Category Archives: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Google to Penalize Slow Loading Websites

Posted on by Wade Sonenberg

Website Speed Counts!Something that has been hinted upon for a couple years, was finally announced – Big G is working a penalty for slow load time into their algorithm.   According to Google’s Webmaster Central blog,  the penalty at this time is a minor one, and only affects:

  • less than 1% of search queries
  • only queries in English made through Google.com

As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.

Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there.

It goes on to say that the penalty doesn’t count as much as “Relevancy of the page” – but what else does?

You can check your website’s load time at Pingdom.

Some tips to speed up web page load times:

  1. Reduce HTTP requests
    • Combine all javascript files into one
    • Combine all CSS files into one
    • Use CSS Sprites to reduce number of background images needed
  2. Reduce the number of images on a page
  3. Optimize images to reduce their file size
  4. Use  an Expires or a Cache-Control Header
  5. Minify CSS and Javascript
  6. Use HTML and CSS over images where ever possible.

SEO Friendly CSS Galleries

Posted on by Wade Sonenberg

We’re compiling a list of SEO Friendly CSS galleries for designers who are interested in getting a little link love while showcasing their work.  To be considered, the galleries must either have a direct, do-follow link from the actual gallery or a direct do-follow link from a sub-page featuring the work.

We’ll update this page regularly, and hopefully provide an Excel download once the list grows a little bit – so feel free to comment with anybody we missed.

Continue reading →

Google Local Search: An In Depth Look

Posted on by Wade Sonenberg

Google Local SearchThe introduction of Google’s Local Search into it’s regular results (Universal Search) has been a real game changer as more, and more categories and locations are offered up near the top of organic searches.  We’re going to cover the bases on what to do to improve your business’s rankings in the local search results & a few pot holes to steer away from.  Please note, it’s no substitute or an organic search engine strategy, but can compliment one very well since many of the same content and inbound linking principals still apply.

  1. Your Site’s Contact Page

    • First of all – have a contact page!  Title it “Contact” as is the convention around the web, and name it something like “contact.html” or “contact-my-company.php.”
    • Include a full address including city, state, and zip code within the locale that you’re targeting.
    • Include a local phone number, i.e. – make sure the area code matches the the targeted location’s.
    • Have multiple locations?  If you run a multi-national corporation, why not hire an SEO company to rank your locations because it gets a little tricky and is outside the scope of this post.

  2. Title Tags, Meta Tags, and Your URL

    • Use a hCard in your website’s head section.  Learn here, create here. Simply use it as the markup/HTML for that part of your contact page.
    • City/State in Contact Page Title Tag
    • City/State in Index Page Title Tag
    • Location in URL (Ex. – AthensGAWebDesigners.com)

  3. Your Local Business Profile

    • 1st, go to Google’s Local Business, and claim your business’s profile if you haven’t yet.
    • Profile using local phone number (area code matching the target location)
    • Location in Profile Title
    • Service/Product in Business Category Fields

  4. Customer/Client Reviews

    • Customer Reviews are Important!
    • And it’s not just the reviews on Google Maps itself -
    • Google feeds it’s listings with dozens if not hundreds other third party review sites.  For example: Kudzu.com, Yelp, InsiderPages, and many industry specific review services.

  5. Pitfalls & What not to do

    • Don’t List a 1-800 number on your profile or on your contact page, I know it makes no sense.  Have one, get your web guys to use an image to display it.
    • Negative Reviews – I know they’re hard to stop, but if you can contact the reviewer & ask them to remove it – do it.
    • Don’t use multiple Business Profiles with:
      1. The same business name
      2. The same phone number
      3. The same address (this one is particularly detrimental)

The Worst SEO Mistake You Can Make

Posted on by Wade Sonenberg

My hats off Brandt Dainow for a great primer on SEO Step 1 for any business. The guy has been doing search engine marketing for over 12 years, which is a lifetime in this business.

First, why SEO over other marketing such as PPC?

Pay-per-click advertising is all very well, but it means you have to pay for every visitor. SEO is about getting free traffic from the search engines. Over the course of two years or more, nothing has a better return on investment than SEO. Thus, if you plan on having a website that runs for more than two years, search engine optimization should be a key part of your online marketing strategy.

So what is the worst SEO mistake that a company can make?

The most common mistake that organizations make with regard to SEO is bringing their SEO consultants into the process too late. Many companies fail to give SEO its due consideration during a website’s design phase.

So there you have it, from one of the godfathers of search engine marketing.

Brandt goes on to list several key aspects to a successful SEO campaign that need attention during the design process, or what we like to call “On Page SEO.” Some crucial SEO techniques your design might forget are:

  • Search Engine Friendly URLS
    www.abc.com/your-keyword.html vs. www.abc.com/page1.html
  • Text Based Navigation Links
  • Use of CSS instead of Javascript or Flash

For more in depth info. on the why a SEO consultant should be contacted during a website’s design phase, check out the whole article or give us a call for an informative chat.

Google Learns Flash

Posted on by Wade Sonenberg

I love Flash, I really do.

But as primarily a SEO firm, we’ve been steering clients away from flash based websites for years due to the fact that Google, Yahoo!, and MSN couldn’t index their content. By content, I mean written text, images, and of course links among other website elements.

Googe Plus Flash

It appears the Game is Changing Once Again

Google announced that it has made vast improvements in crawling and indexing flash based content from menus to entire sites:

“In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines. They needed to make extra effort to ensure that their content was also presented in another way that search engines could find.”

- From the Official Google Blog

At present, Google is only able to index textual content in flash designs, but this is a vast improvement. More information on Google’s new functionality can be found at Google’s Webmaster Central.

Great, now I can have a beautiful flash based and rank it well too, right?

Not so fast. Hopefully this dream is not too distant in the future, but at present little is known about how effective conventional SEO strategies mesh with the new update to Google’s algorithm. Besides, without Yahoo! and MSN Live making similar announcements, website owners could be losing out as much as 30-40% of their search traffic.

DIY SEO: Blog Commenting

Posted on by Wade Sonenberg

DIY SEOAnother simple way to increase to increase your website or blog’s inbound links is by commenting on blogs related to your industry. It takes just a few minutes to gain high quality, one-way, relevant inbound links – and you might just learn something you can use while you do it! It’s important to stick to blogs about your particular industry, since Google and other search engines give higher priority for links coming from pages with similar topics.

Where to find relevant blogs?

  • Simply Google the industry + “blog” For example, the term “fishing charter blog”
  • BlogCatalog directory (there are many other directories). Browse or search
  • Technorati Search your targeted keywords, and check out the top results

Add to the Conversation

Nobody likes the guy who posts “I’m the best Fishing Guide in FL, check me out.” Blatant advertisement is likely to be deleted quickly, and very few people will follow the link to your site this way. Rule of thumb is to either add something complimentary, or something thoughtful is even better – it doesn’t have to be esoteric however.

How to Comment for Maximum SEO Effect

On most blogging platforms, there will be three boxes that you’ll need to fill out. Here’s a couple tricks to get the most out of the comment you’re about to enter:

  • Name
    The name attribute is what’s going to make up the written text of the link. It helps (greatly) in SEO to have keywords in this text because it tells search engines what the link target (your website) is all about. Now some bloggers won’t take kindly to the name “best Florida fishing guide.” That said, if you’re business name includes some of your target keywords, then it should be OK to use that name. To simplify, entering the name “Bob” doesn’t help much unless your trying to rank well for “Bob” in Google.
  • URL/website/address
    Called by various names, but in all cases it is the target of the aforementioned link. Usually you want to include your home page, but it’s good practice to vary them a little bit, especially when you have a page that is relevant to the blog post at hand. Also, if you have other content rich pages that you’d like to rank well for a given term, include it here. An example of this is if you operate a guide service off of a particular island or offer an “overnight” charter option.

DIY SEO: Link Baiting

Posted on by Wade Sonenberg

The second pillar of DIY SEO is generating inbound links, or links that point from other websites toward yours.  Link baiting is an effective strategy for generating one way, high quality inbound links for your website or blog, and especially so for genres of popular interest such as fishing, sports, or news.

Wikipedia defines Link bait as “any content or feature within a website that somehow baits viewers to place links to it from other websites. Matt Cutts defines link bait as anything “interesting enough to catch people’s attention.”[3] Link bait can be an extremely powerful form of marketing as it is viral in nature.”

Link baiting is all about creatin the buzz, and can take many forms, but in all cases involves content that is working talking about, and therefore worth referencing via hyperlink. There are four general types of link bait, but they can contain elements of any or all.

  1. Linkworthy content
    A tutorial that is so concise, and so well written that it becomes the de facto manual on a given subject. It could be winter bass fishing in Lake Lanier or qualifications for a great P.R. firm. Example: Spousel Conversion Kit: Video to get your wife on board for buying that new boat.
  2. Controversy
    An information peice that is so over the top, sometimes lacking all reason, that stirs up an online community or the blogoshpere at large. Something titled “President Bush Hates Puppies” is sure to draw a debate, and therefore generate links from people who agree and disagree.  Example: Polar Bear Future – Political or Scientific? Global warming, conservation, politics, and those cute, rip your arms off, white bears wrapped up in six words – who doesn’t want to read that?
  3. Killer Apps
    A tool or application that is so useful, bloggers and webmasters will link to it to spread the word. It could be a tool for checking inbound links, or a lure color selector based upon weather and water conditions. Example: Georgia DoT Traffic Counts on Google Maps An easy way for retail/commercial realtors to look up traffic counts for a proposed shopping center.
  4. Humor
    Everybody wants to share a joke, especially good ones. A collection of jokes, or one especially humorous one pertaining to your niche or industry is a sure way to draw links from related sites.  Example: Fishing Jokes Give a man a fish and feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will sit in a boat and drink beer all day?

The Search Engines are Hungry- Feed Them

Posted on by Wade Sonenberg

One of the three pillars of SEO strategy is of content, specifically relevant text that is search engine readable. We’re going to take a look at what is search engine friendly content, what is not, and how to find out what your site or blog looks like to search engines.

Search Engine Readable - What is it?

Search engines index your web page and everybody else’s by scanning the HTML code contained within it. They scan looking to determine the content and context of the page, and also consider relevant HTML tags (H1, H2, H3, em, strong, etc.).

Search Engine Readable - What’s left out?

Search engines do not, however, load images, CSS styles, and animation (including Flash). Text that is written in images, including navigation menus, are invible without using the “alt” tag, which by the way is a poor substitute.  This means anything written in these images or animations will not be indexed, and won’t influence your search engine rankings accordingly.

Examples: Good & Bad

Here’s an example of a full Flash site, loaded in a frame set. Notice how there are no written words to give search engines a clue as to what this page is about?

htmlulgy.jpg

On the other hand, the following page offers lots of written text, links, and HTML tags:

hmlgood.jpg

See what the Search Engines see

To view what content the search engines can index, simply enter your web address in the following page address in the tool below.

http://www.willmaster.com/library/tools/What_Search_Engine_Spiders_See.php?dlperry