Google has recently announced a somewhat unfortunate decision that will affect our ability to track referring organic keywords which visitors use to get to a website through Google Analytics and other traffic tracking software. Fortunately for the panicked Australian webmasters who have been emailing me about this change, this does not affect us yet.

For searchers who are logged into Google, searching on Google.com will now automatically take them to the SSL encrypted version of the domain. What this means for websites who are tracking their traffic, Techalite clients included, is that keyword-specific data for these searches will no longer be logged and viewable in traffic tracking. Instead, we’ll still see that traffic came from Google, but the keyword itself will be shown as unavailable. Again, note the use of Google.com above. I am emphasising this for reasons explained later in this post.

Google claims that they expect this to impact up to about 10% of traffic that websites get (less depending on the industry). Regardless, with the amount of effort they’re putting into ensuring that users are logged into Google via Gmail, Docs, Google+, YouTube, and other Google services, more and more people are going to be logged in when searching as time goes on – making this very inconvenient to webmasters who rely on being able to view visitor data.

How this affects Australian websites

Thankfully for our Australian clients, SSL right now is only available on google.com, not google.com.au, which is what the majority of Australian searchers use. Most of Techalite’s clients being small Australian-based businesses (hi guys!), the vast majority of their traffic comes from google.com.au searches, which is exactly the target we’re aiming for. However, Google state that they are actively working on making SSL available throughout all domains. When this happens, we can expect to see similar behaviour for logged-in searchers on Google.com.au. When this will happen, we don’t know – the best we can do is “eventually”! For now – don’t panic – your analytics are not changing yet.

I will create a follow-up post on how much effect this would have when SSL is introduced to Google.com.au later on. For now, this is more of an emergency update to give you guys a gist of what’s actually happening.

A bit of a disclaimer before we start: Google+ has only been out for a couple of days. Most things people discuss and predict about Google+ right now are pure speculation.

Will Google+ be a business networking game changer?

For business owners with more of a techy entrepreneurial spirit, Google+ has the potential to be a networking game changer.

Circles let you separate business and personal relationships

Google+ allows us to sort our relationships into Circles and thereby filter content that you read and share. Sending out a new promotion to current leads? Send an update to your Leads Circle. Informally notifying existing clients of a new feature or bit of news? Share with your Clients Circle. Telling your friends that you just got a new rabbit? Share it with your Friends Circle. Circles allow us to keep our communications with different connections completely separate of each other.

How Google+ Hangouts can be used for business

From a business perspective, Google+ hangouts can be used for things like:

• Run a small seminar, introductory talk, or even just a topical discussion
• Communicating with remote employees
• Catching up with remote clients
• Connecting with business contacts you’ve been following for a while

Google+ vs Facebook for business

Sure, Google+ has no business “pages” to create (yet?) like Facebook. However, with Facebook the business aspect of it seems to have almost been tagged on as an afterthought, after Facebook saw that there was demand for it. Facebook business pages may be great for reaching regular folks who use Facebook to talk about their lunch and personal problems, but Google+ seems to have a much more professional environment from the get-go. Certainly this is partly because early adopters tend to be the more tech savvy ones who like testing out new technologies and being ahead of the pack (after all, why would you seriously start investing time in Google+ so early just to talk about your pet chinchilla when you already have a medium for it on your established Facebook profile?). More mature discussions seem to be springing up from Google+ from the get go.

Therefore, which channel you opt to put more effort into for your business may largely depend on your target demographic. Are you looking to connect with everyday consumers (things like clothing shops might be better suited for this, for example), perhaps teenagers, or are you looking to connect with people on a more mature level?

To me Google+ currently has a “Quora” feel – people are generally technology enthusiasts, entrepreneurs, business owners, and online strategists. Of course, as Google+ picks up steam it could very well start attracting more of the every-day non-techy consumer. Right now…well…I’m just finding that a little hard to visualize. And, well…I like not seeing posts like “heyyyy m8 I got so smashed last nite” on Google+.

Do you have a question or comment about Google+? Contact me or leave a comment below.

Google is in the process of a metamorphosis – from UI to new features, our favorite search engine is evolving. Whether that evolution is for the better or worse has yet to be seen.

With the announcement of Google+, as covered on my personal blog, the shroud has been lifted on Google’s new direction. We’ve been seeing new features and UI changes creeping in over the past few months, the most prominent being the +1 button and more recently the dark navigation bar across the top of the page.

New Google search UI

Earlier this week Google+ was announced. Today, the left hand sidebar has been updated with a new color scheme and brand new icons. It is also no longer expandable, appearing by default with no option to minimize. Even the Search button has gotten a makeover.

New Google search options UI

But it isn’t just Google’s UI that’s going through an evolution – Google is following a new vision – a more social Google. Google +1 was just the beginning and Google+ is a major step, but unveilings will follow.

I’m the first to defend Google’s original design – blue links, simple, clean. I hated the horizontal black bar when it came in. When it comes to Google’s UI and change, I felt (and to a large extent still feel) that there is no need for it. However, the new UI changes that are slowly but surely trickling in seem to be coming together into something not entirely unpleasant. I just hope they get this thing right.

Personally, I’m excited by Google’s new direction, but at the same time apprehensive and nervous. No company is infallible and despite Google’s massive user base they haven’t exactly had a great track record with social networking, especially with the privacy backlash they seem to be constantly under at the moment. In addition, many Google users partly love it for its simple no-frills UI. To me it seems like the massive shift that Google is currently undertaking really will be a sink or swim situation.

The Techalite blog is long overdue for an update and what better topic than Google’s, Bing’s, and Yahoo’s new Schema.org microdata initiative? I won’t be getting into the Schema.org vs RDFa debate here. Suffice to say that I support the search engines’ Schema.org initiative.

What is Schema.org microdata, anyway?

Schema.org is a set of HTML tags that we can use to make our on-page content recognised and distinguished more easily and effectively by the major search engines. It basically tells search engines exactly what it is you’re trying to say on your website by organising your content into a clearly labeled and defined structure – kind of like what a database would be like. Are you listing a product? What is that product’s name, description, price, rating, etc?

Schema.org is a way of structuring data to let search engines know what it is you’re communicating to the human user.

What will Schema.org do for me?

Giving search engines an easier way to crawl your site is always beneficial. Schema microdata will allow search engines to use your structured data not only to better understand what your website is all about, but also for things like potential new featuers that involve displaying structured data in search results. Schema.org itself says:

“On-page markup enables search engines to understand the information on web pages and provide richer search results in order to make it easier for users to find relevant information on the web. Markup can also enable new tools and applications that make use of the structure.”

Schema.org is still in its infancy so you likely won’t see a sudden impact of it just yet, but is eventually likely to be used for:

• Rich snippets
• The ranking algorithm
• Third party adaptation

Will my website be penalised for not using Schema?

This is all speculation, but I would be hesitant to suggest that websites not using Schema will be penalised by the search engines. Google, Bing, and Yahoo have already said that they will continue to support other markup formats that are already being used. However, Schema.org is a major initiative by the SEs and while they might not punish you for not jumping on board per se, it can certainly put your website at a disadvantage against competitors who do implement Schema.org microdata. Think of this as optimising your title tags – you won’t be punished for just having your page name in your title, but you will be at a disadvantage against competitors who are optimising their titles for targeted keywords.

Are you implementing Schema.org microdata for your SEO clients?

Yes. Techalite has already started rolling out schema.org microdata on some clients’ websites, specifically product-based sites. We do our best to keep on top of new search engine initiatives to make sure our clients remain a step ahead of the competition.

Get a head start

My recommendation? If you have any time at all to spend on this, look into implementing Schema.org markup now rather than later.

Got questions about Schema.org microdata or SEO in general? Leave a comment or fill out the contact form.

There seems to be a general consensus among people who aren’t really familiar with the relationship between Google and SEO professionals that SEO is somehow cheating the system, that Google hates SEO, or that SEO is “evil”. On the contrary, white-hat SEO professionals and Google work well together in a symbiotic relationship of sorts. Google often divulges search engine ranking advice and updates publicly. Matt Cutts especially (the head of Google’s Webspam team) has a long history of elaborating on particular aspects of Google’s algorithm and how certain changes impact website rankings.

What white-hat SEO does for Google

Google’s job is to provide fresh, relevant, useful results to its users. White-hat SEO professionals recognise this and, by understanding Google’s goals and how it attempts to accomplish them, work with Google’s algorithms to improve their own clients’ search engine rankings. Therefore, improving their clients’ search engine rankings implores SEOs to generate fresh, relevant, useful content. This in turn improves the quality of Google’s results.

What Google does for white-hat SEO

Because white-hat SEO encourages the production of useful high quality content, Google is only too happy to assist by being transparent about how it ranks websites to an extent. They obviously can’t reveal every ranking factor or tell us about every change, but they do tend to be quite transparent on some topics. As an example, Matt Cutts goes into great detail to talk about PageRank sculpting, explain the inner workings of the “nofollow” attribute and how PageRank is passed when a nofollow is present on a page.

If Google condemned white-hat SEO

If Google suddenly started to condemn all SEO practices, not just those that manipulate the search results in misleading ways, white-hat SEOs would be more likely to cross the line into the more dodgy methods. By working with white-hat SEOs and even providing advice and insight into how Google ranks websites in search results, Google is encouraging fair practices and the production of non-spammy, high quality content online.

Search without white-hat SEO

White-hat SEO centers around two main activities:

• Making sure a website can actually be found by search engines and its content crawled easily
• Increasing the visibility of a website in organic search results by making sure a website keeps up with (and surpasses) its optimised competitors in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages)

White-hat SEO should be thought of not as the practice of trying to “cheat” Google, but that of helping Google to find content relevant to the user’s query and helping businesses to make their content more easily found. If SEO did not exist, we would likely still have websites with extremely useful content organised and structured in ways that a search engine would never find. I still see websites with what would otherwise have been great content stuffed into an image. Good luck finding that super useful page now, buddy.

Misconceptions about SEO

On Lifehacker, a post recently appeared seemingly discouraging people from hiring SEO professionals and referring to SEO as “snakeoil”. I found this amusing, as the advice they gave to business owners and webmasters matches almost exactly some of the things that any white-hat SEO professional who knows what he/she is doing has been saying for years. In other words…they spoke out against SEO while making points that SEOs themselves have been making for years.

In conclusion, SEO isn’t evil any more than a knife is evil. It only becomes “good” or “evil” in the hands of the person using it.

I’ve recently been asked by a few people about what software I use for SEO, so I thought now might be a good time to write a quick blog post about SEO software. I will not be disclosing the individual programs here. It isn’t like what I use is some big secret, I would just rather not advertise my choice in software to anyone and everyone. I do disclose individual names to people I know fairly well and clients if requested, but the purpose of this post is not to list specific programs to use. This post will cover the general use of software in SEO work.

Software is good

Using software to help make your SEO work more efficient may not be a requirement for someone who’s just optimising their own website or only has a couple of smaller clients. Pretty much anything (if not everything) that can be achieved with software can also be done manually, it’s just more hands on and time-consuming.

However, for an SEO professional who deals with more than a couple of clients and understands that time is money, software can be a huge efficiency booster. My client base is by no means stretched at the moment, but I know if I didn’t have some high quality tools at my disposal I would be spending at least double the time to get the same amount of work done as I am now.

Software will not make you awesome

If you know nothing about SEO, flashy software will not magically turn you into a competent SEO professional. No tool can compensate for a lack of understanding and ongoing learning of how search engines work. If you’re just starting out you shouldn’t have any clients, much less enough to need software. Learn by doing it manually and purchase software as your knowledge grows.

SEO software is not evil

You can abuse SEO software just like you can abuse any other tool. So what if a program can churn out hundreds of links in the space of an hour? Just because you can do this does not mean you should. Responsible moderation is key, otherwise you raise red flags.

SEO Software within Techalite

As Techalite is still quite a small business I did not splurge on all kinds of SEO software to start out with. Rather I gradually collect various programs as the need for them comes up. At the moment I own software to do the following:

• Rank tracking/reporting
• Backlink analysis
• Social bookmarking
• Article targeting
• Finding blog posts/articles on specific platforms that are relevant to certain keywords

Oh there’s definitely some SEO software out there that I’d love to get my hands on and eventually I will buy it. For now, the above is more than sufficient.

It’s OK to not know anything about search engine optimisation (SEO). However, if hiring someone else to optimise your website for you, here is what not to do

Do not educate yourself

Many business owners hear “SEO” and think of a magic bullet that will bring them rainbows and unicorns and sales through the roof without actually knowing what SEO really is. Take time to educate yourself about the basics of SEO before hiring someone to optimise your website. I’m not saying you should start trying to learn about specific ranking factors and search engine algorithms as there is already so much misinformation and speculation out there that you might end up even more confused than you were before. But you should take time to learn what SEO is and a general idea of what it entails. Check out our own SEO FAQ for some brief basics to start off with.

Do not ask questions

Some SEO “experts” are very good at acting like SEO is somehow “above” the understanding of the average business owner and discouraging questions about what they do or how they do it. Granted, you can’t expect an SEO specialist to teach you every little step they go through to optimise a website (unless they offer training courses), but as a business owner you do have every right to ask an SEO company about their methodology and techniques. They should be able to tell you what they will be doing to increase your website’s rankings for targeted keywords. For example, my own SEO process goes roughly like this:

1. Research – client’s industry, competitors, website, goals, etc
2. Proposal
3. Keyword analysis
4. Initial ranking report
5. On-page SEO plan
6. Core link building
7. Start recurring ranking and traffic reports
8. Ongoing monthly tracking, maintenance, link building

An SEO specialist/company should be able to outline their process for you. They may not divulge their exact technologies, lists, or software, but they should be able to give you an outline of what it is they’re doing to your business website.

Outsource overseas

If you don’t know much about SEO best practices and how search engines actually work, stay away from outsourcing your SEO work overseas. There is a huge number of overseas SEO providers claiming secret insider knowledge, proven results, gazillions of links, etc. These “specialists” may be cheaper than local SEOs so are tempting for many small business owners. The truth of the matter is that the majority of them will feed you a whole bunch of crap and use spammy techniques to “optimise” your site, if they even do as much work as they claim at all. In the long term their tactics can do more harm than good for your website’s search engine rankings.

This is not to say that there are no good SEO specialists overseas. If you get a glowing recommendation from a business owner you personally know and trust, by all means – look into it. However, if you don’t know anything about search engine optimisation to start off with you will simply not know how to weed out the good from the bad. It is safer to stay away from overseas outsourcing.

Nor is this saying that all local SEO specialists can be trusted. There are plenty of local SEOs who don’t know what they are talking about. However, you’ll be more likely to be able to check them out and ask for referrals from other local businesses than you would with a company in India.

Expect instant results

Search engine optimisation is not an instant fix. It is an ongoing effort. Depending on your industry, competition, current website, any previous optimisation, and other factors it can take weeks, even months, to start seeing ranking improvement. In my experience, clients usually see a solid bump in rankings on their first fortnightly ranking report after the initial SEO implementation stage, after which there is a stage of fluctuation over the next few reports as we strengthen the link profile. However, none of us control search engines. If you’re suddenly trying to rank a brand new site for the search term “weight loss” and expect next-day results, you’re in for an unpleasant surprise.

Do not insist on ranking reports

An SEO company should be able to provide regular search engine ranking reports to you via email or other preferred delivery method. You are paying someone to increase your website’s search engine rankings for targeted keywords and have every right to see if you’re getting what you pay for.

Yes, it is true that search engine rankings are now more personalised (and have been for a while) and can differ from user to user based on location, search history, and other factors. It is true that ranking reports may not paint a 100% exact picture of where your website is appearing in search results across the board for every single person who types in a search query. However, rankings in the top ten are still very stable and usually the rest of them tend to be accurate within a few positions with minimal outliers.

Ranking reports may not be the be-all and end-all of SEO anymore, but they are still important to get an idea of where you stand. This also means that keeping track of how much traffic you are getting through search engines is just as important as seeing what position you’re in.

I provide fortnightly ranking reports to my clients along with weekly Google Analytics traffic reports. Every 3-6 months my clients also receive an in-depth progress report that lays out their ranking and traffic progress in layman’s terms. Some SEO companies may provide more or less frequent reporting options, but no matter who you hire – make sure that reporting is part of the deal.

When I started this post I did not expect to have more than a few points to list, but as I write more and more keep coming. I think there is going to have to be a Part 2 to this in the future, but for now, these are my top five things not to do when hiring an SEO specialist.

Power Legends provides electrical services in Perth, WA. Their existing website was a ‘template’ site that crammed various images and text onto one long page. They did eventually add more pages for various services, but their web development company charged them for each page and new pages didn’t exactly do anything for the design’s outdated feel.

So when Power Legends came to me about a complete redesign of the site, I knew we’d have to modernize it. The client had an idea of some of the elements they definitely wanted on the site – specifically the animated banner on the home page, the various images throughout the site, and parts of the layout of the contact page.

The end result is a more polished website that allows the visitor to navigate through the information easier than the old design, with a much more clear navigation system as opposed to pages tacked-on to what was originally built to be a single landing page.

The Power Legends website is built on WordPress.

A Perth SEO client recently emailed me regarding a link exchange proposition someone email to her. You know the ones, “My site is PR blah and it would be very beneficial blah blah blah”. The SEO client requested some information about these kinds of link exchange requests and thought it might be worthwhile to accept this one as the other website was actually topically relevant to their own business. I spent quite a bit of time writing my reply with a full explanation of why/why not to accept these kinds of offers and am posting a slightly edited version of this below:

There are usually two reasons why people want link exchanges or think they might be beneficial: SEO and traffic.

Quick overview

In short – link exchanges are not useful for SEO, but can sometimes be useful to get more visitors through those links. If you do exchange links with other sites, to avoid a search engine penalty and to make sure that you’re getting relevant visitors it’s important:

1. to only do this with websites that are topically relevant to yours,
2. that the agreement is balanced (eg both links get the same amount of visibility. If you put their link on your most popular page, they should do the same),
3. and that the other website is not linking to hundreds of other websites like this (as this can get them penalized by search engines and put you into the same “bad link neighborhood” as them by association).

Detailed explanation

The two main reasons for link exchanges:

• SEO. This is the most common reason with these kinds of requests. Building links is an extremely important aspect of a successful SEO campaign. However, reciprocal link schemes/link exchanges (things like “I’ll link to you if you link to me”) are not actually the kinds of links that give you any sort of SEO benefit. Google thinks of these links as “gaming the system” and most of the time discounts them completely. In fact, if a website has too many reciprocal links/link exchanges and not enough high quality one-way links in its link profile, it can actually be penalized by search engines, which can reflect badly on the other sites that are associated with it (like the websites that it links to). In short: the SEO reasoning is out.
• Traffic. The other reason for a link exchange is to spread the word about your site. So people might go to the other website and click back to you. Most of the time with link exchanges this doesn’t really happen too much unless the other website is already very popular, but if the website is topically relevant and gets plenty of traffic itself then it could be worthwhile.

In other words, if you do agree to a link exchange, make sure that the site you’re exchanging with is likely to drive some traffic and visibility back to you as it’s certainly not driving any SEO benefit (in 99% of cases). Also, be very careful that this website is not in a dodgy link neighborhood and that it only exchanges links with other topically relevant sites (to avoid a penalty). Unfortunately most of the time people who approach you for link exchanges are dodgy nowadays, so one must be extra careful. In addition, be careful of the anchor text they want you to use. If it’s something spammy and long, like “cool monkeys and bananas for search in Perth with biggest vegetable”, either flat out refuse the link exchange or (if you think they might really drive a good volume of traffic to you), propose your own choice of anchor text.

There are two main SEO benefits to blog comments – one direct, one indirect.

Blog commenting can be seen as both a quantity-based and a quality-based method of link building (or even both at the same time), depending on what approach you take.

Let’s quickly define what we’re talking about when we talk about blog commenting for SEO:

• Commenting on different dofollow blogs
• Adding a backlink to your website to the comment, either in the body of the comment or just to the Website URL section of the comment form

Direct blog comment SEO benefit

The effectiveness of blog commenting for SEO in terms of direct benefit is debatable. Some people say it’s useless, some people claim it works. My own view on blog commenting for direct SEO benefit is based on personal experiences and the experiences of others. I’m certainly not claiming that blog commenting is the best, most valuable link building method out there. I do believe, however, that blog commenting is a quantity-based link building method that can be useful to build a strong link profile.

In terms of direct SEO benefit, blog comments aren’t really worth much. However, “not worth much” is a far cry from “not worth anything”. When delivered in high quantities, blog comments can help to strengthen your link profile. But like anything else, a link profile based exclusively on blog comments alone won’t really be sufficient. A variety of links is required and blog commenting can be one of the various link building tactics that you use.

Some people say that blog comments have been so abused that search engines don’t really give them any weight anymore. This is true to an extent, but first hand experience and accounts of others still show that blog commenting can have a positive impact on search engine rankings.

Indirect blog comment SEO benefit

The indirect SEO benefit of blog commenting comes from forming relationships with other bloggers and catching the attentions of authors, who may then link to your website from their blog posts. A link in the comment may not be worth much, but a link in the post itself, especially in the post of a blog with a strong link profile of its own, can provide considerable value.

Keep your SEO blog comments relevant

1. No spam. Those spammy comments that we all get made up of gibberish or nonsensical auto-generated text with links embedded inside? Don’t do that. Not only do these kinds of things obviously never get mentioned in the blog posts, completely eliminating the indirect SEO benefit outlined above, but they are also likely to land you on a spammer blacklist, which can then flag your comments on other blogs as spam as well and reject them automatically.
2. Well thought out. You might not think writing “Great post, thanks!” is considered spam, but it is. The comment should be well thought out and relevant to the blog post you’re commenting on. Put thought into a comment. Good blog commenting is not a two-second job.
3. Keep links to a minimum. Unless you have a particular page on your site that is extremely relevant to what the post is talking about, avoid links in the body of your comment and restrict your linking to the website URL field in the comment form instead. With so much spam floating around, bloggers are often hesitant about allowing links in the body of comments unless the link is obviously very relevant.

At the end of the day, there is no good reason not to comment on other blogs for either the direct or indirect SEO benefit you can get (or both).

What has your experience been with blog commenting for SEO?