Archive for the 'Webmaster News' Category
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.
Ok, most of you are thinking that this is a really odd question? It has been a long known online marketing secret that the first and second spot in paid search is not always the best but has anyone ever thought of any circumstances it might be better for your website to rank second instead of first organically?
I am not crazy! I swear! Check-out this scenario:
The first result for this long-tail traffic term is a really popular local forum and the specific post it goes to was made back in 2007. It just happens to be a list of local businesses in a specific industry and the number two listing is at the top of this list.
So what would you rather have, people going to a third party source and seeing your company at the top of a trusted list and have them come to your website that way or would you rather have the top spot yourself and get them to your website through that route?
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 vote for April Fools Joke and very funny!
Just noticed my website listed up on www.thedailyreviewer.com and it is a bit of a good news bad news situation. The bad news is we are all the way down on page 7 but that is off-set by having a really cool neighbor right beside us, Shoemoney - skills that pay the bills! I also noticed SEW and Graywolf on the page, so I know I am in good company!
I found a really amazing flash website but please be warned that loading time is really long…..don’t even attempt it on dial-up, you will have to quit your job to wait for this one to load. I found it interesting that the page has been indexed by Google and cached because I have seen clients with big images on their home pages appear to receive penalties for being long to access. On my T1 it took around 3 minutes to load up.
Someone just emailed me this link and it was pretty shocking! With so many spammy link sellers buying dropped domains and re-purposing them - this person either doesn’t speak English or is non-too-bright! Check-out the domain name he is selling links on, www.AntiSemiteOfTheWeek.org!
When the big banks start looking for SEO experts you know the profession has hit mainstream! SEO as a profession is quite big in the USA, UK and other countries around the word but Canada has been lagging a bit behind the rest.
But I just heard about a managment position being offered at TD Bank that has lots of SEO expertise requested in the job description:
Job Requirements
Requirements:. Manage SEO project queue and prioritization list
. Work closely with product and content teams to ensure site navigation and contents are optimized for SEO
. Establish, interpret and analyze critical online KPI targets for SEO/SEM initiatives
. Minimum of 3 - 5 years of online experience, specifically developing and executing SEO/SEM strategies
. Ability to effectively communicate SEO standards and best practices to other departments
This is a great sign and should mean more competition for the few good SEO’s in Canada!
Update June 4, 2010
Looks like RBC Financial Group is hiring for a similar position looking for SEM and SEO experience.
Knowledge of SEM (Search Engine Marketing) / PPC (Pay Per Click) and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategies and a minimum one year experience measure success of SEM/PPC and SEO campaigns / efforts.
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.
