Top SEO Tips » Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Making a Career of Online Reputation Management

Dylan — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 20:32:37 +0000

If you enjoy computers and want to be part of the fast-paced internet-based world, perhaps a career in online reputation management and SEO would be just the job for you. There are several benefits to starting out on your own. One, you can work from home and have complete flexibility of your time and hours. And two, there is no special degree or certification required. And for many who are facing uncertainty in the job area, they are benefits you may not want to pass on.
But before you go and quit your day job, be warned there are many challenges should you decide enter this field. With the internet taking up a larger and larger portion of our lives it is natural that it would provide many jobs as well. As a result, there hundreds, perhaps thousands, of individuals claiming to do SEO. On the flip side there are many well established companies that control much of the market for online reputation management. Elixir Interactive is one such company. They offer many SEO and reputation management services and deliver what they promise.
Another important aspect in beginning such a career is experience. Understanding the way that search engines operate and the algorithms that they use is essential to any successful career. It is not something that you can just pick up over night. You must also stay on top of the constant updates and changes that the internet and search engines make. There is also the threat that SEO analyst could become obsolete as search engines become more refined and natural in their search patterns. Many companies, especially the larger ones, are deciding to move in-house for their marketing and SEO needs. Unfortunately there is not much room to move around, or up, with such a position.
Online reputation management and SEO is an important part of our internet based world; however, pursuing it as a career is not for the faint of heart.

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Making a Career of Online Reputation Management

Page Load Speed Part of Google’s Algorithm

Dylan — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 17:39:34 +0000

Following on from our post the other day (SwiftRank By Optimizing Page Speed) I was looking for more information on this. I found one post from Search Engine Land Site Speed, Google’s Next Ranking Factor which indicates that page load times will be a factor in the algorithm next year.

This makes sense from a user perspective. I have been advocating for a long time keeping the weight of your home page as low as possible, and have always recommended having less than 1MB in total downloads for the home page. This total number includes not only the page source, but also images, CSS, JS, and any other file that might be downloaded by the home page.

The problem is most web masters do not realize the size of their page as they’re on a fast T1, and they’ve got most of their site’s files in their browser cache. One of the most extreme examples I had of this was a client whose site would not download into our site analyzing tool because it was too big and the software refused to download any source code over 30 MB in size.

Another example was a client with a flash sidebar that was over 5MB to download.

To see how bad this is you can use a calculator such as this one to type in your page size and see how long it would take to download:

5MB at 56k would be 9 minutes, at 512k (DSL speed) it would be over 1 minute, and even on a T1 it would take over 30 seconds.

When was the last time you waited a minute or two for a site to download? If kept waiting most visitors would hit the back button and visit your competitor site listed next in the rankings.

So what about Google changing their mind on page download times? Myth busting: delays in page loading from Matt Cutts 2006 stated that download times were not a factor, and perhaps they still aren’t now, but in future, and from a usability point of view speed counts. Do your visitors a favor and optimize your pages now.

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Page Load Speed Part of Google’s Algorithm

Search Engine Strategies in New York City

Dylan — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 00:28:08 +0000

The next Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference to be held in New York City will occur on March 22 through 26 2010. SES is one of the leading global conference and expositions educating in the fields of search engine optimization and search engine marketing. There will also be a series of SES Search Marketing Events which will provide instruction from some of the industry’s leading lights and search engine representatives. When in New York stay at some of the best New York hotels including the Hotel Gansevoort in the Meat Packing district.

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Search Engine Strategies in New York City

IIS Problem with Google Base XML Feed

Dylan — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:57:29 +0000

Just ran into a really odd problem with a client using Microsoft IIS to produce a Google Base XML feed. After a number of years with the feed working fine it seems that a little while back the feed stopped working for no obvious reason. The application was written in C# reading a SQL Server database and outputting a XML data stream that is then fetched by the Googlebase robot.

The problem symptoms were that the feed stopped outputting anything and the server closed the connection with the client.

I decided to update the application to use the XmlTextWriter class – perhaps IIS was changed to force the use of this new interface – but that didn’t help.

After much digging it turned out that adding attributes to the tag was causing the issue – remove the attributes and the application ran fine but then Google Base would not accept the feed as it didn’t declare the version or the namespaces required.

Some more digging and I found that the tag would allow attributes if the tag was missing.

Further digging showed that the tag would be acceptable if it had attributes. Now the Googlebase spec and the RSS 2.0 does not allow for the tag to have attributes. So to get around this I added a dummy attribute to the tag and that allowed the application to output the Googlebase feed without a hitch, would allow the feed to be rendered by Firefox. I have now resubmitted the feed to Googlebase and hopefully it will be accepted.

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IIS Problem with Google Base XML Feed

Issues Upgrading Google Adwords Editor

Dylan — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 17:28:42 +0000

Adwords editor recently prompted me to upgrade so I did. Then the program stopped working and hasn’t worked in a week. I finally spent a few hours yesterday and today to troubleshoot the issue. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling. I tried uninstalling, cleaning the registry, and then reinstalling. Still no dice.

Finally I uninstalled and looked in the Google directory on my c: drive C:\Program Files\Google\ and sure enough there was a ‘Google AdWords Editor’ directory full of files. When I deleted this folder and reinstalled again the program started working.

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Issues Upgrading Google Adwords Editor

Robots.txt validator

Dylan — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 18:55:42 +0000

Just added to our tools section the ability to validate your robots.txt file. There are tons of robots.txt validators available but this one is slightly different in that it looks at the file from an SEO perspective – looking to see if you’ve blocked too many pages from the spiders, whether there’a sn XML sitemap, etc. It validates not only the standard robots.txt syntax but also more modern additions that are not truely standardized yet, such as the commands ’sitemap’, and ‘allow’.

Give it a try and let me know if the validator finds any errors in your robots.txt file.

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Robots.txt validator

SEO Site Review – http://www.silvaheeren.com

Dylan — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 18:13:37 +0000

Daniel Silva asked me to comment on the SEOing of his site http://www.silvaheeren.com.

First impressions:

His home page is about his firm. Who cares? Remember the world’s favorite radio stations WII FM – what’s in it for me? I would totally swap the site around and put services first and foremost and the ‘about us’ page as a footer nav.
Light gray text on white background is difficult to read, give that more contrast.
Links into the content are grouped at the bottom and not in the text where you’d except.
Terms and conditions looks to be a contract – I would remove this as its irrelevant to someone visiting your site.
Your portfolio pages look nice, why not use Ajax to replace the screenshots instead of refreshing the screen? Shows you know how to do some of the more modern programming techniques.
No Web 2.0 on this site – comments, blog, reviews, videos.

So far no SEO comments, and that’s deliberate. SEO is as much about usability of a site as about minor tweaks to rank it. If the site is unusable then even if you have people land on your site they will not convert, therefore your SEO effort is wasted.
So as for the SEO:

Revisit your keyword research and found out what people are searching for. Your site links are ‘brochure’ which is vague and could mean anything. ‘Travel Brochure’ is more descriptive but probably not a good term either. How about ‘brochure design’.
Your portfolio pages contain minimal text, as spiders do not read images you need to add text to tell them what is on the page.

I ran it through sitecara.com and got the following errors:

Code:1265: Robots.txt – No XML sitemaps defined.
Code:1831: Both www and non-www URLs returned http code 200 – page found. (http://www.silvaheeren.com/ — http://silvaheeren.com/).
Code:1480: No H1 tag on home page
Code:1501: Too little text on this page – below 300 words. (179).

In addition I ran it through CSE HTML Validator and it had a lot of HTML errors, none major but should be fixed anyway.

Next steps:

Address usability
Re do keyword research, pick 10 or 20 terms you want to rank for. Add a localization to it for now i.e. instead of ‘webdesign’ use ‘webdesign miami’, smaller set of searches but more chance to be #1.
Re optimize your site.
Download CSE HTML Validator trial edition and validate your HTML. http://www.htmlvalidator.com/
Add your site to Site Cara and run the site audit, fix any issues found.
Add your keywords to Site Cara see where you rank now.
Go out and get some links (a whole article in itself). Most web designers gain links from their client sites in the footer, these can really help.

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SEO Site Review – http://www.silvaheeren.com

Return of Pages Indexed and Link Quality Tool

Dylan — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 16:39:39 +0000

A popular tool on the old Eixir site was the pages indexed and link quality tool. When we changed sites we lost those tools but we have now recreated them with some more bells and whistles at http://www.semreportsonline.com/

This site is still in beta (or even alpha) but I wanted to open it up for people to play with and give feedback.

Main features:

Link quality assessment including graphs and history functionality
Pages indexed across all 3 major engines.
Ranking reports including capability to go back in time and compare ranking reports including how the top 30 looked at the time.
Response time checking for your site.
Multiple sites per login/email.
Multiple logins per site (this needs to be done by an admin behind the scenes).
Whois history – whois info stored once a week and you can compare old whois with current to see how its changed.

Sign up and give it a try, let me know what you think. No credit card is required at this time I want to test the site before turning off the ‘trial account’ status. I might even add advertising to see if I can allow an ad supported limited version.

Future enhancements are already planned – mainly email alerts when reports have been run and perhaps an analysis of the report i.e. details of whois record changes. SEO Road blocks, etc.

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Return of Pages Indexed and Link Quality Tool

How to Get More Traffic to Your Site

Dylan — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 17:29:40 +0000

This post is not about ‘how to get more traffic to your site’ its about how to get the right traffic to your site.�Once a site is properly optimized some people will see reduced traffic to their site and that’s a good thing overall. The problem with targeting ‘more traffic’ as a goal can be the traffic is the wrong kind of traffic. If you sell widgets and get ranked #1 for ‘viagra’ then the traffic you get will land on your site, see it’s not what they want, and quickly move on – you’ve had a bounce (single page visit) which has eaten your bandwidth and produced no results.

So how do you get the right kind of traffic. First of you need to know what search phrases (keywords) to target. Generally we recommend Wordtracker (free trial), or Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Using these tools you can find terms that are likely to drive targeted traffic.

A good way to test the keywords you find is to set up a PPC campaign around these keywords and see what the traffic does once it lands on your site. If it bounces you’ve got the wrong traffic, if it stays or even converts you’ve got a winner. The budget outlay for this can be small – less than $100 should do it in most cases.

So now you have your search phrase list – around 10 for a non-ecommerce site should suffice, and for an ecommerce site you’ll want at least one search phrase per category and one per product which can run into thousands.

So with these 10 words you decide which are your top priority, either their higher traffic, or lower traffic but convert well. Then run the command ’site:mysite.com searchphrase’ on one of the engines and let the engines tell you which page is most relevant for the keyword. If the page that shows at #1 is in your opinion the best page that’s ok, if it isn’t you need to find the best page and then optimize it.

So optimization. Keyword density checks are old hat. Put your keyword once in the meta title, once in the meta description, once in the meta keywords. Make the headline (h1 tag) include your phrase, then try to insert your phrase about 6 times on the page. You can use Firefox to highlight your search term on your page using the command ‘Ctrl-F’, a search box appears in the lower right, type in your phrase, and click ‘highlight all’

Linking is then key and I’ll hit on that another time.

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How to Get More Traffic to Your Site