Reno SEO, Web Design & Internet Marketing » links

A Compilation of SEO and Related Links

Kristy — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 15:57:55 +0000

Mark all of these as “Must Read”.

Update: Top 10 Rankings in under 2 weeks with 1 link

Kristy — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 16:59:21 +0000

It’s been one month since I originally wrote about our client, Creating Effective Organization, and how their new website received top ten rankings in under 2 weeks. I thought I would revisit the subject and check their rankings a month later.

Not much has changed in the past month. The title tags and the descriptions are still the global setup we implemented when the site went live and little to no content has changed since launch date as well. So, it’s no surprise that that a couple of our rankings have slipped a few spots. The content is slowly starting to get stale and I suspect the duplicate titles and descriptions will have a greater impact in the coming month.

However we can no longer say the site has only one link from our blog. We did release one article through a few article marketing websites and that has generated about a dozen links back to the site.

June 7, 2008

ceo skills development program – #1
skill development – #5
leadership skills development – #9
ceo lack of leadership – #11

July 8, 2008

ceo skills development program – #2
skill development – #7
leadership skills development – #7
leadership skill development – #1
ceo lack of leadership – #23
NEW! – small business coaching gym – #7

Are these the most competitive phrases? Not necessarily, but the traffic they are driving is more direct and average time on site is much higher than other sources of traffic. Conversion rate is ok, but definitely not where we want it to be – yet. Stay tuned for more updates in the future.

Don't Let Your Developer Trash Your Search Engine Rankings

Kristy — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 21:15:24 +0000

It is fairly common for a website overhaul or redesign to include a significant change in the technologies used on the site. With the rate at which most companies redesign their site the web technologies in scripting languages, content management tools, and coding standards can make leaps and bounds often times leaving their site and it’s backend architecture feeling antiquated at best.

Developers of course hate to use old standby measures and prefer to drop aging technologies in favor of today’s better and more efficient tools. This can cause a major hiccup, if not a small disaster, in web performance if the developer has no knowledge of search engine optimization or is not working with someone who does (maybe an external SEO resource).

So what happens is you spend a pretty penny or two on a brand new website with all the latest whizz-bang tools and widgets, a robust content management system, a dynamic lead capture engine, et-cetera… et-cetera… et-cetera. Then before long you notice your web performance has tanked right through the floor. You have very little visitors and even fewer conversions. “WHAT HAPPENED??” you scream as you vow to never do another website redesign (well at least for another 3-5 years). The blame will be placed squarely on the shoulders of the developer. They did it, it is their fault for this “pretty” failure. So, what exactly did happen?

Although the developer gets left holding the bag it may actually be the fault of that new content management system or new scripting language. If your URL structure is dictated by that new CMS or scripting language, all the years of stability and backlinks your old pages attracted are essentially wiped clean.

Example:
Old URL – http://www.widgetstore.com/catalog/products/bluewidget
New URL – http://www.widgetstore.com/main/en/catalog/products/groupid/9/productid/21/index.php

(BTW – This is pretty close to the change we encountered with a new client. We found the old URL structure by visiting the Wayback Machine)

So what do you do now? Well, as I see it, you have two options:

Suffer through the bad times and start building your webcred (aka PageRank) all over again.
Work with your developer, server administrator, IT department and/or an SEO professional to set up 301 redirects to forward requests for the old pages to the new pages and then hope and pray at least a portion of your PR will get transferred to the new pages within a few months. Oh, and all the while, you should be building even more backlinks and generating new content.

A site redesign/redevelopment can be a knockout to your SEO strategy, but having a SEO-savvy developer or someone who knows search engines overlook the project you can avoid this costly oversight.

Vanity in Your Address Bar – WWW or no-WWW

Kristy — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 00:18:06 +0000

This is one of those elliptical conversations that seems to never really go away, it just keeps coming back again and again. This time around it is SitePoint that tossed the boomerang in one of their blogs. As they say this is really a rather geeky topic that stays mid-brain with most designers and developers, but is not something most business owners would even care to think about. However this is a top-of-mind topic for most SEO experts and can carry big implications if not handled correctly. First I will touch on the vanity aspect and then move on to the SEO concerns.

Is the WWW Necessary in Today’s Internet?

The answer – it depends.

It depends on a lot of things including the psychology, demographics and the users’ comfort level with computers among many other things. In the SitePoint article they note the launch of their own site, 99designs.com, as well as the social networking service Twitter.com as two examples without the WWW prefix. However, these two sites are targeted at a younger, more technically savvy, demographic that most likely will not even bother typing the WWW prefix in the first place.

With an older demographic on the other hand I would argue it is a requirement to include the WWW. When I used to do computer training courses for a public entity with a large percentage of older employees, instinctively I would speak domain names without the WWW and inevitably someone would ask if they needed to type WWW before that. Their limited knowledge in this area dictated how they interacted with websites. No amount of explaining the how’s and why’s of the internet would make them more comfortable in their interaction.

Any Ol’ Domain Will Do

While browsing through the comments on the SitePoint blog I noticed an overwhelming majority of people stating they didn’t care either way, but they set up domains to work with both the prefix and without it. They do this by changing the setup of their domain records. Few of the respondents indicate whether they use 301 redirects. While I am a proponent of having WWW and no-WWW take the user to a working website I also understand that if you fail to set up a redirect to one or the other it is possible to create a real search marketing snafu. More and more we are finding this to be one of the most overlooked aspects of web design and development. As an example we just took on a client who has had a website for over 7 years and yet their was no domain preference set via a 301 redirect.

The problem with this is referred to as canonicalization errors or canonical problems. It is a huge ugly name for something very simple. Basically search engines will count www.domain.com and domain.com as two separate pages. It doesn’t end there either. They will also see all of the variations below as separate pages.

www.domain.com
www.domain.com/
www.domain.com/index.html (or index.php, index.asp, index.cfm, etc.)
domain.com
domain.com/
domain.com/index.html (or index.php, index.asp, index.cfm, etc.)

Having multiple instances recorded by the search engines is a bad thing. Your website will suffer in the SERPs. One quick way to find out if your site is suffering from this problem is to use the site: and link: commands in Google and look at the total number of results returned.

So for example, type in site:www.domain.com and then try site:domain.com

If the numbers vary then you may have a canonicalization problem.

Which One Should You Use?

From an SEO standpoint I analyze all of the potential versions floating around that may or may not have links to them or may or may not be indexed by the search engines before I just hop on board with one or the other. If the non-WWW version has more backlinks and is generally performing better, I might redirect the WWW version there. However, coming back around to my first point in this article, current SEO performance should only be one piece of the puzzle. Usability and understanding your demographic should also play a role, because your domain name will be on everything (remember Integrated Marketing) from business cards to outdoor billboards to email marketing and PPC campaigns and should always look the same. Right down to how it appears in your address bar.

SEO Do's and Don'ts: Website Architecture (Structure)

Kristy — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 22:03:29 +0000

This is part two of our Do’s and Don’ts series. The purpose here is to provide quick actionable snippets of information to help you avoid any pitfalls in developing a strong web identity.

Do: Link to every page of the site from at least one other page on the site.
Do: Use absolute links in your link code, starting with the “http://”.
Do: Link key phrases within your copy to other relevant pages on the site.
Do: Use keywords in your page and folder names. However, keep the names short and simple. Separate words in page and folder names with a hyphen or an underscore. Do not use spaces or special characters in your naming conventions.
Do: Validate your html code and correct any errors. Use this online validator from the W3C.
Don’t: Use javascript menu systems and links. Links of this kind may not be indexed.
Don’t: Use frames or iframes in your html code.
Don’t: Serve different pages to the search spiders than your human site visitors. Nothing will get you dropped from the SERPs quicker – just ask the German BMW website.
Don’t: Use lots of folders and subfolders in your site structure, spiders like relatively flat websites.

SEO Do's and Don'ts: Link Building

Kristy — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 23:46:28 +0000

This is part one of a Do’s and Don’ts series I hope will help dispel some of the misinformation clients and prospects have stated to us lately about SEO.

I can understand how the average business owner or webmaster can become confused by all information, often conflicting information, that is out there on the net regarding our industry. With no way to regulate the industry the good guys (that’s us) and the bad guys (that’s the snake oil salesmen) are left to clammer over the top of each others’ message in a never ending battle of king of the mountain.

So hopefully this will help. If you find this information useful please let us know and we will continue to publish many more posts like this. Enjoy!

Do: Document all of your link building exercises and progress. Commit time in monthly intervals (minimum) to grow your links.

Do: Vary the anchor text you use for external links to your site. Don’t forget to use your target phrase for the landing page of the link!

Do: Find authority websites in your niche to obtain links from. Use your best judgment on this one by reading the content or reviewing the comments if it is a blog. Can you find the site in a search on the topic it covers?

Do: Utilize news agencies/websites in your niche to link back to your site.

Do: If you feel it is a good advertising investment, purchase links on industry and related websites.

Do: Exchange links on a one-on-one basis with other sites in your niche.

Don’t: Don’t Spam blogs, forums, user groups, guestbooks or anyone else. Ever.

Don’t: Fear Google when it comes to buying links.

Don’t: Buy links for any other purpose than advertising and traffic benefits.

Don’t: Participate in reciprocal link schemes or link farms of any kind.

Hope you enjoyed Part One!

RFP – Random Friday Post

Kristy — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 22:23:19 +0000

If you have been around this crazy web 2.0 phenomenon for any amount of time you have probably heard of Hugh MacLeod who is most well know for his business card cartoons. If you’ve never heard of him, you’re missing out on some hilarious social and web commentary! I have two of his cartoons that are in regular rotation as my desktop backgrounds.

Fair Warning! If you are offended by strong language do not click any of the links in this post!

Have a great weekend!

We Have PageRank and We Don't Care!

Kristy — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 17:33:37 +0000

I find it slightly amusing and a little interesting that in the midst of this Google PageRank debacle we received out first boost in PageRank. We’re now a PR3!

The best part is, we don’t care!

I’ve been telling clients for years that PageRank doesn’t matter. Let me repeat that, PageRank does not matter. Got it? PageRank is one of those irrelevant metrics that gets thrown in the bucket with Hits and Alexa rankings.

Once more, PageRank does not matter. The only metrics that matter are conversions, traffic, natural search position. In that order. Period.