What would you call this image?

The exact number of websites that Google indexes is not known, but it is known that Google receives several million search queries each day, and the number of pages it sifts through to respond to those searches is in the trillions.

Trillions.

Yeah. And Google indexes and displays images in much the same way as it indexes websites. It’s easy to see that a non-search engine friendly image will get “lost” amid all of that. So, how can you make Google’s job easier?

Keep in mind that Google’s search engine spiders are essentially “robots” that can’t “see” images like you do. They can only “read” the text that is associated with any particular image.

Here’s an example of how complicated images can be: Think of the term “gas.”

You might have a photo that you have labeled “gas” and think that you have been pretty descriptive about what that image is. But, “gas” can refer to gasoline for a car. It can refer to oxygen. (Is “oxygen” referring to a tank of medical oxygen for a patient, or atmospheric gas?) It can refer to a gas burner on a stove. It can refer to natural gas. It can refer to natural gas of a different sort, as in belching or flatulence. See? Detail is crucial.

There is no way that Google’s search engines can tell what type of gas you mean, if “gas” is the only tag, or title, that you have given the photo.

Google search engines (and I’m using Google as a shorthand to refer to all major search engines, as they all function in relatively similar manners) look at the image’s filename, anchor text that points to it, and its “alt text.” I’ll explain more about what this is. If these textual cues are absent, then Google looks at the content on the page the image was found on to learn more about the image. Other important cues are also the page’s title. But, the tags that you put directly on the image are the most important.

To help make sure your images are indexed:

1. Make sure that the image filename is related to the image’s content: “gasoline” if it’s a gas pump; “oxygen” if it’s atmospheric gas, etc.

2. Enter something descriptive in the alt field that describes the visual components of the image in a human-friendly way. More about this…the “alt text” is what displays when the image can’t load for some reason. It is also what is spoken aloud by reader programs used by people with visual impairment when they search the web. Much like search engines, they can’t see the images, so they must rely on text. If your image is a gas pump, such as the one in this post, you might include “Driver filling fuel tank on a blue compact car from a gasoline pump at a gas station” in your alt text. If for some reason the image can’t load, such as if the user is connecting to the Internet via a slow dial up connection or they have images turned off, then “Driver filling fuel tank on a blue compact car from a gasoline pump at a gas station.” will appear in place of the image.

3. Try and place the image next to the content on the page that the image relates to.

4. Avoid displaying images in a JavaScript, as search engines can’t “read” code in this format.

5. Give your image a title. The title tag field is what displays when someone hovers a cursor over the image.

If you’re considering hiring an SEO company, or perhaps you already have, then chances are you’ve invested some significant funds into both your website and your marketing efforts and you don’t want it to fail. As a company that provides complete website design and development services from conceptualizing a website to Pay-Per-Click advertising, no one wants you to succeed more than we do. But sometimes SEO clients get in the way of their own success.

First of all, SEO is search engine optimization of a web site’s content. This is a synonym for any or all of the activities related to optimization: primarily, keyword research, linking campaigns, web analytics, and content creation. The best SEO campaigns work not because the client hands over all decision-making to the SEO professional, but because there is a balance between the client’s in-depth understanding of their business, and the advice of the SEO pro. SEO professionals are discreet when making changes to a client’s site, and understand that the best SEO happens “behind the scenes,” so to speak. It should be relatively invisible and only serve to increase the usability and relevance of the content on your site.

There are two things that are crucial to the success of an SEO campaign:

1. Clients must be involved in the SEO campaign. We ask that our clients not only implement our recommendations in a timely manner, but that they share their knowledge of their business with us to develop long-term strategies for success.

2. Clients must get over their “tweakophobia.” You have to trust us. This means having a willingness to adapt to change. We can’t help if you don’t want changes made to your site. If you don’t want to change how your page titles look, or you don’t want to target keywords in your text, or you don’t like the way that links look “highlighted,” then why did you hire an SEO company? There is nothing wrong with clients asking questions, but most of the time making the right changes leads to positive results, and we wouldn’t make a recommendation to you unless we truly felt it would work.

If you get bogged down in the process and just aren’t comfortable allowing someone else to work on your site, it is possible to achieve high placement in the search engine results without using professional optimization services. After years in this business, we’ve seen all types of sites rank highly, but the sites that rank highly with poor optimization typically have something else going for them, such as high-profile brand recognition or a high-quality incoming link profile. So, if you don’t like the idea of letting someone else tweak your site, you will need to build your online success through focusing on an alternate area.

From time to time, I get emails from customers saying that they have decided to move on from having an online business and they are wondering if I can tell them how much their online business is worth.

Business valuation is a tough one and we certainly are no experts in that arena. But we do have some insights on the topic. Here are some of the factors that a prospective buyer will likely consider in determining what they will pay.

1. Customer Base

There is no question that a large and active customer base is a great asset. If you have 30,000 account holds on your website, that would likely have value to a prospective buyer. Building a customer base and continually communicating with them is an important practice on many levels.

2. Inventory

You need to consider whether you want to sell just your website or all the product inventory that goes along with it. Some buyers will be quite interested in your inventory and others will just want access to your customers.

3. Website

As you know, investing the money in a professional website as well as the time to build out all the content is significant. Buyers who are knowledgeable about what it involves to build a full-featured site will understand the value.

4. Domain Name

A great domain name could be worth as much as anything else you have to offer. Of course, you need to have a really awesome name. The market for domain names has declined from the fervor in the early 2000s, but a solid name still has value.

5. Brand Recognition

If you have been successful in building some recognition for your brand and business that will be worth a lot. If you have done nothing to contribute online and establish your brand in your industry, you likely won’t get much of a bump.

6. Revenue and Financials

As with any business transaction, the value often comes down to your financial statements. That is no different with an online business. Be prepared to show sales data and financials to prospective buyers. Here is a blog post from our friends at Practical Ecommerce that gets more into the financial valuation side of things:

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/blogs/post/840-eCommerce-Business-Valuation

7. Traffic and Search Placement

A buyer not only wants to understand your current financial position, but they are going to do their best to determine whether a business acquisition is going to grow and prosper in the future. A strong signal (assuming they are wanting to take over your website)  is your site traffic trends. If your traffic is consistently trending upwards, that is an important factor.

Related to your traffic is your current search engine placement for important phrases. If you can show that you have established your website in the search engines, that can be worth quite a bit to a buyer. We all know  that strong organic placement is not an overnight process!

Conclusion

One of the key elements for any successful business is a clearly defined exit strategy. Although it is very hard to determine exactly what someone else might pay for your business, we encourage you to start thinking about the factors we have listed so you have a compelling package to offer when the day comes for you to test the waters with putting your business on the market.

If you have sold or purchased an ecommerce business, I would be quite interested to hear your thoughts.

A frequent question I get from customers is whether their Google Analytics data is skewed by all the traffic their site gets from search engine crawlers. The simple answer is – No. Let me explain in more detail.

Your website receives a barrage of traffic from a multitude of automated programs. The major search engines have crawlers (sometimes called spiders or bots) that systematically and relentlessly visit websites to index pages and gather data for their search engines.

Googlebot and Bingbot are two of the biggies. Our servers get pummeled by scores of other crawlers. The traffic from these crawlers can place a big load on our servers and cause all kind of headaches. But they rarely impact your Analytics data. Why is that?

The reason is  that the Google Analytics tracking is activated by a javascript that is placed on every page of your site. Rarely does a crawler recognize or process the scripts on your pages, so the traffic from these sources – as well as traffic from any other visitors with javascript disabled – will not show up in Google Analytics.

In general it is a good thing that the traffic from automated spiders does not make its way into Google Analytics. Some people argue that Analytics data is inaccurate because ALL traffic from real visitors is not accurately recorded. We will save that topic for another discussion.

Anyone who follows HEROweb/MightyMerchant knows that we are die-hard Google Analytics users. The data that Google Analytics provides is not perfect, but it does give small business owners excellent information about their website.

Google has finally reinstated scheduled reports – as well as PDF generated reports. For those of you who have relied on the automated reports in the past, you know that the new version of Analytics, which came out in the fall, mysteriously omitted this wonderful feature that allows you to email reports on a regular schedule. The removal of the the scheduled reports and pdf report generation could be likened to a favorite family pet between cruelly snatched away. Ok… that might be a bit extreme, but the fact is, the scheduled reports are an awesome way to help users stay on top of their Analytics data.

Here is a quick screen shot showing where you access the schedule reports.

You can get more details over at the Google Analytics Blog.

http://analytics.blogspot.com/2012/04/share-reports-by-email-and-export-to.html

Happy Reporting!

Broken links are links that lead to pages that do not exist. When clicking on a broken link, the page you land on is called a 404 error page, and that indicates that the requested URL doesn’t exist.

Even the most diligent site-owner can have broken links on their site. Whether the broken links are a mistake or because a page has legitimately been removed, it’s still frustrating for users to suddenly come across a 404 error. Most of the time, the immediate response would be to simply leave the current site in favor of another one because both people and search engines consider broken links an untrustworthy sign.

There are many tools online for checking and removing invalid URLs. If you have a Google Webmaster Tools account, they offer an easy to use diagnostic tool that will check this for you. Webmaster Tools provides a Remove URL tool, which allows you to remove invalid pages from Google search results. First things first, sign up for a Webmaster Tools account if you don’t already have one. It’s free to sign up. Once you add your site, you will be prompted to verify the site (to prove that you have ownership of the site).

1. In the left-hand side navigation menu, click on Diagnostics
2. In the Diagnostics menu, click on Crawl Errors.
3. At the top of the list of “Issues Google encountered when crawling your site”, click on the Not Found category.
4. To make sure that the URL is indeed indexed in Google, copy and paste the URL into Google’s search and see if any result comes up.
5. To remove URLs from Google’s search results, click on Site Configuration in the left-hand navigation menu, and select Crawler Access.
6. Select Remove URL (which will be the third option in the Crawler Access menu at the top of the new menu window that appears).
7. Click on New removal request.
8. You will be asked to enter the URL of the address you would like to completely remove from Google search results. You can copy and paste the address from the list of broken URLs that Google previously provided.
9. Click on Next. The URL to be removed should now appear in the list of requested. If you would like, you can add more pages for removal.

There are a variety of reasons why a link might appear with a 404 File Not Found error, including links to a product that you have sold out of and hidden. Webmaster Tools doesn’t provide an explanation for why the links appear in the broken list. If you created a blog post and then changed the address of the post after Google had already indexed it, this could result in a File Not Found error. If you are using a system that recommends items “If you like, you may also like this…”, a link might appear broken if a suggested product is hidden. The link checker tool is a valuable resource that can help you uncover problem with the way that your site is indexed that you might not have been aware of. An example might be a broken link to a contact form. If people are trying to contact you but the form doesn’t work, you may never know, because they may just give up.

While pages that repeatedly return 404 errors will naturally fall from the index over time, there may be a case when you want to remove something quickly. For instance, private content that was accidentally posted, such as credit card information, could be removed using this tool.

Most business owners use email every day. Despite the rise in use of Twitter and Facebook, which is a way to potentially communicate with millions of people instantaneously and all at once, email is still the “default” tool for communication by most of us.

In our industry, we encounter many people–both customers of ours and not–who are not sure how their email works. Many people have one primary account, such as yourname@comcast.net, and many other accounts related to their business, such as “sales@”, “info@” “news@” and others. Yet it is confusing how these accounts work together, and also equally difficult know what you should do if you ever get an “over quota” message or people tell you that emails to you can’t be delivered because your inbox is full.

If these are the kinds of questions you have ever asked yourself, head over to the HEROweb site and read the article we just posted, called Email Basics: Accounts versus Aliases.

Are you happy with your email experiences? Let us know!

In September 2011 Google made some significant changes to their data feed requirements. MightyMerchant has made the appropriate updates to our feed templates, but if you manage your feed yourself it is important that you log-in to your Google Products account to be certain that your feed is running properly. MightyMerchant customers using our Managed Feed Service need take no action.

We recommend you check on your Google feed regularly. Going through these steps every month will help you stay on top of any feed import or data quality issues that may crop up.

Visit our documentation page explaining how to verify your Google Product Feed.

Have you noticed that your analytics for the past month look a little different?

In a move that is bound to make Internet privacy advocates cheer and SEO’s and website owners jeer, Google recently announced that when users are signed in to their Google account, the search service is taking them to the secure search page (https:www.google.com . . . note the extra ‘s’) by default. If you’re not logged in to your Google account you can navigate to the secure site directly if you choose to. This change encrypts users search queries—a useful and desirable feature when users are on a public WiFi network or hotspot, but it has significant implications for site owners using Google Analytics to track their site visitors.

In unsecure search, site owners not only know that a visitor came from Google, but they get individual data about each referral, for instance, whether the user came from another link or what specific search term they used. With secure search, site owners will know only that the user came from Google.

Paid search data will not be affected.

What is a victory for privacy means that website owners that want this information they used to have access to will now have to pay for it. While this change is estimated to affect only about 10% of a site’s traffic, that’s 10% less data that you will now have access to.

You can still use your Google Webmaster Tools account to see your top 1000 search terms each day for your site, but that data is just a sample, doesn’t show every single search term, and the numbers are rounded off.

As business owners, how do you feel about this change?

One of the mysterious things about search is that we know what we want when we search, but the computer doesn’t. Google’s entire kingdom has been built upon their efforts to break through this barrier to delivering users the information that they really want.

Google just announced an improvement to their algorithm that delivers fresh content when you want fresh content, and all content when the freshness might not matter so much. Let’s explain more. . .

Current events and news pop up on a daily, hourly, and minute-by-minute basis. If you search for a current event, you probably want the most recent information. Even something from a day or two ago might be too old to be useful.

If you search for information about a football game score, you might want the one from last week, but there’s an even better chance that you want scores for the game that ended earlier that day.

An event such as the Olympic takes place every 4 years, but if you search for Olympics today, you probably don’t want results from the last Olympics–there’s a good chance you’re interested in the one that is coming up next summer.

Google Search uses a “freshness algorithm” they call Caffeine that delivers the most up-to-date results, even when, like the Olympics example, you don’t specify Olympics 2012.

The results from Caffeine have now enabled Google to improve the ranking algorithm that they say impacts roughly 35 percent of searches and better determines when to give you the most recent results that you probably want.

If you’re searching, for instance, for Occupy Wall Street info, you may get results that are only minutes old, rather than news reports from last week.

But there are lots of times when the most recent results don’t matter that much, for instance, when searching for a recipe or some other reference point. In those cases, the algorithm update now better “understands” what you want and delivers freshness to meet your needs.

While on the surface this seems like a great thing, SEOs and webmasters are concerned, and rightly so. This change may put even more influence on content that changes on a regular basis. If your site doesn’t update very often, you may want to keep an eye on how this affects your rankings. Let’s say you have helpful, informative articles on your site about your products. If they haven’t been updated since last year, Google may not pay much attention to them anymore in favor of articles about the same topic that have been updated more recently.

Also, for the user, the best search results are the ones that are relevant, not just fresh. If you have any doubts about how you should proceed with your site updates and optimization in light of this change, here’s our advice:

Relevancy will always be important. If you can make updates to your site’s content, review, articles, etc., do so. But don’t update haphazardly so that you’re updating with low-quality information just for the sake of updating. And, like most things search-related, keep an eye on things. There are opportunities for webmasters in any industry to provide fresh, relevant content.