Archive for the 'Optimizing for Google' Category
A friend of mine just emailed me some social circle results that came up when he was doing a search for Toronto SEO – while I think these are interesting I am worried that Google is going to make it very hard for new companies in any industry to breakthrough in the search results.
Everyone knows you can pay cash in the form of Google Adwords to show up above the regular organic results but how about showing up above them for free!!
For the term ‘cool logos’ my site occupies the first two image spots, which show above the number one result!! The first one actually goes to my category page which is extra nice!
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. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.
Just announced today over at Google Webmaster Central Blog – this is something you should already have been tweaking for user experience but knowing it will effect rankings in a small way (as one of over 200 factors) this should wake up some sleeping webmasters, SEO’s and designers.
One part of SEO that many people have trouble with, even professionals – is data-mining. I wrote a Google Knol titled : Website Analytic Tips for SEO a few months back and received good feedback on it.
The truth is, that data-mining can be very time consuming and a bit boring but it is essential! There is so much great information hidden among your website statistics that you are really missing out on good opportunities if you don’t leverage this data. Here is an example of an opportunity I recently discovered:
March 7, 2010 – April 6, 2010 Google sent 13,4xx non-paid visits via 2,8xx keywords
March 7, 2009 – April 6, 2009 Google sent 10,8xx non-paid visits via 2,2xx keywords
23.xx% increase in visits
http://www.xxxxxxxxxxxx.com/xxxxxxx.htm – Pageviews 97x Previous: 9x (+914.xx%)
xxx xxxxx xxxxxx – rank 5th in Google.ca
March 7, 2010 – April 6, 2010 67 visits
March 7, 2009 – April 6, 2009 0 visits
xxxxxxxxx – rank number 2 in Google.ca
March 7, 2010 – April 6, 2010 54 visits
March 7, 2009 – April 6, 2009 0 visits
Almost all the visitors are finding this page by searching two keywords, so optimizing further for those should increase our ranking and traffic to this page.
Through data-mining we find opportunities like this and the goal here is to follow the natural trend of this page garnering more visitors, so I will build some backlinks and authority directly to the page to increase its traffic. I might also tweak the on-page content to help with relevance and to make sure I get conversions.
Generally speaking I have gradually changed many inner page title tags so they are more unique and contain appropriate keywords to match the content of those pages. In the long-term this should increase the long-tail traffic to inner pages and offer us more opportunities like this to rank and receive high quality visitors to these pages.
I have heard from a few potential clients before that even though their own website does not rank for many searches they are OK in the SEO department because their various directory listings rank, so people will find them anyways….
This is a really bad decision and will most certainly guarantee a long-term unsuccessful foray on the web.
Even the high quality listings typically offer multiple chances for a potential customer to veer off to another competitors website. Then there are some like below that just post your company info with the intention of making money by NOT sending a customer to your website. In the sample below, note the two ads before company info and then there is not even a link to the destination site listed. No where to go but directly to one of your competitors I guess! If you are located in Toronto and need a quote on SEO please give us a call at 416-671-3114, we also help international clients across the world wide web.
I found an interesting blog post on DigitalPoint and that combined with some local research really has me concerned about the current and future state of SEO. Almost every new client I speak to has one or two horror stories under their belt from dealing with SEO in the past. Btw, here is the post:
hiii friends
i have join seo line very shortly n i have no knowledge about it all,, i think i choose better line but some body told me that there is no future. is it true if yes then tell me why.. n if its false then tell me how growth is possible in this field.
To me this is a good example of why so many people have bad SEO experiences. Now don’t get me wrong, my favorite coder is from India and we have been working together for the past four years but if you are going to provide research, content, backlinks and represent a company’s website online you should be able to read, write and speak the language you are optimizing for.
I just spent a few minutes perusing the computer services category of my local Craigslist to see what the local competition is up to….and let me tell you – they are up to no-good!
Usually it would make me feel good to see so many clueless folks calling themselves SEO and SEM experts but I am really starting to get concerned. Why you may ask, would I be concerned if my local competition is a bunch of quacks? Well the thing is that I still think they are getting clients and those same clients will walk away in a few months scratching their heads and thinking SEO/SEM is a total waste of time because of these tricksters.
Let me take a moment to count the ways my local competition scare me (and should scare away clients):
1. Most of their websites have very few backlinks but they all brag that they have 5-10 years experience. How can that be?
2. Most of them don’t rank for anything at all, well almost nothing…one of them ranked for ‘online SEO youtube vids’ – now there is a money term!
3. Most of them offer submission to search engines as part of their service.
4. One doesn’t even have his own website, when I called he said he is not a good designer so he needs to buy one soon?!?!
5. A couple are on free hosting services.
Now that Google is coming to terms (publicly) with the fact that SEO is real and important it seems they released their own SEO Report Card internally.
Very interesting report and you can download the entire thing here.
You know search engine optimization has gone mainstream when it shows up in a Dilbert comic strip!
I received a private message at a forum I have been a member of for many years and it was from a relatively senior member that was promoting some discounted listings reviews in his network of web directories. The directories themselves look pretty nice, good templates and category structure but I took a quick look through the backlink profile of one of them and I was quite shocked!
I found backlinks from porn, coming soon sites and even from a page that was simply 10k+ links jammed full of porn, gambling and rx – I was going to post a screenshot of the page but it crashed my browser twice so I figured I better not push my luck.
Most good SEO’s always check backlink profiles before building links but there are many ‘cut-rate’ services out there that won’t spend the extra time doing this type of due diligence. So be very careful or your website might just become part of a ‘bad neighborhood’.
