Systems Admin Checklist

1. Get a 2048-bit TLS certificate
2. Configure TLS on your server(s)
3. Verify TLS server configuration
4. Monitor performance: resumption rates, etc.
5. Tune server configuration: cache sizes, etc.
6. Investigate SPDY & HTTP 2.0

Get a 2048-bit TLS Certificate

When choosing a TLS certificate, there are three types of cert options: single host (site.com), multi-domain (sub.site.com, cdn.site.com, site.us), and wildcard (*.site.com). The most common TLS purchased is multi-domain since most of the time you know exactly what subdomains you manage.

Pricing options vary by the type of website you own. For example:

• Free certificates for non-commercial use from StartSSL
• Free certificates for open-source projects from GlobalSign
• Commercial multi-domain certificates for $30+
• Commercial wildcard certificates for $100+

Configure TLS on Your Server

Refer to Mozilla “Service Side TLS” wiki for configuration best practices for Apache, Nginx, HAProxy, AWS, and other popular servers.

Verify TLS Server Configuration

To verify that you’ve configured TLS correctly, use the Qualys SSL tool to quickly identify misconfigurations. You’ll want to test with this tool every time you change your configuration.

Monitor Performance: Resumption Rates, etc.

What about the CPU resources on the server? A common hangup developers (and us SEO’s) have about using HTTPS by default is load time issues, probably the reason you’re reading this post to begin with, right?

So apparently there are two steps to establishing the TLS tunnel:

1. Asymmetric cryptography – where we verify the certificate and do the public crypo
2. Symmetric cryptography – where and how we actually encrypt the application data

The overhead comes from asymmetric cryptography, which can be reduced using keepalives and session resumption. Keepalives allow you to use the same connection between different requests, which means you only need to do a handshake once.

Session resumption actually means that you can reuse the negotiator parameters of our secure session from a previous session when we establish a new one. So once again we skip that handshake and significantly reduce the overhead.

In the old days of the Internet, you’d need specialized hardware to handle HTTPS, where modern day servers have specialized CPU’s optimized to handle this type of work that we do in the TLS stack.

Investigate SPDY & HTTP 2.0

You can see significant differences in load time by installing SPDY, but it also creates a scenario that uses a single connection, resulting in fewer handshakes, resources, memory and Apache worker threads.

What are you waiting for? I’m on a mission to start working toward HTTPS everywhere. Google I/O folks created a site to help you at isTLSfastyet.com that you may also find interesting. Are you going HTTPS? If not, what’s your hangup?

The post Converting Your Site to HTTPS by Default appeared first on Creative SEO Strategy.

My answer likely shocked many of peers and potentially alienated me from my community, SEO’s – the brilliant people who are hired to break the Google formula and get ranking for their clients.

I, unlike many, am relatively happy with Penguin and how it has improved Google’s search engine results. Before I get into why, here’s a quick recap of what I told Ari Levy:

He [Wiideman] says that if companies concentrate on building a clean site, producing useful content and doing outreach to business-listing services, rather than spreading links, they’ve got a much better shot of moving up the search rankings.

“Penguin has cleaned up so much garbage and spam created by black hat SEO companies,” Wiideman said, adding that Google manages negative SEO just fine. “It’s pretty easy for Google to see what is natural behavior and what is manipulated behavior.”

Most of the negative SEO complaints Wiideman has heard are from small businesses that at some point hired the wrong person to try and boost traffic and ended up with a bunch of low-quality links.

Why Penguin is Good for the SEO Ecosystem

The smarter we become as search engine optimization specialists, the more vulnerable Google and other search engines become, an ending that destroys our ability to seek and find knowledge, products, and services that authentically satisfy our queries.

It’s therefore critical for search engines to “shake up the virtual etch-a-sketch” once in a while, to seal up gaps susceptible to vulnerabilities, and immunize themselves from those geniuses who figure out how to push a square object through a triangular hole (results that don’t deserve or belong at the top of the SERPS).

Google’s next Penguin Update could be the refresh that penalizes over-linking within your own website. It could be the update that reduces or eliminates the value of any link from a page that isn’t linked to itself. Regardless of it’s impact, it’s purpose is to penalize manipulation, and you can bet that Google knows the difference.

The Cure to Change: Working Under SEO Principles

I’m just a plain guy who drives a 2003 Honda Civic, wears jeans and polo shirts (sometimes shorts and a geeky t-shirt), and spoils my two little girls and crazy awesome wife as my leisure activity. I don’t use what I’ve learned in SEO to make billions of dollars with search arbitrage, affiliate microsites, or anything else that involves creating content that doesn’t genuinely make a difference to those who stumble upon it from an online search.

All of us SEO veterans have been through the muck of black, grey and white “hat” techniques, testing, exploring and experimenting with tactics that often become short-lived, and reap zero long-term financial gain. So many of us find our soul (and our career) in helping amazing clients operate under 3 unbreakable, never-changing principles:

1. Good search results are the most relevant to the person’s end desire, not the keyword queried
2. Web crawlers feed on links that infer authority to weigh against a page’s historical popularity
3. User search behavior is and always will be important to search engines

There’s No Way Around It

Do the math, if you satisfy the first principle and build amazing, relevant content that serves a user’s end desire, but fail to validate that result through organic links, references, or brand name (with keyword) queries, it could appear to search engines that you’re just not as interesting as you may have seemed at first.

If you satisfy the second principle by earning seemingly authentic links, but users return to search engine results and ultimately end their quest on somebody else’s webpage, it’s easy to figure out that you missed serving the searcher’s need and that you might not be relevant enough to hold that number one position.

Lastly, if you and your genius technology crew figure out user behavior patterns and emulate what appears to be user preference in search results, yet lack a random pattern of natural inbound links over time, you’re destined to be filtered out from the SERPS altogether. And let’s face it, eventually Google will catch on to your robot searches when you reboot or forget to refresh your Mechanical Turk account with funds.

Take the Red Pill

To avoid search engine penalties, we as a community must avoid anything the search engines tell us not to do. That means staying away from link schemes or anything that may appear unnatural or only created for sole the purpose of moving up in rank. As my 8-year old would say (sing), it’s time to “let it go“. So put away your black hat, roll up your sleeves, and take a deep breath.

Now you have a choice: take the virtual red pill and come to the reality of the work lies ahead, or take the blue pill and keep experiencing the unpredictable roller coaster of short tail search engine ranking.

By following this new idea of search optimization, you’re presented with a few obstacles, but nothing too scary. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, involves the following:

1. Really challenging yourself to make and keep making your page better than any other page
2. Building and earning relationships with people who believe in you and your brand
3. Monitoring and adjusting based on what is seen in search and how content is served up

Or Take the Blue Pill

If all this “Google stuff” is still overwhelming to you, don’t beat yourself up. It’s normal to fear what we don’t know or understand. As you go back to work, I encourage you to (at a minimum) change your thinking about SEO to be that of doing “whatever it takes to rank higher”, to finding a sharp person (or agency) with a great sense of ethics, who avoids using the word “links” in the interview pitch.

The worse that can happen is being eliminated from organic results and having to pay for advertising; which is still a very viable and worthwhile strategy for getting traffic from search engines (it’s just not a cheap way to go about it).

Thanks for reading.

The post The Unbreakable Principles of SEO appeared first on Creative SEO Strategy.

If you want to skip to the end, where I’ve strategically placed my elevator speech, please click here. Else, please enjoy this write-up of tactical strategies for succeeding with search in 2013 and beyond.

What to Focus on in 2013

Being awesome as a business simply isn’t good enough to succeed in search engine optimization. For example, I know for a fact that Now That’s Killer Jerky has by far the best beef jerky on the planet. However, they don’t even exist within the first 3 pages of Google results. So on this page, I’ve listed some focal points to consider in your 2013 strategy.

Avoid the Panda

Didn’t catch wind of the Panda update in 2011 or 2012? Or perhaps you heard of it but have net connected with your SEO company, Social Media Expert, or talked with your in-house staff about what they are doing (or not doing) to address the Panda (duplicate / similar content) update? Either way, here’s your list of how to avoid Panda’s penalties:

1. Cease all content syndication strategies
2. Stop using tools that “spin” content and then blast the web
3. Don’t use press release distribution services for link building
4. Consolidate similar pages on your website (lawyer-atlanta.html and attorney-atlanta.html should be one page)
5. Replace your awful web copy with content that bests every single one of your competitor’s copy

Dodge the Penguin

Google’s Penguin update was like a stab to the heart for many businesses who were told to include their target keyword in their link-building efforts, and had developed a very unnatural backlink profile. In 2013, I encourage you to focus on your brand and let your pages and internal links do all the keyword-level SEO. Here are some other tips to get you started:

1. Review your backlinks in Webmaster Tools
2. Ask linking websites to modify the words used in their links if they appear too commercial
3. Use RemoveEm.com if your manual efforts are unsuccessful
4. Keep it clean! From now on your links should be natural and keyword-focused
5. Find webpages that discuss your product/service type or industry, and then earn a mention by talking with the author
6. Discover where your competition have been earning links and become part of the semantic web
7. Use Neo-Link Building techniques centered around content marketing

Stop Buying Exact-Match Domains

The day of the exact-match domain is dead. Even my own Top10SEOTips.com website was affected by the last major update of 2012. It’s a waste of money, as is building multiple websites to game search results. We can achieve 1st, 2nd and 3rd page placement with our own website, video, and social media without having to spread your marketing efforts between multiple domains.

Grow Your Author Rank

If you’re like me, you absolutely love what you do and nobody does what you do with as much passion as you do. Am I right? If that’s true then I challenge you to prove it. Prove that you’re awesome by giving away tips, tutorials, help guides, cheat sheets, experiments, and case studies. Use your blog or at a very minimum use articles on your website cataloged under the work’s respective category.

Next, add the Google+ publisher attribute to your website by following the steps provided by Google, which also requires that you claim your website through your Google+ profile.

Don’t produce garbage or else it will destroy your percentile history of awesome content. Consider doing a video with each post you create and shoot for 85% pure awesomeness. Ask for feedback from your Google+ Circles, Facebook & LinkedIn groups, and Twitter followers. Shoot off an email newsletter, or if it’s worthy enough, a press release (provided you’ve discovered something nobody has talked about before). Rinse, repeat and measure your engagements.

Consult with an Expert

Experts like Aaron Wall, Eric Ward, and myself are available to help guide you through the SEO process life cycle. It never hurts to have a consultant on your side as you upgrade to WordPress or another CMS, move from one domain to another, or just to help you evolve from traditional SEO techniques to the new Google-approved content marketing approach.

I read a quote the other day that I thought made a lot of sense when it came to doing any kind of work. The quote was:

You think hiring an expert is expensive, wait until you hire an amateur.

Click here for different ways you can work with me this year or if I’m not your guy, try Neil Patel, Aaron Wall, Eric Ward or search SEMPO for other suggestions.

Have an awesome 2013 either way. I believe in you and your white hat strategy. Now it’s up to you to believe in yourself.

The post Planning Ahead with SEO appeared first on Creative SEO Strategy.

Autocomplete Example

Arm and Defend Yourself

Have some fun with your online reputation management (ORM) campaign. Create funny, goofy, useful, and authentic content on top level domains like Posterous, Tumblr, etc. Use your name as much as you can without annoying the reader. Name your images with you full name, and use ALT and TITLE attributes. Get some fans to your Facebook and Google+ profiles. You get the idea.

For more on this, visit Beat the Autocomplete, a definitive guide to influencing what shows up in Google Search Suggest (or Google Autocomplete). Definitely share your thoughts below.

The post Google Removes Scam from Autocomplete appeared first on Creative SEO Strategy.

Wow, just imagine, 500 instant links, 10,000 forum posts, and 1,000 Facebook Likes! Okay, now imagine what Google will think of you next month, when your website only gets 7 new links from some fans who like your blog posts. See an unusual pattern of behavior here? So will Google, Bing and other search engines. Worse, get caught trying to influence search results and you could face banishment or lose your job if you’re the resident SEO guy.

Buying Links Exposed in the NY Times

I’m not going to talk much about the Overstock Wall Street Journal post, because I believe what they did was grey hat not black hat SEO. I believe they were attempting to earn links a little too aggressively, as opposed to J.C. Penny’s exploit in the NY Times who I can only assume did what you see in the comic included with this post; buying links from a broker en mass to game search results.

The consequences were far worse than pages just being buried in Google search results, as now the company carries with it a reputation for participating in questionable marketing tactics and will forever be watched with a sharp eye. There’s no ounce of grey hat SEO J.C. Penny can do now without thousands of marketers immediately criticizing and scrutinizing each effort to improve organic traffic.

The Right Way to Buy Links

I know, oxymoron, right? No matter what you do to get links to your website, there is cost involved. Whether you invest $2,000 into writing and deploying the most likeable, shareable, linkable, embeddable, tweetable page on the planet for link bait (uh hem), spend time and resources interviewing experts, or spending money on developers to create freebies that come locked in with links (such as free WordPress themes); anyway you look at it, you’re buying links.

Having the best product in the world will absolutely help, but the catch 22 with this idea is that you must first be known before you can be viral. In other words, you need traffic to get traffic. In other words, it takes money to make money. In other words, you’ve got your work cut out for you.

Alternatives to Buying Links from a Broker

I’ve listed some alternatives to buying links in what many are calling the Best SEO Audit List. It doesn’t get much traffic yet, though it ranks well already. If you find it useful, help me get the word out. If you don’t, let’s just put a pin in my request and we’ll revisit after the next Google update.

Cheers!

The post Buying Links from a Link Broker appeared first on Creative SEO Strategy.

The post Steve Wiideman Video appeared first on Creative SEO Strategy.

Before I do any SEO work for a client, I try to educate them on the 3 Basic Principles of SEO, so that they understand the importance of keyword-themed content, inbound links, and user selection within search results pages. For many of my small business clients, I might as well be explaining the theory of relativity or use the term “flux capacitor” when I explain SEO.

This whole One Page idea is something I came up with to help increase the percentage of clients who lag on delivering content after I deliver my Content Tracking Spreadsheet. Okay, here’s the Catch 22: MOST smaller business clients (plumbers, carpet cleaners, etc) will NEVER touch a keyboard. I’m sorry, but it’s the truth. So what do you have to do as their SEO Expert? That’s right, you have to write the content on their behalf, and they will be pissed off when they discover that you actually don’t know a damn thing about their industry or niche (so be prepared to receive a big fat “F” on your write up of their service or product).

Outsource you say? Nay, I think not my friend. Have you seen the quality of the content from an outsourced vendor? It’s perfect for Wikipedia if you outsource to India, perfect for a kindergarten picture book if you outsource to the Philippines. You won’t find any copy in the writing you get back that will convince a visitor to purchase your client’s products or services. Can you say garbage boys and girls? I knew you could.

Just One Page – It’s About Content

There’s some screenshots in this video that fly by fairly quickly, so here they are with their explanations. The first is an example of how David Mihm’s idea of coming up with “Local Ranking Factors” using leading experts as contributors was the one of the top examples of Link Bait to ever exist. This screenshot shows the thousands of backlinks this One Page earned, in part from the contributors and their fans, and in part from just being kick-ass content that all of us SEO’s reference when we train and practice our craft.

Here’s a screenshot of Yahoo! Site Explorer. Domain data was provided from OpenSiteExplorer.org.

The next screenshot shows the dozens of contributors David was able to get to participate in his study. Note the one most important element from this page (buttons to make linking easier).

Then there’s Mark Robertson and ReelSEO.com, the best resource on the planet to get training on SEO for Video. His videos section attracted over 3 thousand inbound links from over 600 domains.

The theme here should be obvious: great content produces great volumes of organic, non-explicit inbound links, thus producing higher ranking in the search results. It also doesn’t hurt to make it easy to link and/or share a page if you like it:

And Then Came Me

If you’ve been to one of my Orange County SEO Meetups, SEO Seminars, or have had a consulting session with me, then you probably remember my story about how it took over 6 months to get to the first page for the term “SEO Expert”. Unlike the #2 guy at the moment, who as I understand it, is looking for ghost writers to game the system, I gave away free strategy, ebooks, tips, wrote for and got featured in popular magazines to earn my position.

Below are some screenshots of what I did on my website, beyond all the off-page SEO:

The Result? Well, at the moment, I’m still doing okay. However, it’s not the RANK that’s important with SEO, it’s the traffic and leads. Based on this snippet of data from Google Analytics, do you think I really care that much about my rank for the term “SEO Expert” as opposed to other terms?

Can You Write One Page?

If you’ve downloaded my SEO Content Writing Guide, then yes, yes you can. Should you write at least one page about every product, service, technique, definition, and subpages about each of those topics? Yes, yes you should. The more “unique” content you can produce, the higher probability you will have to get ranking – so write until your hand falls off. Be sure to link to every page you create from the appropriate category on your website, otherwise the web crawlers will not have a way to access your pages, and please do not use “click here” as the link text; instead use the keyword that best describes the page.

Okay, I made some bold statements, acted a little goofy, gave you a ton of free stuff, and threw in a controversial comment about a peer. Your gears have to be spinning, so spill your guts and respond below will ya? Thanks for reading!

The post One Page – An SEO Epiphany appeared first on Creative SEO Strategy.

Why You Don’t Want to Use Garbage Content

1. Your reader will know it’s garbage and they’ll return to Google
2. Google will learn from bounce-backs that’s it’s garbage, and penalize you
3. Spun, wrangled, mixed, or reused content usually spits out garbage
4. It’s just lazy. If you can’t commit an hour a week to your website, turn it off

Get My New Writing Guide on SEO Below

No opt-in’s or registration required. Click, download, and share all you want. If you decide to share the information in the Guide on a webpage outside of the PDF, please be sure to link back to this page, that’s my only request.

Benefits of Optimized Content

There are hundreds of reasons why you should create awesome content and tweak specific focal points to include keywords. In general, here are several benefits of creating SEO-enhanced web content:

• People will link to great content (think of Wikipedia)
• Good content educates, informs, and SELLS your stuff
• Unique, hand-typed content won’t be filtered by Google
• Bing is an ORGANIC search engine that looks at keyword prominence
• Bing will have 30% market share after the Search Alliance concludes
• People will tweet and “like” (Facebook) a noteworthy page
• It’s the right thing to do

So what are you waiting for? Grab Version 1 of my SEO Content Writing Guide and get to writing great content! Need a way to keep track of your content? Try my SEO Content Tracking Spreadsheet, designed to take the thought out of the individual focal points by creating columns for each SEO attribute you’ll want to include on every page.

Let me know what you think in your comments below. Thanks for reading!

The post SEO Content Writing Guide appeared first on Creative SEO Strategy.