sure you have talking points if you are asked about the posting, and explain why the online defamation is inaccurate. If the libelous information is well known, you can post an explanation that preemptively diffuses the issue by discussing it in general terms. Usually it is best to avoid naming the guilty party, or the party you suspect. However, you should not link to the offending website or respond in forums unless you absolutely have to, because responding usually makes the post relevant and gives it new life.

If you aren’t proficient in DIY reputation management, you can hire a search engine optimization company to help you. There are quite a few methods for removing or reducing the impact of negative publicity about you or your business from the search engines. Search engine reputation management professionals can do everything from contacting the offending sites to creating multiple websites that talk about you in a positive manner.

SEO Tools – Free Search Engine Optimization Tool Kit

2009-06-11T13:24:00.004-07:00

One of the most popular sections of our site is the free SEO tools page . In fact, the tools page is so popular that many of our competitors use these tools to get quick search engine metrics for their own potential customers. Here’s A Quick Breakdown about what each tool does:

Domain Trust Find out your site’s age, PageRank, Number of Backlinks, How many of your pages are indexed, and positions for 3 of your keywords. This tool has been updated to compare your site to two of your competitors for the same phrases.

Site Submission – Submit your website to search engines. This may seem old fashioned, but our company was founded on the principle of getting people into search engines by submitting them, and new sites should be submitted so search engines know to crawl them and start the clock on your “sandbox.”

PageRank Checker Not everyone likes using the Google Toolbar, since it basically tells Google about every page that you’re visiting. You might also work for a company that won’t let you download and install toolbars. The PageRank checker is a perfect shortcut for people who want to know PageRank without downloading a toolbar.

Ranking Report Get Google, MSN, and Yahoo rankings for up to 3 keywords. Our regular customers get larger reports with comparisons to previous months, trends, etc, plus an explanation of how their SEO program is growing.

Link Popularity Checker See your link popularity vs. that of 3 competitors. Note that there are ways to beat people with quality links vs. link quantity.

SEO Competition Report One of our favorites, this tool lets you Compare site age, PR, Backlinks, and Pagerank against the top 10 Google results. It is also very educational for new clients, because it shows them how much (or how little) work is necessary to get a site ranked for a particular phrase.

Meta Generator Got some basic HTML Skills? You can type up a title, meta description, and keywords and our generator will create the code to put on your pages for you. Just make sure you replace the metatags that might have been there previously, so the search engines don’t get confused.

Shortcut Widget – Put our tools on your own website! This tool has dropdown boxes so you can check one metric at a time, and if you work in the field of SEO and want a tool to give your own customers, this one helps you illustrate a variety of optimization factors without all the hassle of paying a developer for complex code and maintenance.

As any good Search Engine Optimization agency can tell you, free tools are a great place to start but a poor place to finish. We like to use them to help our clients understand the many factors involved in getting great search engine positions. On the “paid” side of the equation, our customers get experienced SEO consultation, and customized optimization designed to match up real-world search demand with your products and services. We have also built quite a few proprietary processes which help you save the time and money compared to DIY optimization. Even though there aren’t too many secrets in search engine optimization, proper use of SEO tools is often the difference between success and mediocrity in the search engine world.

How to use a search engine

2009-06-11T08:00:00.005-07:00

Microsoft has a commercial for the new Bing Search Engine which is quite entertaining if you understand the context. Basically, someone mentions a topic and another person starts babbling about things scarcely related to it. I happened to watch this commercial with someone not as immersed in the field of search as I am, and to that person, the ad didn’t make any sense at all.

In the same way, we see data in Google Analytics and the Google Keyword tool that tell us how people are using search engines. Many people would be surprised with the results. For one thing, quite a few people are using the search engine as a “browser bar” and typing URLs directly into the search box. As long as someone already knows about your site, and you are the #1 listing on Google (or Yahoo and the aforementioned Bing) they you are still in luck. If you're a direct competitor of a known brand, you can take advantage of this by buying your competitor's URL as a sponsored keyword. People type complex questions into search engines, after the fashion of the old AskJeeves.com model. The results for complex questions can be disappointing because search engines still like to parse keywords into matches that are most similar to the query, so in lots of cases you can ask a question and get forum posts which contain the same question, and the top results won’t always be questions that got answered. In the future, semantic search engine technology may be good enough to solve this problem, but there is definitely a gap between queries and highly relevant answers.

It might be interesting to see a commercial that actually tells people how to use a search engine. Even in the field of Search Engine Optimization we get questions from people who could have gotten the answer by typing two words into Google. We all have tales of friends and family members who wanted information, and were shown how to use the search engine to retrieve it. In many cases people can still be amazed (and alarmed) that you can get a picture of their back yard from space, or show their front yard from the street. Given the large amount of anecdotal evidence, it would appear that a few commercials disguised as public service announcements might open up the world of search to millions of new searchers.

Beyond the standard search features, there are a lot of things our potential clients don’t know about when it comes to search engines. For instance, the map feature was less well known until it was integrated into local search results, but now anyone with a local presence wants to be found on Google Maps. The shopping feature ( primarily Google Shopping/Froogle) has helped a number of our clients make sales by getting product searches to show above the regular results. We have found that many of our best customers are more likely to renew if they are making money from some aspect of search engine traffic, even if it isn’t mainly from the natural results that appear under the search button. Exposure in places like Google News, Video, and Image search opens our customers up to new possibilities, and services that we can fulfill for them.

Considering the number of people who didn’t know about these features, it may be time for a public refresher course on everything a search engine can do, and how to do it. Back in 1999, the Lycos Search Engine had a commercial which showed a Labrador Retriever getting whatever was written on a piece of paper, then it showed someone typing in a search engine query. The idea was simple, and it showed uninitiated people how to search. Apple has an approach with its Iphone which shows people what they can do (“there’s an app for that”) by actually demonstrating the phone’s features in a series of commercials. For people who make their money in the field of search, it would appear that there is a tremendous opportunity to re-educate the general public about all the things that are now available on search engines. In an economy that may be stagnant for some time, more customer knowledge can still create growth in the search sector, which will in turn allow people in the online marketing field to survive and thrive.

SEO Glossary

2009-06-09T10:55:00.011-07:00

The world of search engine optimization is jargon heavy, and we often have to take a step back when speaking with prospective customers because we are immersed in the “language” of SEO. The list below has some of the more common optimization terms used on a daily basis, but we also have an older glossary that is somewhat more in depth. Note that SEO terms often have a different definition than the same terms related to internet practices.

Age – First appearance of site in Archive.org, or first appearance in search engines. Not to be confused with domain age, which is the registration date of the domain name. Older sites have more credibility, but for SEO purposes the “age” clock starts when a site is cached by a search engine.

Algorithm – A very complex series of rules used by a search engine to determine rankings. The Google Algorithm uses up to 200 different factors to determine web rankings.

Analytics – Most often, this is a reference to Google Analytics, a free way to measure your site traffic. Other analytics programs include ClickTracks, WebTrends, and Omniture.

Anchor Text – Linked text on a web page. Example: This is anchor text. Anchor text is important because search engines use it to determine what the destination page is about. Therefore, anchor text must be topical and relevant.

Backlinks – The number of links from other websites to your website. Google Webmaster Tools will give you the most accurate picture of your own links, and a search in Yahoo under link:yourcompetitorsitehere.com will tell you how many links Yahoo is listing for that site.

Ban – A severe search engine penalty that takes you completely out of the index. Normally caused by using black hat techniques.

Black Hat – In reference to search engine optimization, a technique that is unethical in the eyes of a search engine, and can get you de-listed.

Bounce Rate – The number of people who come to a web page from another site (or search engine) and leave without visiting any other pages. A high bounce rate is believed to negatively affect search engine rankings over time. Most often measured using Google Analytics.

Cache – The search engine’s stored data about your site. This information can be weeks or months out of date, depending on your crawl rate. When you make SEO changes to your site, it won’t be applied until the site gets re-cached and re-indexed. To see your cache in Google, type in cache: followed by your website.

Content – All text on your website readable to the search engine. Usually this is in reference to the body text on your pages.

Conversion – A visit to your site that results in an action being completed by the user. This can be a form fill-out, purchase, or phone call.

Conversion Rate – The number of conversions divided by the number of visitors. Higher conversion rates are always preferred. In Google Analytics, this can be considered "Goal" conversion.

Crawl Rate (Frequency) – The interval between search engine robot visits to your site. Generally, sites with frequent changes and more interesting (to a robot) content get visited more often. Pages with higher PageRank also get visited more often.

Description – A metatag that allows for a brief description of the page’s content. All description tags on a site should be unique, and less than 256 characters.

Directory – A website that lists other websites in categories.

Duplicate Content – Content that is substantially similar to content on other sites or on multiple pages of your own site. Non-original content is generally ignored by search engines, and referred to as a “duplicate content penalty” when it impacts your site. Duplicate content is often cached but not presented in normal search results.

External Link – A link to another site or online resource from your site.

Google Sitemap – An XML sitemap that lists pages on your website that you want Google to find. The same protocol is used by Yahoo and MSN. Several sources online will create a sitemap for you. Not to be confused with a sitemap that lists all the pages on your website.

Filter – A reduction in search engine ranking for a number of possible reasons. Filters are different than penalties, in that when the item tripping the “filter” is removed, then results should bounce back.

Indexing – When a search engine applies your site results and links to its current index. Web pages can be cached for some time before the cached results are applied to the index.

Internal Link – Links from pages on your site to other pages on your site. How pages link to each other is known as Navigation.

Keyword Blurring – Using the same keywords on multiple web pages. This keeps the search engine from picking a “best” page for the keyword, so multiple pages may have lower positions that a single page devoted to the topic.

Keyword Stuffing – Using multiple keyword repetition on a web page. Search engines prefer text and keyword use that is more readable and user-friendly.

Keyword Tool – Any tool that helps determine keyword demand. Wordtracker and the Google Keyword Tool are two popular sources.

Keyword Research – Strategic research into the demand for keywords relevant to a website’s topic. Good keyword research also uncovers synonyms and search terms that may improve site traffic.

Link Juice – A way of explaining the relative power of any link to another page on the same site or external web page, based on the power of the referring page and the number of other links on that page. For example, a powerful page with a single outbound link to your site would have more “link juice” than the same page a link to you among 49 other links. Link Juice Illustrated.

Links – In the world of SEO, “links” is most commonly a way of referring to inbound links to your website, given that Google bases a great deal of its rankings on other sites that link to yours. The value of links is highly variable, and links from sites trusted by search engines are more powerful than links from low quality sites.

Link Popularity – An overall measurement of a website or web page’s link value, as determined by links from outside sources and links form other pages, which may themselves be getting good inbound links.

Long Tail – A keyword that contains a long search phrase. Long tail keywords usually have a lower search volume but a higher conversion rate, because the people who type them in have a very specific idea about what they want.

Metatags – Page code not normally visible to a site visitor which describes the content of the page. The Meta Title, Keywords, and Description tags are the most common, but metatags can contain many different fields of data not important to search engines.

Navigation – The way links are configured on a website to allow people to get to other pages. Search engines like to follow navigation and use it to determine the relative importance of pages on a site.

PageRank – (1) a numerical representation applied by Google showing the link value of any given page. This is completely determined by links from other websites and internal links. It is not a representation of the relevance of the site. There is a logarithmic scale of 1 to ten for PageRank, and higher numbers may require millions of links. This can be found using the Google Toolbar. (2) The algorithm at Google, not completely known to the public, that determines part of how links impact rankings.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) – Paid search engine advertisements that appear next to search results. PPC can be very expensive, but can be executed within hours, while SEO can take months.

Penalty – A change in search engine rankings caused by breaking one or more “rules” of search engine ethics. A search engine “filter” is a less strict penalty, but a “penalty” can be applied for a longer time period and is generally a sign that you are believed to be deliberately violating webmaster guidelines for search engines.

Ranking – A keyword position on a search engine, anywhere from #1 to somewhere in the billions. Usually you want your site to show on the first page for your keywords.

Ranking Report – A listing that shows positions on search engines (usually Google, MSN/Bing, and Yahoo) for a list of preferred keywords. Monthly ranking reports will show you your progress over time.

Reinclusion Request – A request to a search engine that a site be reexamined for inclusion back into listings. This is most commonly done when a site has been penalized or banned.

Relevance – The key to good SEO. More relevant sites are preferred by search engines because they confirm the search engine user’s trust in the ability of the engine to deliver results. SEO practices help format a site in such a way that the engine can understand its relevance.

Robot – An automated program that visits your website.

Robots.txt – A file on your website that can either allow robots or restrict them. Robots files can be useful when you want duplicate pages to be ignored, or search engines are crawling unnecessary pages.

Sandbox (AKA Sandbox Penalty or Google Sandbox) – An artificially low ranking due to having a new website. The existence of the sandbox penalty is debated, but generally a new site will get lower rankings. Search engines use this to prevent junk sites from getting rankings. There are ways to get out of the “sandbox” by being relevant, but customers with new sites are still advised that search engines may take some time to show good rankings.

Search Volume – How many times (usually per month) that a keyword search is made in a given search engine, or all engines. High search volume indicates a competitive keyword which may be more profitable.

Short Tail – A one or two word search term like “auto parts” that gets a high search volume, but is not very specific. A “long tail” version of the same term would be “used auto parts free shipping.”

Spider – Essentially a search engine robot that “crawls” your website for information.

SEM – Search Engine Marketing. This most often refers to Pay-Per-Click initiatives, but can also include SEO as part of an online marketing strategy.

SEO – Search Engine Optimization, or the practice of getting websites ranked on search engines through a variety of specialized methods.

SERP – Search Engine Results Page. The list of websites that you get when you make a search on a search engine.

Silo – A way of structuring categories on your website and individual web pages. Normally all the pages and navigation links in a silo are relevant to each other, and the “silo” structure helps improve rankings by structuring similar items into easily navigated categories. This benefits search engines and site users.

SPAM – In search engine parlance, Spam is not junk email but site content and linking practices that are keyword stuffed, automated, or created to get undeserved rankings for search terms.

Submission – The act of submitting a site to search engines or directories. For new sites, submission is still useful, but any site cached in a search engine would not need to be re-submitted.

Title – Also known as the meta title, the title of each web page appears at the top of the browser window. It tells search engines about the topic of each page. A well written title can have the fastest impact on search engine rankings if all other factors are good.

Webmaster Tools – Google Webmaster Tools is a free program that will help the average user understand how Google sees the website, if there are any problems, and if the site is penalized. Highly recommended to any webmaster.

White Hat – Search Engine Optimization techniques that are approved by search engines.

XML Sitemap – A “Google Sitemap” or a list of pages that you want search engines to find. This normally gets placed in your root directory in an XML format and named “sitemap.xml.” The sitemap contains information about pages, their relative priority, and how often they are updated.

It should be noted that this list is by no means complete, and different people in the SEO industry use different terminology. The purpose of this glossary is to make the language of optimization more transparent to the average user or potential search engine optimization customer, so terms may be added or edited later.