SEO and Web Design Tips Straight from the Core

Yahoo and Microsoft Team Up

2009-07-30T06:44:00.001-07:00

Some people in the search engine optimization and search engine marketing world are saying "Finally!" as #2 (Yahoo) and #3 (Microsoft aka. MSN aka. Live aka. Bing) search engines have teamed up to go up against Google and try to make internet advertising interesting again. Carol Bartz CEO of Yahoo has only been in charge for 7 months and struck a deal that has been lingering for a long time. Between the 3 major search engines; Google, Yahoo and Bing there is roughly 85% of all search queries going through them. Google sits pretty with about 65% of search queries, Yahoo comes in around 10%-11% and Bing has been floating around 8% but has been increasing since its birth in May of 09'.
There wasn't any exchange of funds, but the 24 month process of taking over the Yahoo search engine is going to result in 88% of advertising going to Yahoo for letting Microsoft advertise to the millions of dedicated Yahoo email users. Earlier this year Yahoo found a home for their new data center in Lockport NY after striking a great deal with the local power company. There hasn't been any word on any changes to that deal so the residents of WNY should rest assure that the estimated 65 jobs will still be coming to the Buffalo area by 2011.
Many people know there was an offer to buy out Yahoo to Co-Founder Jerry Yang by Microsoft for over 48 Billion Dollars, which he had turned down and sources say many people on the Yahoo board, want him removed from power and that was a silly decision.
The big picture shows that even though they are going to team up, that is only 20% of the search market within the 2 search engines and more search engines are popping up all the time. Search.com has been one search engine appearing on all Analytic reports as a major contributor to traffic to the sites.
Google may not get de-throned by the two merging on this advertising deal, but I am sure over time they will give them a run for their money.

Bing New Search Engine

2009-06-24T07:31:00.000-07:00

The release of Bing.com,late May 09', Microsoft's new search engine replacing Live.com and MSN.com as their new search platform has everyone wondering what it can bring to the table.
The first new feature noticed was the video search feature which allows the searcher to view 5-10 seconds of the video before deciding if that was what they were looking for. Say you do click into one of the videos displayed on the search results, you can then watch the video and still search more results narrowing your search down and still watching the current video.
The next feature, Bing Cashback allows searches that are looking for a product to purchase, to save additional money on the purchase, just by searching for it on Bing and signing up for a Bing Cashback Account. Some stores are listed in a database that you can scroll through and proceed to the site and look for qualified items to purchase and save anywhere from 1%-20% (highest I have seen) on the qualified purchase to be placed in an account, similar to paypal. Once the account has recieved 5$ or more worth of savings, you can either have the funds transfered to a paypal account, paper check by mail or electronic deposit into your checking account.
From what I have heard a $68 Million dollar marketing budget is going to put Bing.com on the map and to give Google.com a run for thier money.

Getting ecommerce sites to convert with a shopping cart.

2009-05-12T07:28:00.000-07:00

Just about everyone that has a brick and mortar these days, also has an online business storefront as well. These online stores always have some sort of checkout process that ranges anywhere from 3-20 steps to complete to get the purchase completed.
You really should find a happy medium to accommodate the variety of users you may be experiencing. Part of your marketing campaign "research and development" you should already have a great idea of who your target market is and you should really design and develop your site if it already isn't, for that particular demographic.
When choosing your shopping cart method, or when you develop it yourself keep in mind the number of steps and the information that you may require. The acronym "KISS" (keep it simple stupid) still holds strong today and really should be implemented on the web as well. Keep your checkout short and sweet and make sure all your charges are clear cut. Shipping charges might make a few people drop from the process, but better to have them drop early so that you could pinpoint that your shipping charge is what is stopping the sale. Unfortunately with Ecommerce sites there is no salesman that is going to inform you where he lost the sale, so you have to use behavior and bounces to determine which step is causing you to lose sales and move from there.

Website has malicious software and stops AdWords.

2009-04-29T07:43:00.000-07:00

If you have a lot of website traffic and are having your website hosted with a third party with low level security on the servers you may encounter someone with a little more time on their hands than you and decide to hack the server.
Now when you go to your home page it says the site may contain malicious software and you have an option to continue to the site at your own risk.

Step one is contact your hosting provider and have them clean up the server so that you may be reconsidered for your listing.
After you are cleared you need to use your webmaster tools to request a reconsideration for your adwords account and your listing with Google search engine.
Wait about 24 hours and if the malicious software was cleared you should be good to go.

Don't blame the hosting company in this instance, there are just people that are "malicious" and wanted to have fun at your expense.

Banned from search engine result pages?

2009-04-13T09:47:00.000-07:00

Are you looking for the perfect URL name and it's already owned? Thinking of buying it? You might want to take a few minutes to see if the URL is worth purchasing.

Check the URL Status

Ex. www.NewCastleFarmersMarket.com
Go to the Google search box and type in; site:www.NewCastleFarmersMarket.com, this will tell you what pages if any are listed in Google search results. If you have multiple pages listed in the results the URL is meeting Google guidelines.

Check the URL Link Status

Go to the Google search box and type in; link:www.NewCastleFarmersMarket.com, this will provide you with the websites, if any, that have a text link on thier site pointing to that URL.

Repeat these steps for the other search engines you want to make sure you are listed in.
If for some reason there are no pages or links available on that search you may want to check the wayback machine to show the last page indexed for that URL, this will give you an idea of why the site may have been de-listed with the search engine(s).
Sometimes by looking at the previous site you can tell if the search engines were mislead or there was questionable content on the site that may have had it removed from the search engine results page. In any case you can ask for special reconcideration of the site using the Google Webmaster tools after you verify that you are the site owner by putting in a meta-tag code for the search engine spider to see.

Flash and Search Engine Optimization

2009-04-01T10:52:00.000-07:00

Recently I was approached with a project to optimize that was completely flash and was just created and the URL was purchased about a year ago. Right there is an SEO nightmare and not an easy task by any means.
So how do you optimize an interactive flash site? Social media and networking 2.0 can start getting people to visit the site, maybe some ppc (pay-per-click) advertising on Google to develop a brand image for the new site and provide immediate traffic. As long as the interactive flash site has a tool of some sort to have a purpose other than viewing information. This is more or less for the other websites on the web having a reason to link to your site. There isn't any text content on your site to give them a reason to link for search engine purposes.
Flash sites do not get attention from the search engines, they don't have text for the spiders to index, thus not proving their worthiness to the search engines. I really wasn't able to find any information on the subject so I am sure in search of work arounds and any other insight on the subject, but linking will certainly work for the time being until Google changes the algorithms for links and Page Rank.

My Website Was number 1 now its not on the first page!?

2009-02-12T18:00:00.000-08:00

Welcome to my world! Due to the amount of exploiting and constant tweaking that search engines make to their algorithms to improve the SERP's for the searcher. The trick to it is that no one knows exactly what they did if they did anything at all. It could be some other competitors that did something to better their rankings pushing you off the page. First off you should know which page of your website was ranking #1 because it was not your entire site. After you narrow down the page you have to go through your SEO step by step. Start with internal and external links, make sure all the pages you point to actually work. Than your title's, spelling, source code for the meta tags in the HTML.
It's really a lot of time and effort to continuously keep your pages on the first page results, otherwise their wouldn't be a need for SEO experts. So if you have a lot of competition, usually ecommerce sites, or competitve services you should invest some of your marketing dollars in either an on staff employee or company or freelance SEO to take care of your site for a monthly or hourly fee. For total Search Engine Optimization or even a complete content management system with SEO and Web Design you many different options and should prepare for the future.

Web design factors into SEO?

2009-01-19T09:58:00.000-08:00

People always ask me what the easiest route for their optimization process is. From site creation? Or from any point and time. Well web design and layout usually plays a big part in your optimization process and little things

like position on the page of where the content is.
Whether or not if your keywords are at the top of the content or at the bottom.
If you have detailed headlines within your site's content letting search engine spiders know that this is important content.

Subtle things like this will help the spiders when they visit your site, not necessarily the bread and butter of the SEO but if you have your text content buried 5 clicks into your site from your home page, chances are that your home page is going to suffer on the search engine results page.

Make sure that any images, videos, blogs or any other information not in text form, has proper tags informing the spiders what the images are and what the videos are showing.
With a new site, this is the opportunity for you to take SEO slow and easy, monitoring the effects of all the SEO that you implement also giving the search engines a reason to come back to your site. Don't too much at once, you wont be able to tell what helped and what hurt your sites rankings. Navigation is a big part of new sites, mainly to allow search engines to find all the pages of your site getting all your pages indexed as soon as possible. Keyword research is a lot easier in this form of optimization, this way you can install the keywords on the site where they would be beneficial to be within the content of the site.

So when you design your site, (with Optimizing the site on the plate as well) make sure that you lay out the site so that its easy for both the searcher and the search engine, make subtle adjustments and not too much at one time, and watch your rankings grow. IF they fall between process's you know to revert back to what was keeping you ranked higher.
Rank Tracker is a perfect way to keep an eye on your keywords to see how you are doing in your quest for #1.

SEO ToolBar For Firefox

2009-01-12T06:13:00.000-08:00

When trying to perform SEO to the best of your ability, automation is usually a route you want to go once you get enough business on your plate that needs more attention or if you need more hours in the day. SEOBook by Aaron Wall provides a unique toolbar extension for Mozilla FireFox that can give you important information about sites you are researching in order to stay competitive. It is a free tool that automatically provides results or based on what options you choose to activate. From the page rank down to the last date that Google cached the page. What you can do with this data is at your discretion, whether if you are just compiling data or if you are trying to rank a site, knowing this information is a very important piece of the SEO puzzle. In order to keep this information free and more tools to come from Mr. Wall, I suggest a donations or sign up for the newsletter to give us the opportunity to hear more suggestions and more tools to come from this great SEO site.
Having the information at your fingertips is only useful if you intend to use it, compiling a bunch of data about industries or interests is the first part. Make sure you put the data to good use, by adjusting your keywords, links and expect that you are not the only one using this information. Thinking outside the box to be different and ahead of the game is the game of SEO and this toolbar can definitely help with staying ahead of your competition and giving you the ability to reap the benefits. Good luck and happy optimizing.

Why can you buy a keyword but not display it?

2008-12-31T06:31:00.000-08:00

Recently I started working on a project dealing with Guns and Firearms and noticed something that does not make any sense what so ever. You are allowed to purchase the keywords "Firearms" and "Guns" however you are not allowed to input them into your ad displaying to the searcher that this is the correct ad to click on.
This pertains to the quality ad score which determines cost per click and position. However a simple solution to this problem. Using { } brackets containing "Keyword" will display whatever keyword that was typed in automatically upon the search. For instance, if your keyword you are purchasing was "black nike shoes" your ad may say :

Black Nike Shoes
Browse Nike, Reebok, Adidas.
$25 Purchase. Free Shipping.
www.WillsNikeShoes.com

But you also may be purchasing "Blue Nike Shoes" "Red Nike Shoes" "Hightop Nike Shoes", instead of making an ad for each keyword to display properly within the ad, use {keyword} to display the keyword (when character space is available) to the searcher to "call to action" or click on your ad. This will also allow you to display those words in your ad that they would not allow you to input previously, be aware if the words are against all of their rules you may have ad turned off or worse, suspended. This tactic is a time saver and very effective to convey your message to the potential customer.

Google PPC vs. Yahoo PPC

2008-12-30T07:35:00.001-08:00

After your website is created and published you will come to a crossroads, depending on previous activity on the site. Do you have traffic yet? Did you have traffic? Do you anticipate any return on investment from your site just sitting there?
Take a global view of your company. What is the average dollar amount for a sale? How many sales do you average on a daily basis? Are they new customers? Are they existing customers taking up sells? With this data you can determine how many visitors it would be before you would need a conversion to stay on the positive side of the profit scale. Regardless of what your business is, everyone advertises to make money, it's an investment.
Say you average $100 dollars profit per sale, and Google has a minimum cost of $2.00/click. You would need to make 1 sale out of every 50 visitors in order to stay positive. So your goal should be 2 sales out of every 50 paid visits. 1 sale for every 50 visitors would keep you even and you would know that you need to make adjustments.
Now that you have your goals set, you need to determine which search network you want to use. Google has by far the largest search network, aka the most traffic. Yahoo has been around the longest and has a very large following of Yahoo email users. Maybe not searched as much as Google but always in competition with the most unique daily visitors. This could lead to higher conversions depending on the region, and age group you are targeting. Google has the most competition for advertising spots, and people are starting to learn that you can pay to be in those spots rather than using the search algorithm to show up organically. However not every business that advertises on Google advertises on Yahoo as well, so there may be less competition for top spot, making your cost lower, traffic lower, and possibly lower conversions. Lets face it without traffic there is no opportunity for a sale, and without sales there is no reason to advertise. If you have $100/day budget you might wanna spend $75 on Google and $25 on Yahoo this way you can determine which of the search engines provide your business with the right mix of traffic and conversions.
There is no real answer to what is going to work, but the old saying "Don't put all your eggs in one basket" definitely stands strong here. Diversity is what is going to set you ahead of your competition, using the data you can compile from your experiments with PPC can really boost your confidence and the success of your business.

When is it time to hire help for your SEO?

2008-12-29T16:51:00.000-08:00

When do you think it is time to hire an SEO expert to handle all your internal optimization of your site? You are the only person that can answer that question. Anyone can perform SEO and anyone can maintain SEO, it's just a matter of having the time and the knowledge.
If your business has 5 products/services and is a fairly small operation, chances are an employee may have the time to learn and to perform the SEO that needs to be done. So instead of checking into what companies are out there to perform the SEO, use sites that already exist to learn about the process of SEO like SeoBook for example. This way an existing employee can learn the process of SEO or even hire a new employee to do the work for you at an hourly rate rather than paying someone obscene amounts of money to do it for you. However you do miss the quality of the work, this is a best case scenario for a small business. A larger business may want to take some of the money they have in their marketing budgets to hire a company to optimize and maintain optimization on the site ongoing. The choice is completely up to you, and there is no real answer it's just another judgment call you have to make as a business owner.

Email Marketing

2008-12-15T12:06:00.000-08:00

Ever since the birth of the "Black Book" or the "Do not call list" everyone has changed their marketing strategies and their procedures with phone calls and emails. Spam became a quick phenom and I am not talking about the kind that comes in a can. Email spam was a quick way to get your message in front of a potential client from an email list someone may have purchased from a scrubbing company. A scrubbing company basically made their money from gathering email addresses using scripts to find the @ symbol in an email address and took the info, put it into a database categorized based on the content on the site and offered lists to potential companies interested in solid contact information. This idea worked really well for a long time until business owners got sick of being prospected by companies they did not know or in other words, "Cold Called".
Along came the DNC list which prohibited companies from calling or emailing companies that were apart of this national list. Fines are handed out for not abiding by the rules and regulations of the DNC registry and the telemarketing industry took a large hit. Email databases have never been as important as they are today. If you have a feature on your site that allows users to input their information, aka. thier email address, that made the DNC list null and void for that particular customer. Now you have their information and you are now capable of sending them the email letters or specials you may have. However this may not be a good practice in this day and age, your best bet is to develop a regular routine of newsletters or press releases to send to these potential customers, keeping them interested in the content of your prime site guaranteeing a loyal subscriber base. With the use of an email marketing campaign like Bella Posta you can now use that information and keep it updated as often as you would like, send out automatic emails, automatic newsletters or special offers. All your data will be at the tip of your fingers, allowing you to change the scope based on demographics or product interest or even by name.
Using an email database platform will not stop you from getting fined or listed as spam, in fact it's how you use it and how often you use it that will have a bearing on the outcome of results.
Programs like Bella Posta or third party vendors of the product can truely improve your viral networking and get your information out to people that weren't using search engines in the first place. Email marketing can be used with your SEO or SEM project improving the results of either and increase your business exponentually.

When to consider a no index.

2008-12-09T17:23:00.000-08:00

There comes a time in your websites young life that you need to make some adjustments to the code that resides on the pages. Whether it's adding images, deleting pages, or you need to adjust the frequency the robots visit your site, or what pages they follow or index.
The no index tag can and should be applied to log-in pages or credit card info page. This way when the search engines index or try to index the page there is no way that the search engines will look for an entry point past that page. However without the no-follow tag it will still follow all text links and keeping the links associated with the content on the site. Use no-follow tags on: Log-In pages, contact us pages, internal search pages or maybe even examples of what not to do on a site, show the user what not to do, and tell the search engine you do not approve of this site in lesser words. Use the no-index for any of the pages of your site you do not want the search engines to find. Whether if it's duplicate content that you are just trying to provide the "users" the proper information, or if its a page that changes it's content frequently and the previous information is not archived. Specials pages can be a page that does not indexing due to the frequent change of content on the page, rankings will never be achieved when the content is always different.
Do not put a no-follow tag on your links page, you want the search engines to find the other sites that you are linking to, this will establish a chain of data streaming to the people that use your site.

To Link or Not to Link

2008-11-25T09:54:00.000-08:00

There has been much speculation over what is a good link and what is a bad link. Most of the time if the site is relevant to yours you would want to link, unless the site is a PR (page rank) of 2 or less. Even so, 1 or 2 sites that are low PR may not hurt your site, only provide more traffic or make it more noticeable. The more sites that your site is linking to makes more opportunity for your site to be in front of someone that would not normally make it to your site. Free directories (www.dmoz.org is a good place to start) and industry specific databases are a great place to start, especially with a moderate to less than moderate budget available for your website. If you are asking for someone to link to your site keep in mind that any links in and out of their site helps their rankings as well.
When you want a link to your site expect the other party to request a link back to their site for a reciprocal link, so you may want to develop a relevant links page for easy navigation for search engine spiders to find and crawl your relevant links. Burying your relevant links, may upset your link partners or the spiders in general and they may not crawl all of the sites. There is an undisclosed point structure for all items in an SEO strategy which provides enough information for a search query to search engines when anyone is using the search engine.
Everything adds up to equal your search engine rankings from page title, to meta-tags, to links to every last bit of text on your site, so be careful and very inquisitive when being requested to link back, not everyone does everything by the book.

SEO vs. SEM

2008-11-09T18:41:00.000-08:00

Since the ability to advertise on search engines became apparent to business owners and webmasters, variations of internet advertising and a combination of online and offline advertising for websites was born. Then the discovery of search engine indexing was exploited, and webmasters worldwide found various ways to trick search engines into ranking their web pages higher up on search engine results pages.
Search engine optimization and search engine marketing is a science. A perfect mixture of user experience and search engine spider experience makes a high ranking website. In the same breath of a perfect mixture, that mixture is very difficult to obtain. So there is much debate in what pays off more, search engine optimization or search engine marketing. I believe that both have their values and are both equally important to creating a successful website. You really use search engine optimization to pretty much index your site properly, monetize your site (again for proper indexing) and to link your site to as much relevant content as you can. When search engine marketing, Google AdWords for example, can be successful only when search engine optimization is done properly. With any ppc campaign you are looking for short term results and long term results, if you are looking to only use sponsored links to drive immediate traffic, then you need to re-evaluate your goals and try to find a purpose for spending the money. A good PPC campaign will bring in immediate sales with long term effect, maybe even repeat business. Let's face it, if you just built your website and nobody knows about it, chances are you are looking or have looked at different ways to get people to your site and SEO was one of your options. Which is great, SEO should be on your mind, but think of it like this, if you don't already have steady traffic coming into your site when you start to perform SEO, SEO is not going to start raking in the gold. You are going to have to market the new website in anticipation of it being useful to people. So when the spiders index your site and there are people worldwide that visit your site daily, it will have a very good result on your first indexing, giving you immediate results.
So again you ask which is better SEO or SEM, here is one reason why SEO and SEM should be thought of as a team, and not opposing teams. One looks out for the other, and without SEO there would be no SEM, and without anyone competing for the first page, there would be no need for SEO.