Here’s a fun little image that we created to illustrate the benefits of SEO in the simplest terms possible. We tossed around a few different ideas on the type of imagery we should use. Do you remember those old “your brain on drugs” commercials? We did too. We based this little image on the concept of those commercials. We hope you like it and it makes our point. If not, we hope it is at least a little funny.

You can click over to the full size image and use it on your website or share it with your friends if you want.

We are happy to announce that we have just rolled out the first stage of a new website for Woodbridge FoamPartner. Woodbridge FoamPartner (WFP) based in Chattanooga, TN is a joint venture between FoamPartner Group based in Europe and the Woodbridge Group based in North America. They have both offices and manufacturing facilities in Chattanooga. Staffed by exceptional and capable professionals, engineers, scientists, WFP is a company worth watching.

The design goals for this site were modest with the idea of delivering a usable site very quickly. A customer can visit this site and learn very quickly the story of WFP, what they do and how WFP can help them.

We have a little more work to do and the content of the site should grow substantially over the next 6 months.

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 weary 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 (we’re not just a Chattanooga SEO company). 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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