Do You Think About These 3 Factors in Web Design?

May 19th, 2012

web design

If you’re ready to redesign your website, what sounds like the best thing ever could turn into the worst project you’ve ever encountered without proper planning and research. There’s a lot of pressure on both sides: for the business owner as well as the web designer/developer. Don’t forget to consider these 3 important factors of web design:

1) Personality – This is where the endless search for inspiration begins. What kind of identity do you want your brand to take on? It’s common to feel overwhelmed and feel the need to include many different design elements to your site. But think about how that will translate to customers – it will be very cluttered and confusing. Keep it Simple Sam, is a good rule of thumb to go by. Take a look at some cool web design examples:

20 Examples of Minimalistic Responsive Web Designs
20 Inspiring Examples of Big Backgrounds in Web Design
21 Awesome Bright and Colorful Websites

2) SEO – Now that you have an idea of what you kind of persona you want your new site to portray, it’s time to dig a little deeper. Have you thought about the SEO web design functionality of your website? How can all that great content be found if it’s not made to be seen and crawled by search engines? This includes technical aspects including meta and title elements, on page optimization, search friendly URLs, image attributes, navigation, sitemaps and more. Ideally, this is a process that takes place before a new website is ever launched. It’s always a possibility to go back and re optimize but it’s best when these elements are looked at in the very beginning.

3) User Experience – When users come to your website, they want to easily find and read the content they’re looking for. Load time, navigation, relevant information, and engaging content are all a big part of user experience. Some websites can be aesthetically pleasing but too abstract to navigate. While other sites may be so “boring” that customers don’t identify with the company/brand. This is where these three elements meet to create an effective and useful website. Creating an objective may sound simple on paper, but it’s a more difficult process as you go along. Remember, it’s worth it to devote time and invest into the beginning stages because a website is a highly valuable asset that your business will keep for many years to come.

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Quick… Think Links!

May 18th, 2012

link buildingGoogle algorithm updates are currently putting links in the hot spot, but there is good reason to always be thinking about them instead of just sometimes. In the world of SEO, link building is becoming more complex and can’t just be an automated after thought. That is, unless you want to get nailed by the reoccurring Panda and Penguin updates!

Theories about link building can be confusing and it’s hard to keep up with current and outdated strategies. Here’s a quick refresher on 4 common linking topics:

Diversity as a Goal: Automated link submissions are seen as spammy because you can easily create hundreds of the same links. Not only is this not helpful for user experience, but it also makes your link profile look suspicious. Manual link building is encouraged because you can achieve a diverse portfolio of links. But here’s where the “catch” comes in, as Google is cracking down and devaluing or even penalizing links that look unnatural in their eyes.

What’s Your Anchor Text?: Exact match anchor text is also being devalued because it’s not natural to gather a lot of those links. Relying on these types of links can quickly get you penalized for over optimization. Instead, it’s natural and more likely to have partial match keywords as well as a good percentage of anchor text such as: your company name, your site’s URL, and generic words like “home and “click here”. These linking practices are undesirable from an SEO standpoint, but it’s still good nowadays to have a few thrown into the mix.

Don’t Forget About Images: Whether you want to call it hesitation, paranoia or even fear over anchor text, you can integrate the use of linking images. This is a good time to think outside of the box and broaden your SEO assets so that you’re not just counting on text links. Check out this article on Pinterest optimization that is also extremely helpful for optimizing pictures in general.

Deep Links: Here we go again – always linking to your home page might sound like the best and most convenient strategy, but it’s really just a bad habit. As we all know, bad habits are hard to break. Depending on your anchor text, you’ll want that link to point to the specific page of content on your site The goal is to connect your inside pages together and show that the related pages are relevant. This can help improving indexing of new pages and increase click through rates.

Using effective online organic strategies to create links is so important because they are what is pointing back to your website. A diverse and reliable link profile will strengthen your web site’s reputation, while sporadic and shoddy links create a weak foundation. This is why negative SEO is such a scary thought because bad links can literally destroy your visibility in search engine results. Do you have any other thoughts on link building?

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Why Your Content Marketing Strategy Needs SEO

May 14th, 2012

Google’s Penguin update may have left you feeling down and out, but now isn’t the time to completely give up on SEO.

Penguin Penalties
If you’ve been dabbling in black hat tactics, or even gray hat, that is obviously a big problem. But there are many marketers who have been “punished” by the algorithm updates, even if they have played it safe. Some sites have dropped a few spots, while others have felt  a full on penalty by dropping 10+ pages. What does that mean for the future of SEO? Regardless of what you’ve read, search engine optimization isn’t “dead” as much as it has drastically evolved. It’s a matter of which businesses can hang on during this ever changing environment.

The Big Problem with No SEO
While this may lead to a focus on cranking out content without any optimization, there is a huge problem with that. The main problem with thinking about online marketing without SEO is that your content needs to be found and seen by search engines in order to be indexed and eventually ranked. Just think of it as if you have the greatest thing to share BUT no one will ever come across it because you’ve done no marketing or planning to bring the content to the people. A failure to plan for effective SEO may also affect other aspects of online marketing like social media marketing… things that’ can’t be found cannot be shared!

Lessons Learned
The best advice is to stay up to date on upcoming updates and to see how they are affecting your peers and industry. Gone are the days of building hundreds of links, pages, articles for a quick fix. As Google puts it, the face of SEO today yearns to reward high-quality content without unnatural links or methods that may seem to be created solely for the purpose of manipulating search results. If these updates teach you anything, it should be that you should have a balance in optimization tactics: content creation, inbound/outbound links, on and off page optimization. In other words, simple is better and less is more.

Helpful articles:
- Reconsideration Request Tips From Google
- SEOs Share Google Penguin Recovery Tips
- Google Penguin Update Recovery Tips & Advice
- Whiteboard+ on Google’s Penguin Update

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Google’s April Search Quality Highlights: What Stands Out For You?

May 8th, 2012

What a month it’s been! Google has released 52 search quality updates over the past month and it’s felt like non-stop changes in search results.

While you can check out the entire list here, these are a few that stood out:

Smoother ranking changes for fresh results. This update is meant to help users easily find fresh, breaking news stories. For example, if you search “Google Panda Updates” you can expect stories about the latest update (Panda 3.6) to be at the top of the search results. This is slight factor plays a minor role in ranking changes and you can expect more to come as the algorithm is tweaked to be more sensitive to fresh stories.

Keyword stuffing classifier improvement. Google has designed a keyword stuffing detector so that they can better seek out sites that are participating in this outdated and ineffective practice. As we can assume, this was one of many signifiers used in the Penguin update, which solely targeted “webspam”.

Less snippet duplication in expanded sitelinks. It’s a well known fact that Google is averse to duplicate content and content that is used over again site wide. With this update, Google is working on reducing duplicate snippets of expanded sitelinks. This means that you’re less likely to see the same content summary of related topics that you’re searching for. In another related update, Google also worked on displaying the beginning of the content on each page for snippet results to give users a better idea of what they’re about to click on.

More authoritative results. This is a vague mention of an important update. Google has updated a signal that they use to find more authoritative content. Perhaps this is related to the PageRank update, although it technically occurred in May.

What do you think of last month’s search updates and do you think they’re helping you prepare for changes in the upcoming months?

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So Long Facebook FBML

May 4th, 2012


Are you ready to finally say goodbye to Facebook FBML tabs?

As of June 1, 2012, Facebook FBML apps will no longer work. As Facebook suggests, you can use HTML, JavaScript and CSS if you are building a new application. This is good news for web designers because it is just like building a regular web page without worrying about weird formatting issues. But this could be problematic for non-coders who liked the “simplicity” of using FBML.

For Page owners who haven’t used FBML, this news isn’t a big deal. For active users, it’s making the transition that could be difficult… depending on the number of tabs you have and their complexity.

There are many other alternative applications available and many are making the switch to iFrame Apps. Facebook accepts and favors this framework because the content will be hosted directly on the developer’s server, instead of through Facebook’s servers. Now here is one important thing to consider:

Should I use a Facebook tab application or make my own iFrame app? There are many applications to choose from if you’re looking for a quick and easy way to set up Facebook tabs – Wildfire, Involver, Tabsite to name a few. While these applications are easier to use, remember that they often have require monthly fees and are branded with their own company name (instead of yours’, unless you want to pay a higher fee for white label services).

Making your own iFrame app will give you the advantage of creating your very own web page on your Page. Depending on the number of tabs you want, it could be like creating your own mini-site with targeted landing pages that you can track using analytics. With FBML, this is something that couldn’t be done – don’t look at it as something that Facebook is doing to inconvenience owners!

So, if you need to, you have less than 1 month to make a transition. Give yourself time to think about the type of web design you’re looking for and weigh the benefits of using different applications for tabs. Be sure to contact us know if you have any questions and check out our portfolio!

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SEO Plugins for WordPress

April 30th, 2012

Before we take a look at some helpful SEO plugins for WordPress, here are some impressive statistics about the content management system and view the detailed infographic here:

- WordPress is responsible for 14.7 percent of the top million websites worldwide representing small, medium and big business.
- An average day sees about 500,000 new posts and 400,000 new comments on WordPress.com
- 48% of the top 100 blogs, as ranked by Technorati, currently use WordPress as their CMS
- 22 of every 100 new domains created in the US are running WordPress
- WordPress boasts the biggest market share when it comes to content management systems (53.8%)

There are many benefits of using a CMS, and there are a variety of WordPress plugins that you can help optimize your website for maximum exposure. Here are a few:

SEO Rank Reporter
This plugin provides an easy way to track Google rankings of specific keywords based on 3 day intervals. The data is presented in easy-to-read graphs so that you can see your progress and areas that you need to work on.

Premises
Need a hand with landing pages? This plugin provides effective templates with different features that makes it easy to customize content for a main landing page or any content page.

WordPress SEO By Yoast
This highly rated plugin is widely used for a good reason. There are many features including: meta data analysis, XML sitemaps, social sharing, analysis of onsite SEO and much more. Try it for yourself!

Author hReview
This is any easy way to integrate star ratings and other useful reviews into your pages that will show up in rich snippet previews of your site. This is extremely useful for increasing your credibility as well as your click through rates.

Sharebar
This plugin makes it easy to directly post your content onto different networking sites for maximum social visibility. You can customize the boxes and buttons of your liking and chose the most relevant ones to your business.

There are so many plugins for different business needs, so you can try a variety to see which ones are most helpful. Don’t forget to utilize plugin ratings to see which ones are most helpful to other people. Let us know which are your favorite plugins and why!

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Takeaways From Google’s Penguin Update

April 27th, 2012

penguinYet another “surprise” for SEOs?

Google’s Penguin Update officially launched on April 24 and the overall consensus is that it’s the worst update yet.  The official word from Google is that this update is an “important algorithm change targeted at webspam” that is meant to “reward high-quality sites”. Then why exactly are so many people so upset?

As you can see from the influx of comments in related forum threads and news articles, webmasters are NOT happy with this update. The story is similar – sites with #1 rankings for months (or even years), have all of a sudden taken a drastic drop or have even disappeared. The infuriating thing is that many people are finding that spam sites, sites that haven’t been updated for years or even plain un-optimized sites are now out ranking their site. How exactly is this “rewarding” high quality content?

SEOs aside, looking at the user experience is not a pretty picture either. Imagine that you’re looking for affordable or cheap auto insurance, only to find spam at the top results. When Penguin first rolled out, some users pointed out how people would have to scroll past a couple pages before getting to a reputable, brand name auto insurance company. They argue that this update isn’t aimed completely at spam (since it is still prevalent in SERPs) but any site that is remotely optimized. Whether this is true or not, is a different story. Even one that we may not fully understand since Google hasn’t officially made a response to these reactions.

This is only day 3 after the update rollout, so we can hopefully see the changes settle down and smooth out. Whether it’s all just a coincidence or theory, Google is finding themselves in controversial waters, so get ready to read more about Google’s evil ways. Many people are commenting about Google’s motives and after reading about all the businesses that have been affected, it isn’t hard to see things from a different light. Perhaps, Google is trying to prepare their algorithm to take into account more social factors (especially Google Plus profiles.) This may make sense if you’re up to speed with the Facebook search engine news. Others feel that Google is putting less revelency into their organic search so that businesses will turn to paid ads. After all, this is where Google makes over 90% of their overall revenue…

On the less pessimistic side, the Google engineers are probably (and hopefully) taking all this feedback into consideration as they tweak the update or make note for the next update. We can’t expect algorithm changes to roll out so seamlessly and it’s important to remember that there will be some winners and losers with each new wave. It’s too early to tell how things will end up as results may take awhile to settle down, but definitely expect something to happen soon!

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Can Competitors Attack Your Site With SEO?

April 25th, 2012

Lately, there’s been much debate on whether Google penalizes bad/low-quality links OR if they simply de-value them. With every algorithm update, there is more speculation. The argument is that Google can’t (or shouldn’t) penalize outside factors, such as links, that can be created by virtually anyone – including your competitors.

This is where the notion of negative SEO comes into play. Since frantic webmasters are scrambling to avoid over optimization penalties, what’s to stop the really vindictive ones to use these tactics against a competitor?

If you’re interested in reading this long thread, 2 users posted a case study about their experiment on using “negative SEO” techniques to cause 2 sites to tank in just a few weeks. They post rankings of specific keywords before and after their link bombs and the 2 targets suffered accordingly. If this experiment really holds true, this means that competitors can focus on penalizing your site instead of optimizing theirs. Rand from seoMOZ eventually joined in on the conversation and even offered his site as an experiment for negative SEO.

On one side, this is terrifying news and imagine all the possibilities! Competitors can spend a few hundred dollars a month to send crummy links to your site, buy social mentions, submit false/wrong information to automated local citation services and more. This is all in the realm of possibility… but others argue that negative SEO alone cannot bring down a site that has been thriving solely using white hat techniques.

The best thing you can do is to keep an eye out on the search marketing newsphere. Keep this information on your radar so that you know what’s going on and when. It’s also important to keep tabs on your site via analytics and check them regularly for any drastic and unnatural changes – like say a couple thousand incoming links from irrelevant sites! It also helps to check your rankings (with a service like Authority Labs) or even keep Google Alerts so that you’re aware of mentions and if anything else unusual occurs.

For now, we’ll have to stay tuned to see how this negative SEO experiment turns out. In the mean time, SEOs around the world are awaiting Google’s official word on this topic. This idea of manipulating a competitor’s link profile is controversial but relatively low-key (for now) but what if it catches on with more and companies attacking each other? Do you think that Google will wait until then to make an announcement or change the way that they value bad incoming links?

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Search Marketing Odds & Ends

April 20th, 2012

For your Friday: here are some helpful tips that we all hope you can benefit from.

Don’t focus on just one factor: When it comes to metrics and analytics, it’s difficult but sometimes, you just have to pull through! Focusing solely on one measurement whether it is Page Rank, bounce rate, or clickthrough rate can cause you to lose focus of other measures as a whole and lose sight on the big picture. For example, it’s not uncommon to hear about a client who complains of being outranked by a competitor for 1 particular term… even if they are outranking that particular competitor for 10 different terms! In other words, pick your obstacles and choose wisely.

LinkedIn Answers and Avvo: These are both reputable Q&A sites for business professionals. Being active can help increase your credibility in the community. Bonus: as you become more active, your search engine visibility may also increase as these trustworthy sites are favored in search algorithm.

Don’t be intimidated by updates: Google Panda updates or algorithm changes can seem like a scary thing. The important thing is to stay in tune with what’s going on. As we’ve always said before, if you haven’t dabbled in black/grey hat linkbuilding methods, you should be in the clear. Many times, these announcements drum up anxiety and panic causing people to go out and make sporadic changes to their site. In the mean time, they may very well be doing unnecessary damage to their own site and blaming the drop in SERPs to the updates.

Put the most important things first: This goes with content, Facebook updates and Tweets and anything else you want to link. In a more specific example: we are conditioned to think of Twitter updates in 140 short characters. Think again – how about 45 characters, instead of 140. Many people have found that while whole Tweets are indexed, the messages are truncated in results at about the 45 character mark. While it’s tempting to please the search engines, remember to put real human readers first.

Don’t believe the SEO is dead hype: While the tactics of search marketing from 5+ years ago are “dead”, SEO is far from dead. An increasing number of these articles are showing up for many different reasons: link bait, shifting the focus on alternative search marketing strategies (local and social) or even just because SEOs who want to be disassociated with the myth that all search engine optimization is spam. Make sure to check out this article to see why SEO will never really die.

Stay tuned for more odds & ends and have a great weekend!

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Taking a Look at Google Plus and Search

April 16th, 2012

google plus While there’s no argument that your website can benefit from an active presence on Google Plus, it’s still crucial to take a look at the different ways in which this is possible:

Inside the Social Realm
There’s no doubt that +1′s help web pages when we take a look at Search Plus Your World. This helps socialize your search results – meaning that your +1′s will show up when your Google plus friends search for something relevant to your recommendation (and vice versa). These +1′s act like a social sign of credibility and relevance since your friends are liking them and in return, endorsing that certain web page/company. This major change in search has businesses even more intently focused on creating content that will engage users and not just search engines.

Impact on Search Algorithm
The more +1′s your site has, the more it signifies relevance, credibility and trustworthiness. To what degree Google considers these social signals is unclear and their impact probably changes all the time, due to different factors. Of course, this also goes for Facebook Likes and Tweets, but some suspect that Google will give preference over their own social networking platform over the others that are out there.

Ongoing Debate
There is no direct answer on whether Google Plus can bring something “new” to your online organic campaigns but it’s the potential that people are focused on. In a way, you can look at Google + in a way that it isn’t doing anything to drastically change the search marketing game, but that it is amplifying the effects of things being spoken about in the SEO community for awhile now.

For example, these social signals are encouraging companies to create content that is more user-friendly and that will evoke more engagement. The addition of social factors to search engine results are also discouraging spammy content, keyword stuffing and other black hat methods that have been frowned upon because really, who is going to click on, read or even +1 a badly written, self-serving article?

Is Google Plus Right for Your Business?
This all boils down to making an analysis on what social platform will be a good fit for your company. Right now, big brand names and marketing/technology companies are doing well with Google Plus. Smaller companies might benefit as well, depending on their niche. In a comparison that can be easier to relate to, it’s like choosing whether direct mail, television ads or even paper directories are a good fit for your company. Believe me, there are some clients who still invest thousands a month in Yellow Page ads. Marketing is about choosing a mix of different strategies that will suit your company well – it doesn’t mean that you have to just choose one thing and stick to it.

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