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

Flash Mobs: Power of Social Media Exemplified in Philadelphia-

April 2, 2010

Social Media is taking off among the youth but also within all communities as the popularity of these sites increases. People frequent these new doorways to the internet. As they share their interests and day-to-day happenings with each other, people are flocking to these sites. One can communicate with hundreds or even thousands of friends in a few keystrokes.

Never has the world seen such a network that literally has the power to engage the human spirit so effectively. We may see entire governments overthrown by these sites one day. When it comes to likes and dislikes, everyone is not the of same vein and debate is natural. Entire communities of folks interested in topics that range the gamut, daily communicate on the internet to share information and links to interesting sites.

The power of this raw force of networking has been seen in the city of Philadelphia of late, as in other parts of the country. So called, “Flash Mobs,” are appearing and causing disruption, damage and problems across the city of Philadelphia. Youth that are looking for action and are able to communicate by way of their hand-held devices on the networking sites and gather in mass to disrupt a given area of the city at will.

This is about the power of these sites and that people can communicate with each other in real time. It is no mystery that the sites more fluid in nature like Facebook and Twitter are more poplar to people looking to engage. How can a business harness the power of these sites to increase sales?

These sites like Facebook and Twitter use a global “nofollow” attribute in their “robots.txt” and generally links are considered dead to the machines that crawl the web. My opinion is that they are picked up and crawled anyway by big search. There is some debate about this. The links on many of these fluid sites that use the global “nofollow” designation do not, however get indexed in the search engines. Some sites linked to these sites are indexed by search engines. Take “Digg,” for instance and sites like it that allow spider crawling. These are prime real estate for well written articles and links to interesting sites. Again content reigns supreme and the same link bait ideas are attractive to the social networking folks that share an interest in your good or service.

As stated before, big search will continue to harness the happenings on these social sites so that the search engines remain valid in the internet experience. The power being wielded by these sites has unleashed an attraction to them by Google, Yahoo and Bing. Although the chaff that is known as spam is always going to be prevalent, the social sites are working hard to prevent it and the human element is heavily employed to cancel out the spam artisans. Take “Slashdot” for an example as it marks articles as spam until they are voted upwards by readers to raise them to a page of higher ranking.

So, we must ask if the social sites are helping the quality of big search or are they becoming entities all their own and threatening big search. I think the latter, but as long as people need a place to search for items on the internet, the search engine will remain viable. Google and Yahoo and Bing may be reduced in their ability to garner revenue from pay-per-click listings as copywriting will take on a role that will empower businesses to convey their messages in other ways. One thing is for sure and that is that the old linking schemes are dying a slow death right before our eyes. Another is that quality in site copy will rise to a level of significance never seen before.

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

SEO – A Way Around the Sandbox Effect

A Way Around the Sandbox Effect

The sandbox effect has been written about by myself and many others that have followed it since ’03-’04 by many in the SEO profession. This filtering out of new sites that are “un-trusted” by the search engines are relegated to sit in obscurity until they can be verified and let out into the SERPS (search engine page results). This is a period of time that is an average of six months and can be longer or shorter according to unknown criteria employed by the search engines.

In the public service I want to comment on my successes of late in getting new sites broken out and noticed, crawled and placed in the SERPS. There are several methods I have used to do this and it is working quite effectively. Below are elements that aid in this effort and will work well to get you noticed fast. I will expound upon them after listing them below.

1. Google Webmaster Tools are essential in getting you listed on a new site on the big kahoona. You should have an existing Webmaster Tool Account with another site that is already listed.

2. A very active Blog is most effective. By active, I mean that you are posting well written articles that contain careful keyword usage. The Blog/Website should be carefully crafted with in-page optimization and cross linking for exciting ping-backs.

3. Social network submission on a daily basis for approximately a week with crafty title tags. Automate your social submissions so that all is done for you so that you can continue your written barrage of daily written articles regarding your business.

4. Write professionally for a living. Your payoff will be amazing if you can produce interesting copy about your company or offering. Do not worry about those that will try to mimic what you do. Be a trend setter not a follower.

5. Submit to smaller search engines along with the big ones.

The above four elements sound so simple to do but they are a challenge to some folks. Google Webmaster Tools is a way to get your site trusted if you already own a website. You can get noticed very quickly. Google will not always list your site as being indexed right away but who cares as long as you get into the SERPS, you will have something with which you can begin to improve upon.

A Blog is a way to get your site noticed quickly with a lot of pages. Quantity is very important because you will not go unnoticed. Your site will achieve what all the lazy black hats want for their sites but are now having trouble doing. There is no substitute for site copy and this is demonstrated by all of the angst I feel when my work is plagiarized. Content is the key to your success.

You need to write like a journalist or you need to hire a writer that can produce good clean and interesting site copy on a daily basis. This is war and the better writers are going to prevail in this battle. I received an email yesterday from a black hat offering software that “legally” scrapes content and automatically posts it on websites. The black hats are scrambling for content because it works. Links are secondary and Google is cracking down on the link spammers even having offered a new snitch program to help them in this regard.

Social networks are the new avenue to get listed. These sites are networked and everybody is using them. You can automate your social submissions so that your new articles are automatically posted on them. If you hand submit, pay close attention to the “title” tag as you want a unique tag for every submission and you want it to be relative to the keywords usage within your article and you want your pages to be titled along with your site at the biggest audience.

While big search is busy filtering out new sites, a large amount of the smaller search engines are taking listings and posting them immediately. Use this avenue to GET NOTICED!

-Bob W

SEO – Sandbox Effect – Double Double Cross?

The Sandbox Effect – Double Double Cross?

I have written about it. Many people have written about this grey topic that is a negative to the website designer’s vocation. The sandbox effect is real and it is currently an obstacle that stands in between you and getting a newly launched website noticed in the SERPS. There are interesting observations however that you may want to consider.

We expected Yahoo and especially Bing to employ a new site filter aggressively because of the “quality vs. quantity” mantra that Bing has exuded from the rafters of late. Google is expected to employ this type of filter also as it tries so desperately to return to organic quality results.

First, let us explore the reason for this filter and then the current implications of its use by big search. First of all it is the constant work of those who have become known as “black hats” that causes these giant purveyors of search to endeavor to control their successes. Automated linking schemes and reciprocal linking strategies threatened the very core element of big search rankings. These efforts were artificial and to get your site up there in the SERPS, you had to employ some of them because of the influences of those that hijacked the SERPS. Now everything has changed. After much activity in the shadows, the black hats evolved to hijack the pay-per-click marketplace. Finally after the threat was realized and big search recognized that real people doing real searches were getting frustrated with spammed results, Bing came out and voiced the intent to bring up the quality level of their search offering. With the merger with Yahoo, Microsoft’s intent to clean up search was taken very seriously by Google. Google took on a proactive approach even cleansing tens of thousands of paying members of its Awords program. Google also employs an aggressive new site filter. The strange part of the current state of new site SERPS placement is that Bing has opened its doors to new sites. Yahoo has also not filtered new sites out of the SERPS.

I cannot take risks with clients’ websites and their internet exposure. What I do is to take a lot of risk with my own sites. Now in launching a new site, it appears that if you are conservative about your back-linking strategy, only seeking one way back-links from high ranking sites along with social marketing and press releases, you can hit the SERPS within a week! Now this is limited to Yahoo and Bing. I have had Google crawl new websites, obviously indexing the pages but not listing them listed in Webmaster Tools. After about 24 hrs. or so, the new sites that were showing up on Google highly ranked in the SERPS, because of my expert in page and careful linking strategies. Then they drop off the face of the earth. A check of Webmaster Tools reveals that the sitemaps are updated every day as I update materials on the sites, but no listing of URL’s being indexed is available. This is certainly reflective of the reality that Google indexed my brand new sites and then employed a new site filter that has sent them to the sandbox. Below is a screen capture of the sitemap page in Webmaster Tools.

Sitemap Page from Webmaster Tools

Is the old double-double cross that we see? Who knows exactly why but we can see what is going on right now. Think about this for a minute. Bing exudes this grand intention to make their brand of search “Bing & decide” a clean and organic new style of experience for the end user that even feels good to advertisers. Independent business owners and operators are attracted to this idea of “Bing & decide.” The powerful new look of Bing attracts people while Google maintains its clean (but now more cluttered) look. Google looks over its proverbial shoulder and decides to act after the new Bing gives Google something to focus upon. Google decides to purge itself of its junk that threatens its organic search results. Google has done a lot of work and it is actively doing “Spring cleaning.”

As Bing watches while Google begins to clean up its act, the marketplace is going through its own purging. In brick and mortar establishments across this land many companies are going belly-up and established websites are shutting down. New start-ups are getting ready to capitalize on the Spring, post-tax season, early-summer sales season. Now these are the new entrepreneurs and even the businesses are left standing that want to try a new website launch to get the exposure they need for growth. These are the businesses that will pay for the services that big search provides. Bing is looking to peel off some of the advertisers from Google. It won’t be hard to do.

Google has made a lot of people angry with its big purge of advertisers. There are many that were caught in the snare and dumped that were not guilty of anything. By opening up and reducing the burden upon new websites, Bing may just be positioned in a happier place to capitalize on this big negative.

Speaking of negatives, for a website design company or an SEO company, the divulging of the real aspects of the sandbox effect to you, a business owner may affect your decision to move on a campaign to exploit free search. The SEO’s that do not tell you the whole story are not looking out for your best interests. You should know exactly what is happening and the prospects of getting your site highly ranked in the SERPS. Now is the time to move and to get your website ranked. Engage the services of the best SEO professional you can find. I am making the argument that I am your man.

-Bob W

Yahoo Search embraces BING by Microsoft

Yahoo & Bing Forge a United Front Announced January 31, 2009, not sealing the deal until the end of July of 2009, Yahoo’s vote of confidence of the new BING is a real lift for the new search engine.  The no cash deal put Yahoo’s search resources in Microsoft’s hands and layoffs ensued as the new Lion in charge gobbled up the baby Lions from the prior leader of the pride. Yahoo stands to increase annual revenues by 500 million while saving another 250+ million from not having the drag of maintaining search.  Yahoo will get approximately 85% of sales of pay-per-clicks for five years on its side of the equation.  There are also other down line perks for Yahoo. This union will not be up on Yahoo for a couple of years, reportedly as government anti-trust cops have to check to make sure all is on the up and up.  Rival Google handles twice as much traffic as Bing and Yahoo search combined.  That is a massive canyon between the Google and the combined Yahoo-Bing combo.

Google had tried to buy Yahoo back in ’08 but the anti-trust cops put a stop to that.  Yahoo dumped Google search results several years prior.  Google’s effort to purchase Yahoo Search was more to prevent Yahoo to falling for Microsoft.   Microsoft’s courting of Yahoo for years finally paid off.  Hopefully some real competition will cause search to be more quality oriented Yahoo and Bing Search offer competition for a better search tomorrow……

New Sites: Sandbox on Google

New Sites: Sandbox on Google

There are theories (called sandbox theories) as to why new sites take time to be listed on some SERPS on Google.  The “Sandbox” effect was a theory years ago that was generally accepted among SEO experts.  The sandbox theory was an explanation in response to apparent delays in new sites getting into the results in the SERPS.  For a brief time at the end of 2003 to 2004, the sandbox was eliminated for a while and there was a “reverse sandbox” effect theorized because new sites for several months during the period, gained almost immediate and seemingly undeserved SERP results.

There is disagreement among the experts as to the existence of the sandbox and how the indexing of new sites works, but there is something going on that limits new sites from reaching the top. The general consensus is that because of spammers and manipulators, new sites are filtered out and some refer to this as the sandbox effect.  The impetus for the sandbox effect is simple.  Black Hats have caused sandbox measures to be employed.  Some website owners have developed new sites, or spread a

large site over several URL’s with smaller pages of specific topics for the purpose of back-linking to the main site and gaining high SERP results for the main site. Google rejects any efforts to manipulate the rankings. Google, Yahoo, Bing and the rest will catch up to the manipulators that affect the authenticity of the SERPS.  There is an admitted sandbox effort over at Bing.   Hopefully in this new age of fast and changing content, search will find a way to eliminate the sandbox for viable new sites.

The need for the sandbox effect just demonstrates that the unsavory among us are taxing the search engines from doing their job, delivering truly organic results. The search engines are designed to deliver results from popular websites. These sites that rank are supposed to be from a result of human beings visiting the sites and back-linking to interesting sites. These are human votes of confidence. The vast majority of links on the web are generated by requests from site owners to other site owners requesting in-organic backlinks. Herein lays the problem. We see that the search engines are not equipped to handle the situation without major resources being expended or measures such as the sandbox being utilized. A newer way of indexing sites may move to the fore.

Sites that generate many, even thousands of back-links in a short period of time are suspect. search engines can pick these sites out easily and should forget the sandbox and put them on an island far away. This is not the case however. These sites seem to be back in the SERP rankings in several months after being penalized in a type of sandbox.

We shall see the results of the efforts put forth to quash the enemies of organic results. In the interim, we have the reality of viable sites being penalized for the sins of spammers. The current average to expect for your new site to be fully resulted in the SERPS and out of the sandbox is about 6 – 8 months.

A gradual incline in the number of back-links is considered best to keep your new site off the radar screens. Favorable SERP results should be expected from a quality SEO effort on a new website in about the 6 month timeframe. Existing sites can see almost immediate results (a month is a reasonable time-frame to expect results).

keywords from this page

Keyword density for this page is listed above.

The theory behind the sandbox is a viable one.