SEO – Don’t Redesign If It Is Not Necessary

Let’s stop for a moment and look at the real rift that builds in the misunderstanding of website design as it relates to SEO. For the technologically astute, please humor us for a few moments. For the business owner that has hired on, or engaged the services of multiple “website designers” solely for the purpose of attaining better placement or “rank” in the search engine page results, this posting is for you.

It may seem like all the verbiage, even on this website, is too confusing to understand as far as what this gray area, this fuzzy thing called SEO is all about. We have tried really hard to keep the techno-speak down to a minimum on this website for your benefit. We want you to understand so that you don’t spin your wheels.

We do not want you to hook up with another website design firm so that just maybe they have the right stuff to get your site to the top of the search engine page results and that maybe your potential clients can find you and will contact your company for your services. A website design firm is not an SEO firm, necessarily. The two endeavors are related and a company that does one can certainly do the other, but for all the hours of design and painstaking work that goes into a quality website, provisions for SEO need to be in place every step of the way. This is all too often not the case, as if the optimizing part can be done later.

It can be done later but there is always re-hashing of old content, internal structure and pages so it is really better if the whole project can be done at once. Usually, a company specializes in one discipline or the other or if a company is large enough, separate departments can be employed for the desired results.

SEO, short for “search engine optimization” is a separate type of specialty and a certain focus upon current trends in the internet and search engine placement must be in place because of the waves of changes we see daily in the search engine technology. Today, the best method for staging a website roll-out is to have the SEO professional follow the very astute designer in the process of working a website to its fullest potential for search engine placement. The SEO specialist needs to take an SEO optimized website and begin to tweak it and work in the associated back-linking strategies and check for internal linking, etc. Most website designers are familiar with much of the basics and will provide optimized work for the SEO specialist.

Today’s climate requires copywriters to be employed by the SEO practitioner for the full implementation of an SEO campaign. Leveraging content is now a vital part of getting your website to the top in the search engine results pages (SERPS) and a few carefully crafted pages will no longer do for permanent ranking strategies. We have competition in the SEO field and your competitors will be working to overtake your website and push you down to the second page of the SERPS.

A good design form will have an SEO specialist and sometimes you will find a specialist that can deliver on both elements. One without the other is a waste anyway you look at it. If you have a good and functioning website but have been passed by in search engine ranking, an SEO professional is who you need to call. Another website redesign will not work in and of itself. If you want to start over, remember that site structure being changed may hurt you in the loss of the exposure that you already have. If you have had an amateur working old linking schemes, stop right now and contact a professional to take inventory of your current situation. You website could be ruined for the search engines for some time to come and undoing amateur work that is very hard to track down all over the internet can be a disaster and starting over may be a hard choice to that has to be made. Before you redesign however, allow an SEO specialist to take a look and to analyze your particular situation.

A website that cannot be found is no good to anyone. Usually, turning around an existing website and keeping the good elements in place can achieve more than you could imagine. You don’t change your engine in your car if it only needs a tune-up.

We are seeing web designers that are selling complete rebuilds that do not produce any more sales leads than the old website they replaced. We are seeing this quite often. Let us take a look free of charge and offer you what you need, rather than opting for duplication of work already done. Yes, we may have to fix some things, but does not that make more sense than spending money on what you don’t need?

-Bob W

Check Your Backlinks for Penalties

Some see today’s search results as tumultuous and uncertain. New sites can break out of the sandbox or completely avoid it altogether and be listed with the big boys without the site age and backlinks. Page rank is being beaten out by content siloed websites with great internal link structure.

For some it is like a wave that the surfer waits for to ride only to be dumped into the sea. For the many that do everything right and then get slammed in the SERPS, there is a reason. These machines that index the web are running on particular algorithms and even though the SERPS may seem like a result of random placement, they are not like 52 card pick-up at all.

The recent trend of big search has been commented upon often on this website. It seems that all that we knew is in a continuous shake-up, but this is not the case because the big search players are moving to perfect the art of delivering truly organic results. Currently great content and internal linking strategy is being rewarded and old spammy schemes are being penalized.

On one hand you have rewards for good and on the other you have penalties for being linked to a site that has bad marks against it. New site owners that have true professionals working the SEO of their sites are enjoying fantastic results. Some websites however, are experiencing penalties by association. Even with established, aged sites we are seeing them being dumped off the first page and sometimes even far lower.

What is it? What is going on is just what I predicted in big search’s strive for organic results. Backlinks, whether contained in news articles, press releases, or raw incoming links need to be checked. Right now, a new link with anchor text placed on a penalized website will tank your site on any search for that keyword or keyword phrase in the given anchor text. New potential links have to be checked and a page rank check is hardly enough.

It seems page rank is an item that is setting idle for now and while it is a factor in the SERP placement, its value is stagnant. A page with high page rank can be penalized to death and you would never know it. Google and Yahoo are very similar in their algo’s regarding the penalty placement in the SERPS. The bar graphs on tracking software shows parallel movement in these two search engines. Bing is another story and we are still trying to figure them out as they seem more stable but a bit also harder to see movement.

So folks, it is your links! If you track your backlinks, you can begin to undo some damage. Visit the Seopenalty.com site and try out their service. You will be surprised at the sites that are penalized heavily for spam and related tactics that have been allowed on the sites. Focus on Anchor Text both within and outside your site. Remember: If it is too easy to develop a link = RED FLAG. As always, develop quality content and keep it fresh. Use the social networks to prop up your links and pages.

Have fun because without challenge there can be no great achievement. Ride the waves and stay on top with a successful strategy.

SEO – Page Rank Fading – Back to the Future – Content

Pie Graph of Search Market Share - link juice provided for SEOmoz.com

The Static Internet was a simpler place where one could enter, search and find information. Back-Links once regarded in this simpler era, as a vote of confidence in a new an emerging internet have been exploited and abused beyond reasonable validity. Links were the way to Page Rank and too easily acquired in the link free-for-all’s all over the web. The majority of the activity was inorganic and sought out by website operators to self-induce better rankings by trading links, etc. This type of self promotion was beginning to pollute the organic results sought for by the search engines. The original back-link idea was predicated upon end users that enjoyed a particular site would vote for it with a back-link. This old idea was all but destroyed by the linked crazed site owners seeking self promotion and the black hat exploiters. The search engines met this challenge with their own methods to filter out these self generated links and the spam that threatened the user experience of the free search engines. The method Google used for tabulating the old link method was called Page Rank.

Page Rank was a system that attributed value to sites based upon the back-linking and popularity as demonstrated by incoming links vs. outbound links. A mathematical equation was used to discern the Page Rank of a given site. This worked for some time but the inorganic use of back-linking was a continuing cancer of which big search spent a lot of resources to control. Page Rank seemed to be the honest vehicle in a dishonest world by which to deliver organic results to the masses.

Big search worked at filtering the junk out of the rankings. Good, unique and fresh content was rewarded not only by the human experience of organic back-linking, but with a higher PR afforded by the search engines. The sites that were deemed “authoritative” received a higher PR. These along with the blogs and forums were positioned by PR higher than sites with less content. The educational sites and non-profits, the respective “.org” and “.edu” sites received higher PR. This was reflected in the SERPS.

A couple of things began to happen with technology and more folks logging onto broadband connections, etc. A more sophisticated end user began to demand a straight doorway to a more personal experience. Blogs were still popular seemingly to spite PR. The natural inclination of free commerce is always for profit. Big search had its eye on pay-per-click advertising and began to feel threatened by building up PR on some websites. Big search did not want anyone selling back-links to the highest bidder. So as the drive for profit rules, some websites that had gained high PR because of great content, being they forums or blog sites with ever-changing content, started selling their links to lower ranking websites. This would have undermined that natural and organic model that propelled Google to the top and made big search the doorway to the internet. Big search wanted to control this selling of links so it moved to devalue the very things it held high, fresh and changing content. Rich content sites & Blogs were downgraded in PR sometime in early ’07 for fear of link selling. Many great sites were whacked in half. I had a few websites that went from PR4 to PR2 in one swoop.

Something else took place of the old PR method however. The results in the SERPS for Google remained for my regional results, but in the national SERPS that are mixed into the results; my authoritative sites fell against some of the larger sites with less content. This had to do with PR and another type of filter or manipulation by the search engines. The end result was a balance for a while until the black hats began to dominate the Adwords and Adsense programs with spam websites and garbage infiltrated the ranks of the SERPS. For quite some time Google’s own model was threatened by the hijacking of its own money making advertising programs. It took some time for Google to get off the profit taking and clean up its act.

Finally, Google policed its results by dumping paid advertisers in order to keep the world of search organic and honest. This had to be done as real people were getting tired of the experience of searching through the SERPS for what should have appeared on top. Black hat paid advertisers were destroying organic search. Thank you Google, even if it was a little late. (I wrote about this before the dumping of advertisers with great angst.) Google’s competitors started to sound off about the actions they were taking to improve their offerings.

In the current state of Googling, PR is outranked by content. What does this say about PR? PR is just an element of the criteria that is weighed for the real ranking, that of the SERPS. PR has its place as it does rule in many areas of search, but when it comes to content and a regional element, PR is not the deciding factor in getting listed in the SERPS.

Shall we consider PR as a fading element of yesterday’s methodology? I think so. I think we are seeing the reemergence of the human element in social media. PR was built upon skewed backlink math and it is not a real measure of a site’s popularity. Social media sites are inundated with garbage and the search engines are easily filtering out the good from the spam. It seems that big search is set-up to do this in an efficient way. So called “NOFOLLOW” links on sites like Twitter are noticed by Google and position well as referred links. The Google machine sees these links and they get into the results in the SERPS. The Google machine also sees content with its artificial intelligence that above all, will reward the true purveyors of interesting information. Real people are beginning to be harnesses to “tweet,” “dig” or “bookmark” their favorites on these social sites.

Google will continue to regard these sites as very important as they represent a threat to big search. As social media continues, it will refine itself into many doorways for many end users on the internet. Big search has positioning itself to not only harness this new media, but to build its own brand of social media. The networking that is currently in place has big search shaking, but there is hope. Search has realized that because it is so big, more leaches can suck its blood (and yours) and it can fall and be hurt terribly if it does not return to the simple organic results of yesterday.

“A hunger for interactivity will prevail…”

Social Media Growing like a weed - link juice provided for wpsmallbusiness.com

Social sites will also continue to refine, but not for the same reasons big search refines. A hunger for interactivity will prevail as real people can interact with each other. This service is unique to social media while search is a more private deal. Social media has its own limits set by its users as to what is visible and what is held back from the public. This is specifically why the social attempts like Google’s own “Buzz,” where the push for one to open their own personal contacts into the open air will not work. People want to keep some areas of their internet experience private and the mix of social with email contacts will be rejected by the masses. For instance: Just about everyone that has a job would want for their personal ramblings and excesses to be kept from public view.

The mix continues and it seems that big search will either rise to the occasion with a truly human experience that attracts people organically, or a new type of social search will enter to assume some of the traffic and to act as a multi-faceted and different kind of doorway to the internet.

-Bob W

Page rank: How Important is it?

Pagerank, Page-rank, or Page rank:  How Important is it? Pagerank is a number, proprietarily set by Google that designates the importance of a website.  That importance factor must be viewed by the website owner for what it is worth.  The worth is mainly for outbound link or backlink value.  This being the case, the pagerank should not be viewed as anything if what you have is working, unless you are in the business of selling your links.  The practice of selling links is pooh-poohed by big search, but that is exactly what big search does (go figure). Pagerank is matter of dispute with some  SEO pros discounting its significance.  Many pages on the internet have a pagerank of 1 or 2, but perform magnificently.  Meeting or exceeding the desired result is the barometer by which a website owner must gauge the successfulness of a particular website.

Pagerank can be seen through the use of the Google toolbar or variant thereof.  This will enable you to view the pagerank of a site from which you may aspire to obtain a backlink, or outbound link to your site. A regional company can often have its website relegated to the pagerank of 2 with little prospects of growing out of that ranking. Hurting pagerank, is backlinking or the effort to attain incoming links coming from other sites, with low pagerank. Low pagerank yields low pagerank.  Backlinks however, that come from regional, industry specific directories for regional companies are a good thing.  Big search deals on a global level and if you want to go national, you probably look toward raising your pagerank to show up in the national or global SERPS.  This will be according to the competition level for your keywords. A search string devoid of a regional element sometimes results in a regional SERP.  Why would this be so? Google has an IP locator working within its search string as regional results are desirable for the end user. Some industries are deemed regional because they are regional.  A strange mix of regional and national results show up in these searches.  An example of this is a search string that contains a home improvement search.  Big search has the searcher pegged before he or she even gets started.  Big search knows where you are and the regional SERP is what you get in some search strings. Amidst the SERPS, but separately configured and at the top of the SERP is a list of businesses that represent brick and mortar establishments usually listed in the Phone Book Yellow Pages.  Google will also list your company with validation through its Webmaster Tools which requires registration and login. So unless you have an ego problem, or have aspirations of going national or global, or want to sell your links, pagerank is not that important.   Many will disagree, but it is the business mind-set that prevails in the successes of a company through its website.  Do not waste your time with pagerank.  It does not pay the bills.