In the recent past, we have written on the subject of selecting the best SEO expert and the best Web designer for your projects or websites. Revisiting the subject is warranted after reading a blog post over at Blazing Minds regarding SEO Packages for Small Business. It’s an important subject, and understanding it or the lack of understanding it can effect your long term business goals.

In our article Selecting a Web Design Firm and SEO Expert we highlighted these points:

• Avoiding the SEO Amateur – This continues to be a problem among startup businesses and those that do not do their research. We have rescued a few of these since the writing of our original article.
• Avoiding the Submission Scam – Be wearing of anyone who tells you that they will submit your site to 100′s or 1000′s of sites. First, that’s probably not going to do much for you. Second, submission of your site is a tactic and not a strategy in search engine optimization.
• Understanding how keywords are really used – It is a common understanding that being ranked #1 for a keyword is the goal of SEO. Well, it’s true, if you are using the right keywords. If you are ranked #1 for keywords that no one uses, then your keywords are junk. An expert SEO will help determine the best keywords to attract the visitors to your site that convert into leads or sales.

The Blazing Mind’s article points out these concepts in regard to buying an SEO package.

• Bulk Link Building – Root domain authority building should be one of the primary goals of any SEO package and not building low quality links.
• Results in Less Than 3 Months? – While real resultscan happen in less than 3 months, it often takes more time to develop solid ranking results that will stick around for the long term. Usually those 3 month promises is a good indicator that you are talking to a used car salesman. (No offence to used car salesmen.)
• Are you Being Offered a Complete Package? – Avoid the SEO package that doesn’t include keyword anaysis or competetor research. An SEO strategy that doesn’t include these will leave you wanting for more and few conversions from visitor to customer.

You can read the complete article about Selecting a Web Design Firm and SEO Expert here at the Abraxas website and you can read more about understanding SEO Packages for Small Business over at Blazing Minds.

Abraxas offers a highly effective strategic approach to search engine optimization and provides custom SEO packages to small businesses and startups. Please contact us for more information.

WRCB Channel 3 In Chattanooga, TN featured the expert analysis of our lead web/search strategist, Donnie Lee, in a story regarding the proposed new Web site for the City of Chattanooga. The interview was conducted on June 27, 2011 at the conference room of AV Simplified Solutions for the 6 o’clock news.

Update:
You can read the full article over at Channel 3′s website.

A recent web design project that we completed for Team Hillenburg, an independent consultant for Thirty-One Gifts, is beginning to make the rounds to the CSS award sites. Team Hillenburg’s new website has made an appearance as a featured site on CSS Based and CSS Basket. We expect a few more awards to be bestowed on this fine web site that was built using the latest version of WordPress, with some custom design and backend options to suite the needs of Team Hillenburg. The project time line for this project stretched over two months with the bulk of the design work being done in the first 30 days and the majority of the content being added in the last 30 days.

Visit Team Hillenburg to view the design and layout or to explore the Thirty-One concept.

Dog Star Comics
First up, we have Dog Star Comics a digital comic book publisher coming online soon at the frontier of digital comics. Dog Star Comics is both an SEO and Web design project. This site is unique in that the site online now is in a pre-launch state to bring awareness and seed SEO efforts. Once, Dog Star Comics is ready to roll out for business, a new site that is more refined with a membership/subscription option will also roll out.

Focus Floors
Focus Floors is a well established retailer of carpet tiles for residential and commercial use, based in Chattanooga, TN. This project is an ecommerce project that features a robust shopping cart system, blog, and SEO. We have been fortunate enough to work with Focus Floors on SEO before developing customer centric ecommerce solution. This site is still in the design/development stage. In the mean time, their old and archaic site continues to serve their broad customer base. We expect a full roll out on this site in December 2010.

Dog Star Comics beta/pre-launch site to seed awareness and SEO.

Visit Site

Focus Floors early design build that hasn’t been released for public consumption.

Visit Site

Optimizing your web pages and images for Google’s image search is, in my opinion, underused. This can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on your perspective. It’s good if you are looking to gain more traffic to your site from image search, because competition may be low. It’s a bad thing if you are doing the searching and looking for images based on particular keywords. At Abraxas, we always consider image search optimization when we design websites or optimize for search engines in general.

I’ll admit, when the Google image search was first introduced, I didn’t really understand its power. When I first saw referrals from the Google image search in my logs, I set out to block the Google image bot from my sites. My belief was that the traffic generated from these searches was of low value and was wasting my bandwidth. I came to realize that these image searches were of good value, especially for image heavy web sites such as photography related sites.  You should consider whether or not image search has any value to you. If so, use these tips to make the most of optimizing for Google image search.

The Basics
General optimizing for Google image search will help bring your code in compliance with W3C standards, which is a good thing, but obviously, we’re really going for traffic. If you keep in mind that the Google Image bot can’t actually see the image and relies on the text describing the image and how it is related to the content, you are ahead of the game.  Of course, to make the most of these techniques, it’s a good idea to do to some keyword research. In order of importance, here are the things that you should be concerned with:

1.       Surrounding Text
2.       Alt Tag
3.       Image Size and Location
4.       Image Name
5.       Page Title
6.       Links

Surrounding Text – I believe that the most important element that Google looks at is the text that surrounds the image. Adding a keyword rich caption to you image is recommended. The idea is that words is close proximity to the image are mostly related to the image.

Alt Tag – This is one of the most basic things to consider, yet still one of the most important aspects. Please insure that you use the alt tag.

Image Size and Location – An image that is 600×400 pixels and is located “above the fold” near the top of the page will have a better chance of scoring well in the search results than an image that is 100×100 pixels located way down at the bottom of the page.

Image Name – You should name your image using keywords that are relevant. For example, an image with the name “kevin-bacon-breakfast.jpg” has a better chance of scoring a result for the search term “what does kevin bacon eat for breakfast” than does “img0002.jpg.”

Page Title – It does seem that the basic title tag has relevance not only to SEO in general, but to image search as well. Your image should be related to the subject of your page as should your title tag.

Link – There is evidence that suggest that a hypelink boosts the image’s credibility. For instance, linking a smaller 500×500 pixel image to the larger 1000×1000 pixel image or linking the image to a page that has more detail about the image or subject.

These are some basic techniques you should think about if you would like to optimize your images for Google image search and capitalize on that traffic source. These techniques work for blog posts, product pages, and most any type of page on a website. If you have never attempted to optimize your images for Google image search, this will give a head-start. Your mileage may vary, and I suggest that you try different techniques and see what works best for your specific content.

Back in March we wrote a blog post regarding one of our current SEO R&D projects, HD Movie Trailers Online. It’s been about 6 months, so it would be timely to post an update on the progress of that project.

First, we have taken a minimalistic approach to the search engine optimization of this site. We’re doing about as much SEO as the average blogger or website owner might do, except we are armed with a little understanding of how the search engines work. We don’t have any overly grand expectations that we will dominate the niche, but we want to be competitive. We will also gain a better understanding of how we should sell our SEO services to our clients.

The niche that we choose, HD movie trailers, is somewhat competitive with many well-known brands competing in the space such as Apple and Yahoo. There are also a few well-funded start-ups coming into the space. We also understand that this space is not over saturated like consumer products. Understanding this, we can weigh our actual success and how we might apply these tactics to client’s sites.

We selected a small group of keywords to monitor throughout the project. We won’t reveal those exact keywords, but it is sufficient to say that some are more competitive than others.  Here is a breakdown of what we did:

Site Creation and Content

• Used a virgin domain name that was less than a year old.
• Created a well optimized website with a very narrow focus point (high definition movie trailers) using a custom WordPress theme.
• Added some seed content to the site such as movie trailers. A note about the content: The video content is provided by Yahoo and AOL and others. The site does not host any of the video content, but uses JW Player to present the content from the trailer providers. A brief review/summary (text) is provided for each trailer. Usually one or two sentences are written by us at the beginning of the post, and then there is a brief summary that is provided by the production company or a well-known review site. Text length is usually about a paragraphs worth of text for each post. Not all of the text for each post is original.

Initial Site Announcement

• We added a XML and HTML sitemap and registered the sitemap with Google via Webmaster Tools.
• We added a few “Update Services” for our RSS feed such as Ping-O-Matic, IceRocket, Technorati, etc.
• We wrote a simple and basic press release announcing the website launch and submitted it to a few free press release services that provide some SEO value.
• We cross promoted with Blogs we own, operate, or control (where the mention made sense) by writing a brief blog post. (Four in total.)

Ongoing Activities

• We began making minimal updates to the site. Early on, we were making 4-8 updates per week. Most recently, we are making 2-4 updates per week. These updates consisted of posting new movie trailers.
• We began a basic backlinking campaign. This campaign was very minimalistic, but focused on presumed authority sites. Most were “dofollow”, but a few were “nofollow”. We created no more than 10 of these links.
• We promoted the RSS feed, which is multimedia heavy, to major Media RSS sites such as Miro and Podcast Alley.
• According to our backlink profile, we have picked up very few valuable links outside of our network or sites that we pursued.

According to the logs that we kept of our activities, this information is fairly accurate. There maybe one or two things that have been neglected.

The Results

• By the second week of the website launch, Google had indexed 90% of the site content.
• By the end of the second week all the control keywords were ranking on the 3^rd page of Google except for the least competitive which were ranked on the low side of 2^nd page.
• By the end of the third week all keywords were appearing on the second page.
• By the end of the second month the least competitive keywords were appearing on the first page. All other keywords except for the most competitive were appearing high on the second page.
• By the end of the sixth month all keywords are appearing high on the first page except for the most competitive keyword which is bouncing on and off the first page on a daily basis.

Other Results

Search results for a specific set of keywords don’t tell the whole story. Long tail keywords accounted for 50% of the traffic to the entire site during this six month period. We attribute this to the highly optimized structure of the site. We estimate that the Domain Authority and Page Authority of the site remains fairly low, however we were able to overcome this disadvantage by having strong on-site optimization. For those that are always thinking of PageRank, according to Google’s PageRank Tool, we were able to achieve a PR 4 in a short time (within the first 2 months).

Onward and Upward

While the results we achieved in the first six months are very promising, we will continue with our next phase of the project and step a few things up. We will continue to pick-and-choose our content for post, but will post regularly. We will focus a backlinking campaign over the next three to four months on “dofollow” blogs to see how those affect the ranking position of keywords in Google.

You wonder where you should spend your efforts to get those highly prized organic SERPs. Just like SEO, the answer is complicated yet simple. When you get right down to it, SEO is an exercise in common sense. And so is the answer to what has replaced PageRank as one of the most important factors in high rankings. We’ll call it Google Trust and Authority.

Fundamentally, Google Trust and Authority is similar to PageRank, it just involves a few more elements and springs from a different source. I’m still evolving my opinion on Google Trust and Authority and I think most SEOs are, as well. Aspects of Trust and Authority may be independent from each other in the algorithm and some aspects maybe tied together.

One thing remains the same, the backlinks that you have are still important and so is the anchor text. The importance of where those links are has changed whether they are at the bottom of page, top of page, what is the Authority of the site your links appear on, etc.

What is Trust in the eyes of Google? As you might expect, only Google knows exactly what Trust is, but I suspect it has something to do with the age of a domain name, who owns the domain name, what kind of activities have been going on with the domain and sister domains. Do these domains hang out in bad parts of town with other thugs (aka spammers). Or are you hanging out with respected domains that have something to offer to WWW users. I think Google, in part, is looking at your track record.

What is Authority in the eyes of Google? The theory goes, Google has picked out a bunch of Authority Seed sites (like maybe NASA) and authority flows from those sites like PageRank. So, the closer you are to these Authority Seeds in your backlinking structure the more authority you have. Think of it like “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”. Obviously the person only one degree from Mr. Bacon has more authority on how he likes his eggs compared to the person that is six degrees away.

If you think about it, it makes sense. I’m sure that I have over simplified Google Trust and Authority in this post, but I think that this will get your wheels turning and allow your give PageRank a rest. You may be interested in reading a related article over at SEO by the Sea written quite a while back about this very subject when Google applied for a patent that might control some of this.

We had a couple of design goals when we started:

• Contemporary design with logical navigation that most users would be familiar with
• Clear call to action for new and existing users
• Extend MCA’s brand from their print marketing to the Website
• Animation on the homepage without the use of Flash

We also had some administration goals to keep in mind. MCA’s old Website did not lend itself to updating or changes without a significant amount of involvement from many parties.

Administration Goals:

• Content Management System (CMS) for editing and adding content with ease by staff
• Management of the homepage slideshow from the CMS with the ability to create an advertisement within the slideshow and direct the user to more information with a click.
• Multiple administrative users
• Integrated blogging system for news and updates from MCA

We were able to meet all of goals for the project and deliver a Website to MCA that the can use to extend their brand for years to come with a low cost of maintenance.

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The foundation for any search engine optimization strategy is developing a list of relevant keywords or relevant keyword phrases that searchers type into search engines to find a Web site like yours. Not all keywords are created equal, so we need to set some criteria for the types of keywords that we want to target in a SEO campaign.

Our keyword criteria might look something like this:

• Keywords must be relevant to product or service. It doesn’t help you to be bringing in traffic from people looking for widgets if you are selling gadgets.
• Keywords shouldn’t be generic or too broad in meaning. Not only are generic keywords highly completive, but are less likely to produce any action from the searcher. For example let’s pretend you are a heavy equipment retailer:  A top ranking for “farming” will not likely generate any business, but a top ranking for “farm tractor” would more likely get your phone ringing. Even better would be “farm tractor in Chattanooga”, assuming your equipment business is located in Chattanooga, TN.

Now that we have set some basic criteria for our keywords, we need to determine what the keywords are. The first step is to do a bit of brainstorming. Ask yourself how you would search for products and services like yours. Ask your friends and family members. Ask yourself what kind of problems people are trying to solve who might need a company like yours. Another good way is to look at sites that you might be competing with and try to understand keywords they are targeting.

There are tools online and software packages that can help you. Google might have the best free tools, but sites like Word Tracker can be helpful too. I don’t recommend many software packages, because they can lead you down the wrong path. The best resource you have is your understanding of your products, services and company while anticipating and understanding your consumers.

For this exercise, we will use Google’s Keyword Tool. After you have brain stormed your keywords, you should enter them into the Google Keyword Tool. Google will spit out a list of keywords with numbers for “Local Search Volume” and “Global Search Volume”. You should remove any columns that aren’t relevant. Once you have your list, export it as a CSV file for importation into your favorite spreadsheet program.

Once you have your spreadsheet, you’ll want to remove any keywords that aren’t relevant to keep your spreadsheet lean and mean. Now we will have to gather additional information to determine what our best keywords are. What we are looking for is the most popular and relevant keywords with the least amount of competition. You could be surprised by the relevant keywords that are overlooked by your competition.

To determine the competitive nature of your keywords, you will need to use Google. We’ll use the keyword “farm tractor”. Search this term without the quotes. We are looking for some particular information here. You’ll notice that Google displays something like this on the right side above the results, “Results 1 – 10 of about 1,850,000 for farm tractor.” The number 1,850,000 is what we are looking for, but don’t be too concerned with how large this number appears. This number represents how many pages “farm tractor” appears on.

We really want to know how many pages we are competing with. To determine this, we’ll add an operator to our search like this “allintitle: farm tractor”.  Now we see something like this: “Results 1 – 10 of about 822,000 for allintitle: farm tractor.” This tells us how many pages have “farm tractor” in the title.  This number looks more reasonable. The title is a key SEO element that helps determine search engine ranking. Now we add the number 822,000 to a new column in our spreadsheet. Repeat this for all your keywords.

Once you have completed the list you’ll have a good understanding of the keywords that you should target in your SEO campaign. What you are looking for is keywords that have a high “Global Search Volume” and a low “allintitle” value.

Following these concepts, while somewhat simplified, will give you a head start on your SEO campaign and your competition. This list of keywords will now help you determine the content and menu structure for your site, because now you know the best way to reach your customers.

Understanding that Robert wanted to spend as little time as possible dealing with uploading and editing Web pages we developed Robert B. Mullins – Songs & Music, a simple WordPress site with a few features customized for his purposes:

One interface for management of blog posts, songs, and Web pages.

We designed custom WordPress templates that distinguishes between song posts and blog posts and categorizes and styles them accordingly. WordPress already has a powerful page management system built in, so we employed that system to ease content management difficulty.

Upload and management of MP3s from the same interface with automatic insertion.

We integrated a Web based Flash MP3 player within the templates to facilitate the playing of music on a song by song and page by page bases. We used the custom field and media management capabilities of WordPress to automate and simplify adding MP3s to the Web site.

Robert’s primary goal is to allow as many people to listen to his songs as possible. Believing that potential listeners of his songs might be looking at his site on an iPhone, we implemented some basic browser detection to overcome the iPhone’s inability to view Flash. When an iPhone views a page with the Flash MP3 player, the page presents the iPhone with a media type that it understands.

Our design approach was simple. We had a few goals:

• Bring the site live as fast as possible.
• Focus the site on the songs with an uncluttered and simple design while reflecting who Robert is as a song writer.
• Keep the cost down while not sacrificing functionality.

We decided to approach the site design like Frank Miller approached Sin City. We didn’t waste a single pixel. And we won’t waste your time while you discover some killer rock n’ roll from an extraordinary songwriter and musician — Robert B. Mullins – Songs & Music.

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