Are you getting the most out of your website?
Is your website an instant customer and prospect generation asset to your business?
Are you completely outranking, outselling and outperforming you competition? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wf6VmMZIZqg

There are several factors and practices that will not make your website very popular among the major search engines and can seriously damage rankings. These factors can be found in various categories, they range from keywords to content. Here’s a quick breakdown of some of these factors and the adverse effect it may have on your website.

Link Factors

1. Try to avoid having too many outbound links from your site to other sites because the search engines will think you are involved in link buying or spamming. One outbound link per article to an authority site is about right.
2. Outbound links to suspicious or unethical sites will tremendously hurt your rankings.
3. Cross linking is a big no-no as far as SEO is concerned and will result in getting your site penalized. Cross linking is when your site links to site A and site A links to site B and site B links back to your site.

Keyword Factors:

1. Keyword Stuffing- this is the worst practice to do as it results in an artificial keyword density of over 10% and may result in getting your site banned from the search engines.

2. Keyword dilution- this is when you are trying to SEO for an excessive number of keywords and most of the time the keywords are unrelated to one another. For example if you run a local bakery and your main keyword is “bakery in Tulsa”, trying to target 500 keywords on one site and  targeting keywords such as includes “shoe stores in Tulsa” is keyword dilution.

Domain and URL Factors

1. Redirects such as 301s and 302s are sometimes seen as black hat SEO techniques and can hurt your rankings
2. If you have a poor hosting services provider with a downtime below 97-98%, your content will have lower indexing rates and your pages will not get ranked.

Content Factors

1. Duplicate content – Although duplicate content is not completely detrimental to your site, it will cause to be seen as less a valuable website. This is due to the lack or the minimal use of original content. In some cases the use of 100% duplicate content can result in penalties. You should never have the exact same content on several pages of your website.
2. If you use Flash for movies on your site, remember that search engine spiders can’t index this content so provide a written description to accompany the movie.
3. Do NOT use Flash as the sole content on your homepage or any other page. Even though it looks artistic and beautiful, it is SEO suicide since those pages will not get indexed.

Here are some tips on how to do proper keyword research for your business:

1. Come up with a number of combinations-the first step in keyword research is to list all the possible different combinations of keywords that your potential customer would use in a Google/Bing/Yahoo search. For local businesses, the most common combinations are based on:

• The geographical location you operate in E.g. town, county, city, state, zip code, streets/avenues
• Your profession e.g. dentist, barber, nurse
• the kind of services you offer e.g. Lasik surgery, daycare
• the products you sell e.g. Jewellery, Chinese food, used Nissan Maxima

By combining these factors together you can build a list of possible keywords. For example a car dealer can build a list of possible keywords such as:

• Nissan dealer 5^th Avenue
• Nissan dealerAustincounty
• Used Nissan Maxima for sale inAustin
• Nissan repair service

2. Use Google’s Keyword Tool to do further research on your list of keywords and choose the keywords that:

• Have the highest search volumes per month
• Have a buyer intent e.g. cheap cars Austin, emergency plumber
• Have longtail keywords – these usually have less competition and since they are usually several in number, you can use them to build additional pages on your site so that your business website looks like an authority. An example of a long tail keyword is “where to buy Nissan Maxima inAustin,TX”

3. Using your list of the best 10-20 keywords, have a separate page/post written for each keyword or combine related keywords into one page. You can also use your keywords to help create different categories on your websites with pages assigned to each category.

Whether it’s carelessness or a lack of knowledge, or a combination of the two, this often leads to a client that several months down the road doesn’t understand why their site doesn’t get any traffic and isn’t helping their business. A good designer will not only program with SEO in mind, but will also educate the client about the basic principles of SEO, whether they are the one who executes it or not.

Many times the clients I inherit have gone through this scenario and then face drastic on-site changes to get their site search engine friendly before we are even able to begin the arduous process of link building. Whether you are designing a site for yourself or for a client, following the simple steps below when programming will ultimately save the business time and money and result in a search engine friendly site that truly maximizes the online potential of the business.

Use proper tags for headings, bold text, italic text, and lists – HTML has heading tags, bold tags, italic tags, and ordered and unordered lists for a reason and you should use them. Using CSS you can practically style them however you like, but actually using a heading tag for your headings, and bold tags for important text, will help allow search engines understand what text on a page is a heading or what is more important than the surrounding text. Simply applying a CSS style that makes text larger or bold doesn’t do that.

Optimize your images – search engine spiders can’t read text within an image. Adding ALT text to your image tag helps, but ideally you should remove all wording from the image and style it using CSS, adding the remaining portion of the image as a background image to the text. Here is a side-by-side comparison (http://www.seo-playbook.com/image_example.php) of two images that look the same in your browser, but much different to a search engine spider.

Avoid canonical problems – believe it or not, search engines can see http://yoursite.com, http://www.yoursite.com, and http://www.yoursite.com/index.html as three different pages. A simple solution is to use a 301 redirect to point all of your pages to their “www” counterpart. You can also select the preferred domain that Google shows in the new Google Webmaster Tools console.

Get rid of Session IDs if you have a PHP site – have you ever seen a PHPSESSID variable added to the end a URL on a PHP page (it looks something like PHPSESSID=34908908)? This happens because PHP will add a unique PHPSESSID to URLs within your site if cookies aren’t available. This can be extremely problematic for your site’s search engine ranking. Google and Yahoo will see a unique PHPSESSID in the URL every time they visit a page on your site, and in turn think that said page is a different page each time. At worst, this could be viewed as duplicate content and get your site banned, and at best it will reduce the perceived value of each page. One solution that I’ve used successfully is to utilize url_rewriter.tags.

Put CSS and JavaScript in external files – nearly every site nowadays uses CSS and JavaScript for something. While both are great for enhancing user experience, neither will help your search engine ranking if left on your page. One of the factors that search engines consider when ranking your site is the percentage of code relevant to the search term. CSS and JavaScript can take up hundreds of lines of code, minimizing the importance of your text and in turn hurting your ranking. By putting them in separate files and simply including them in your page by reference, you can reduce hundreds of lines down to one and increase the amount of code in the file that is relevant content.

Minimize the use of tables in layouts – the debate about whether or not tables should be used in site design has been going on for years and there’s no end in site. I fall somewhere in the middle – there are certain circumstances (like organizing tabular data) where I think tables still make the most sense, but I also appreciate the SEO benefits of using CSS layouts. CSS layouts drastically reduce the amount of code in your site that isn’t content that the user sees. Just like moving CSS and JavaScript to an external file, the less on-page code that isn’t content, the better. Check out www.searchenginefriendlylayouts.com for some free example layouts.

Validate your site – a site doesn’t have to be perfectly coded to rank high in the search engines (there are many, many other factors), but valid HTML will help ensure that search engines and browsers alike will accurately see your page. Try using the official W3C Validator (http://validator.w3.org/) or install this handy Firefox extension (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/249/). Validating generally identifies areas of code that are redundant, unnecessary, or not accepted across all browsers. All of which will help make your site more search engine friendly.

Here are some tips on how to analyze your competition for each keyword:

1. First of all install SEO Quake on your Firefox browser. This tool will give you important statistics on the each and every search engine result.
2. Enter your keyword term in the search engine. It’s best to use Google since it has the lion’s share of search engine users. Just type in the keyword in plain text and do not use any quotation marks.
3. Focus on analyzing the first page results and particularly the top 3 results since these get 80% of the clicks. After all this is where you want to see your website ranking.
4. First check the page rank of the sites that are currently ranking on page 1 using the SEO Quake tool. If a majority of the sites, especially the top 3 have page rank of 4 or under, that is a green light. However if you see page ranks of 5 and above, then that term is very competitive and will take your 6 months plus to get decent rankings.
5. Next check the number of backlinks that each site has. If the sites have 100 or less backlinks that is a good sign but if the backlinks are over 500 or several thousand, then we may want to drop that keyword. Remember we are looking at backlinks to the page/article and not the website. A website can have many backlinks pointing to its domain or homepage, but not to the page that is currently ranking.
6. Next we want to analyze these backlinks to see if they are from sites with high page rank. If you click on the backlinks link under the result, a new window will open that lists the backlink sources. Look through the list and take note of the page rank of each result. If these are from low page ranks such as 0 to 2, then that shows these are of lower quality and will be easy to outrank if you use better quality backlinks.

 More SEO, Keyword Research & Competition

It became official that various private blog networks were de-ranked and de-indexed by Google since the last week of February after they released the latest version of their search algorithm, Google Panda 3.3.

What is Private Blog Networks?

Private Blog Networks are composed of services that offer quick back-link creation through publishing articles on an array of blogs.  These blogs serve as repositories of articles (usually spun or rewritten ones).  These spun articles are heavily laden with self-serving keywords and links.  Before the release of Panda 3.3, Google’s search engine bots might have overlooked this type of link-building tactic, but, fortunately, they have caught up, and companies who are using this type of link-building services are paying their dues.

These types of sites, that publish short posts across a network of blogs, had been seen as an easy and time-effective way of getting a large number of anchor-text rich links pointing back at a target site.

Despite trying to up their game in terms of relevance and content however, most of these sites suffered from having a large number of clients saturating the network. 

But Guess what?… Google Doesn’t Like Spun Articles

As Google is always improving its search algorithm to deliver high quality services to its millions of search users, the likelihood to game its system becomes more challenging especially for those greedy black hatters who deliberately violate major policies and rules most search engines want their users to follow.

One of the most commonly abused link creation strategies is the heavy creation of spun articles, which are usually dumped to cheap private blog networks to produce numerous back-links.  Google considers these spun articles as thin contents because they don’t offer much value both to readers and search engines.

Originality or uniqueness is one of the main factors used by Google to determine the quality of content.  Their latest search algorithm has now the capability to detect spun articles from original ones.

It can hardly be said that Google’s drive for quality has been kept secret. In addition to February’s announcement that there would be a modification in the process of link assessment, Matt Cutts has recently announced they will be “getting tough” on sites that have obviously been over-optimized for SEO.

 Although it has been over a year since the implementation of the Panda filter, many sites had still been able to achieve high positions in SERPs thanks to low-grade, quick link building procedures.

However, these techniques now appear to have been hit by the recent updates from the Google Web Spam team. There have been a few sore comments, especially from those whose business model has revolved around providing these services and smaller companies who don’t have the time and effort to compete with larger rivals (who incidentally have more to spend on paid search if their organic listings drop).

 It does however; reinforce the mantra from Panda that sites should be concentrating on high quality, useful and innovative content, which will attract links naturally. Those that haven’t planned a content strategy nor have decent SEO copywriting in place ought to make this a priority.

With this latest development from Google, search marketers should learn from the mistakes of those websites that are completely eradicated from the SERPs and create SEO strategies that have long lasting effects and are ethical to the eyes of search engines.

If you are currently looking for high competitive SEO Services, only hire a SEO Company who knows well the workings of major search engines and doesn’t employ unethical tactics to raise your rankings.

By David Murphy

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The never-ending chicken-and-egg issue of gaining ground in Google results is about to take another abrupt turn. According to Google’s Matt Cutts, the company is working on a new set of tweaks to the fabled “GoogleBot” that will penalize sites that over-optimize for prime Google results.

Search Engine Land’s Barry Schwartz reports that Cutts let the impending tweaks slip out while speaking at a panel at this year’s South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas. The goal, said Cutts, is to “level the playing field” between sites that focus on excessive optimization to achieve strong Google results versus sites that hit Google naturally through strong, relevant content.

“We try to make the GoogleBot smarter, try to make our relevance more adaptive, so that if people don’t so SEO we handle that. And we are also looking at the people who abuse it, who put too many keywords on a page, exchange way too many links, or whatever else they are doing to go beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now,” Cutts said.

Cutts added that the optimizations could hit anytime between the next few weeks to a month from now. Google hasn’t gone on record with any additional details as to what its optimizations might include – fair, since additional details about how the GoogleBot will rank sites could invariably assist those looking to re-game the rankings for their benefit. It’s also unclear as to how Google plans to “penalize” sits that over-optimize, or even if there’s going to be a way for website operators to determine whether they fall below this threshold or not.

According to a recent report by the Wall Street Journal, Google is working on integrating “semantic search” technology into its primary search system. This would give Google the ability to better answer users’ questions and search queries immediately, rather than merely point them to a list of websites that might contain the answers they seek.

In the Journal’s example, a user could search for the phrase “Lake Tahoe” and receive a list of facts that Google’s already parsed about the lake — it’s location, altitude, average temperature, et cetera — instead of just a list of sites that could provide this information, were a user to dig deeper. Google’s semantic search will be powered by a database that currently contains more than 200 million “interconnected entities and attributes,” said Google senior vice president Amit Singhal.

For more tech tidbits from David Murphy, follow him on Facebook or Twitter (@thedavidmurphy).”

Read More Here

Published: November 15, 2011

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China operates the world’s most elaborate and opaque system of Internet censorship. But Congress, under pressure to take action against the theft of intellectual property, is considering misguided legislation that would strengthen China’s Great Firewall and even bring major features of it to America.

The legislation — the Protect IP Act, which has been introduced in the Senate, and a House version known as the Stop Online Piracy Act — have an impressive array of well-financed backers, including the United States Chamber of Commerce, the Motion Picture Association of America, the American Federation of Musicians, the Directors Guild of America, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the Screen Actors Guild. The bills aim not to censor political or religious speech as China does, but to protect American intellectual property. Alarm at the infringement of creative works through the Internet is justifiable. The solutions offered by the legislation, however, threaten to inflict collateral damage on democratic discourse and dissent both at home and around the world.

The bills would empower the attorney general to create a blacklist of sites to be blocked by Internet service providers, search engines, payment providers and advertising networks, all without a court hearing or a trial. The House version goes further, allowing private companies to sue service providers for even briefly and unknowingly hosting content that infringes on copyright — a sharp change from current law, which protects the service providers from civil liability if they remove the problematic content immediately upon notification. The intention is not the same as China’s Great Firewall, a nationwide system of Web censorship, but the practical effect could be similar.

Abuses under existing American law serve as troubling predictors for the kinds of abuse by private actors that the House bill would make possible. Take, for example, the cease-and-desist letters that Diebold, a maker of voting machines, sent in 2003, demanding that Internet service providers shut down Web sites that had published internal company e-mails about problems with the company’s voting machines. The letter cited copyright violations, and most of the service providers took down the content without question, despite the strong case to be made that the material was speech protected under the First Amendment.

The House bill would also emulate China’s system of corporate “self-discipline,” making companies liable for users’ actions. The burden would be on the Web site operator to prove that the site was not being used for copyright infringement. The effect on user-generated sites like YouTube would be chilling.

YouTube, Twitter and Facebook have played an important role in political movements from Tahrir Square to Zuccotti Park. At present, social networking services are protected by a “safe harbor” provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which grants Web sites immunity from prosecution as long as they act in good faith to take down infringing content as soon as rights-holders point it out to them. The House bill would destroy that immunity, putting the onus on YouTube to vet videos in advance or risk legal action. It would put Twitter in a similar position to that of its Chinese cousin, Weibo, which reportedly employs around 1,000 people to monitor and censor user content and keep the company in good standing with authorities.”

Read Full Story Here

In our last blog we wen’t briefly over what the update was about and gave you some resources regarding what this update entails.

Now what does the “freshness” update mean for your business website?

Here is a very good article from Entrepreneur.com about the latest update and how it may affect your business.

“New Google Search Update Could Spell More Trouble for Business Websites

If you don’t update your business website very often, you may want to rethink your online content strategy.

A little more than eight months after unveiling “Panda,” an update to Google’s search algorithm that puts a higher priority on high-quality content, the search giant has announced a new update that aims to provide users with “the most up-to-date results.”

“Given the incredibly fast pace at which information moves in today’s world, the most recent information can be from the last week, day or even minute, and depending on the search terms, the algorithm needs to be able to figure out if a result from a week ago about a TV show is recent, or if a result from a week ago about breaking news is too old,” Google says in a blog post announcing the big change.

This latest update is expected to affect as much as 35 percent of all searches on Google, the company says. The Panda update, which had businesses scrambling to stay maintain their search rankings, was said to affect 12 percent of searches.

Specifically, Google says the update will impact searches for recent events or “hot topics,” regularly occurring events, and searches for information that changes often but isn’t necessarily a trending topic or recurring event.

“This change better determines the level of freshness needed for each query and promotes fresher results accordingly,” a Google spokesperson says. “We’re continuously working to improve our search algorithm so that we provide users the most relevant answers to their queries.”

“It seems to me that the biggest impact on small-business owners will be that, in some industries, it will be near impossible to get visibility with a small, rarely-updated website,” says Matt McGee, executive news editor at SEO-focused news site Search Engine Land. “If the business is in an industry where there’s regular news, where things change on a frequent basis, it looks like never-updated websites won’t have much chance of being visible on a lot of queries.”

One effective way for businesses to generate fresh content for their website is to create and frequently update a business blog, McGee recommends. You can write short, informative posts on topics such as industry news or new on your business’s new products or services.

“Blogs have always been great SEO weapons,” McGee says, “and this change only seems to emphasize the value of publishing quality content on a regular basis.”

“

Read Full Article Here