If you don't rank, you don't pay.
June 24th, 2010 — General
Google launched Caffeine in August 2009 to test the water, but by now, it has gone live worldwide. While many people see the name and think of coffee, there is a great deal of confusion over exactly what the fuss with Caffeine is all about.
Let’s be clear about Caffeine: it does not affect rankings, it does not improve your web speed, and it does nothing that you as a website owner will be affected by. Continue reading →
June 22nd, 2010 — General
Google, and search engines generally, are constantly tweaking and altering the complex, mathematical formulas that determine where your website will appear in the search results. Of course, the formulas used are a closely guarded secret; however, there is enough information available for experienced SEO professionals to understand what aspects of a website need attention when looking to gain higher search rankings. As a general policy, Google in particular minimizes publicity of algorithm changes, not least because it is something of a “trade secret”. Continue reading →
May 27th, 2010 — General
Local search is where small and medium-sized companies can really outdo the major competition in terms of search engine rankings. We’ve covered local search before and why this represents a fantastic opportunity for web businesses to dominate in the rankings within their geographic territory. What we didn’t cover was how you can achieve this in practical terms, so here we outline the main content factors for you to include with your website to enhance your ranking in local search results.
Contact Information & Locations Pages
Local search uses the terms included in your website, so when you are based in Poughkeepsie, NY it makes a lot of sense to ensure that piece of information is apparent on the site itself. Make sure your physical mailing address is included, and if you operate from differing branch locations, make sure you have their physical and postal addresses listed as well to reinforce the geographical area where you operate. Continue reading →
May 26th, 2010 — General
Organic search is the use of search engines to promote your website; it is known as “organic” because you rely on building a relevant website which “naturally” ranks highly in the rankings instead of being paid for advertising, such as Pay-Per-Click (PPC).
To be effective, search acquisition requires optimization of your website for both users and search engines and there are four major areas to consider: Continue reading →
May 25th, 2010 — General
Website testing is pushed by SEO practitioners and web designers very heavily, but there is a very serious reason why testing should be viewed as a reiterative process rather than an end of term set of examinations. The most important aspects of any testing focuses on the user experience and seeks to pinpoint issues with user interaction with the website – what problems exist, how to optimize user enjoyment and utility and encourage return visits and propagation through online media i.e. viral adoption.
How users find your site is c ore feature of SEO efforts, however once you have attracted traffic, you must ensure that you cater for their needs once they are on the site. In practice, you have two sets of visitors: in an SEO context, you will have the automated webcrawlers and robots indexing and archiving your site for use in returning results to search engine users, and secondly, the real people themselves who visit your site, no matter how they got there. Continue reading →
May 19th, 2010 — General
Adobe Flash has long been an SEO nightmare for ecommerce sites and any website looking to gain traffic through the search engines. The problem is that Flash is a fluid rendition of web content rather than static, as you see with the Rankpay website. Flash is known as a Rich Internet Application (RIA) and the SEO challenge has been how to link to, how to index and how to display in search engine rankings the changing panoply of content within the Flash files themselves. For search engine web spiders they have the task of catching every relevant aspect of a revolving door, and quite frankly, they can’t do it very well, and for most search engines, not at all. Continue reading →
April 27th, 2010 — General
Link building is a significant factor in gaining search engine rankings, and a lot of investment and time is spent on gaining links from other sites to yours. For links to be of value they must be relevant, for instance, your site sells skateboards then the site linking to you should be associated with that sport, e.g. an extreme sports website.
But how can content gain you links that count?
The answer is by creating “killer content”! Continue reading →
April 25th, 2010 — SEO
Google reports that in 2009, 50% of new internet connections originated from cell phones – the mobile internet has finally arrived! Mobile and local search has become big business and cannot be ignored by web site owners; Microsoft, Google and Yahoo! are all pouring huge sums of money into local search because this is a natural adjunct to mobile internet access. Google’s research also shows that as mobile internet speeds get faster, web browsing using a cell phone becomes more common and the trend is clear – mobile internet connections and use are increasing at an exponential rate.
Continue reading →
April 17th, 2010 — SEO
Automating SEO tasks can have a seriously damaging impact on your SERPS (Search Engine Ranking Position), but at the same time, there is also a great deal about SEO work which is already automated. The real question is not whether automated SEO damages your SERPs, but what aspects can be automated and what cannot.
Where Can Automation be Used?
There are a number of areas where SEO automation has its place, and indeed, without it we’d all be floundering. Keyword research relies heavily on automated tools to research and find appropriate keywords; Google and many other search engines provide automated resources to perform just this task.
Site analysis also relies heavily on automated SEO tools as does many of the testing resources which are commonly used. Multivariate or split A/B testing would be next to impossible without automated resources. Combing through PPC (Pay-Per-Click) reports and masses of data, produced from traffic and marketing data capture tools, would not be capable of rendering any useful information without software tools to help interpret it all.
SEO experts will say that content is king, but how do you get that content out into the web world? Article submission to article and directory sites is one way of dispersing your message, and while you need a human being to manage the process, a great deal of the work is automated.
Continue reading →
April 13th, 2010 — General
Breadcrumbs are a tool to help users navigate your website and especially to help them when they get lost. They are a secondary navigation tool (your site menu and page links will usually take pride of place), they are small, easy to implement and inexpensive, while the majority of users expect to see them when they are on a web page.
You typically see a breadcrumb navigation aid below the title bar of the web page and it will look something like this: Continue reading →
