As is the case with many small business websites these days, there were many opportunities for improvement.  From titles to text content to the development of a strong site architecture and internal link structure, the site was in need of a head-to-toe overhaul and a facelift.  The old site was pretty basic, didn’t incorporate much text content and only had a handful of pages.  Not only did the site not perform well in a keyword search at that point, the original design also had some usability and branding challenges to overcome.

I couldn’t let that continue and not long thereafter my friend and her business partner had a shiny new website that, if I do say so myself, is something they can proudly rely on to represent their brand online.  I know what you’re thinking, “But, Alysson…it doesn’t matter if it’s pretty if no one can find it.”  You’re absolutely right.  I couldn’t have said it better myself.  As I mentioned before, prior to the redesign/relaunch the site had no rankings for any targeted keyword terms.  None.  Zippo.  Zilch.  Nada.

Gleaning Information From Competitors

I’ve obviously been offering my friend a great deal of advice along the way regarding what needs to be done moving forward.  Knowing how bright she is and how likely she is to actually pursue the avenues I advise her to pursue to further improve the site’s rankings now that they have a strong foundation, I knew she’d be doing a lot of investigation and poking around on her own.

She recently sent me an e-mail containing a links to two blog posts that really stuck in my craw.  While the focus of the posts obviously seems to be relative to the advantages of blogging – though that doesn’t really come through as the main topic of the articles at all, there were some statements made in those posts that really got under my skin.

“I am a firm believer that all you need is a website,  a properly hosted blog, and a bit of patience in order to build up a business…”

Wow.  I bet the 80+% of small businesses that fail would have appreciated knowing that.  A website, a blog and some patience…that’s all there is to it?  Damn.  According to the marketing bible of a former DJ turned SEO who describes himself as someone for whom, “…reading and writing have always been the hardest things for me to do ever!“, EVERYTHING ELSE that successful start-ups do is a waste of time, effort and resources.  Someone should really tell them that concentrating on small business website design, usability, online reputation management, branding, etc. is just unnecessary fluff.  Pfft!  Comprehensive SEO strategy?  I don’t need no stinkin’ strategy.  I’m not sure I even know what “comprehensive” means…

Look, that’s one of the most ignorant oversimplifications I’ve ever come across.  It’s like saying all you need to win a Superbowl is an offense, a defense and a properly inflated football.

“With some minor tweaking to her site, a few off-site optimization techniques, and some Search Engine Optimization to her website, only a month later, on April 24th, 2009 to be exact, was already indexed by Yahoo, MSN Live and Google.com…”

<sarcasm>HOORAY!</sarcasm>  I’d like to know what this “minor tweaking”, “a few off-site optimization techniques” and “some Search Engine Optimization” entailed.  First of all…these “minor tweaks” are often not minor at all and are part of an overall strategy.  You can’t refer to “minor tweaking” and “some Search Engine Optimization to her website” as separate things.  Well, I guess you can…but you wouldn’t, if you know what the hell you were talking about.

The “tweaking” to which he refers is actually called “on-site SEO” and it includes making improvements to titles, descriptions, text content, headings, site architecture, text navigation, internal link structure, ALT attributes, image optimization, improvement of page load time, etc.  Dumbing down on-site SEO to nothing more than “minor tweaking” is a ridiculous and dangerous oversimplification of on-site SEO that will lead to problems down the road for anyone who accepts such ignorance as fact.

SHENANIGANS!

Here’s where it really gets to be fun.  It you were to take a look at the tables included in each of those posts, you’d see that all but a couple of search terms are not disclosed.  Really?  You’re trying to prove how awesome you are and how easy SEO is by reporting how crappy a site’s rankings were before your “minor tweaking” vs. how the rankings improved a month later.  I call shenanigans.  And by “shenanigans”, I mean BULLSHIT.  For all we know you’ve improved the site’s ranking for terms that no actual human being would ever use in a keyword search.  Kudos on your transparency.

While I’m sure anyone who publishes a supposed case study without actually publishing the terms being targeted would say it had something to do with confidentiality, again…bullshit.  If you can’t publish the terms, don’t publish the post as a supposed case study.  Not doing so makes the individual rankings and ranking improvements utterly meaningless because there is no way to compare the ranking improvement on a term by term basis.  What appears as “Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword” in row 3 of the first table may not be the same target term that appears as “Wedding Marketing Keyword” in row 3 of the table in the follow-up post.

For example, if you compare the original ranking report (before any optimization was done) to the “month after” ranking report, the “Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword” that appears in row 12 ranks in position 83 on the original report, yet the “Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword” in row 12 of the follow-up report shows the site is “Not Ranked”.  So a month after the “minor tweaking” was done the site actually went from being ranked in the 83rd position for an unknown keyword to not ranked at all.  Hmm…curious.

Since the Redesign/Relaunch

The new site launched on July 7th, 2010.  Initially I focused my attention on creating optimized, keyword targeted text content for a handful of the target terms within her niche that generate the greatest search volume.  While there are 25-30 terms we want the site to rank well for moving forward, my main concern at the outset was to improve the site’s ranking for the following terms:

• [wedding planners houston] – about 320 searches per month
• [wedding planner houston] - about 320 searches per month
• [houston wedding planners] - about 260 searches per month
• [houston wedding planner] - about 260 searches per month
• [wedding planners in houston] - about 210 searches per month
• [wedding coordinator houston] - about 170 searches per month
• [wedding planning houston] - about 110 searches per month

And let’s not forget that the site wasn’t ranked AT ALL for any search term aside from the actual business name.  In the spirit of transparency, here are the ranking results for the site just 9 days after the relaunch (July 16):

Keyword	Google.com position	Yahoo (United States) position	Bing position
wedding planners houston	31	-	-
wedding planner houston	32	-	-
houston wedding planners	44	-	-
houston wedding planner	49	-	-
event planning houston	153	-	-
wedding planners in houston	38	-	-
event planners houston	117	-	-
event planner houston	127	-	-
wedding coordinator houston	26	-	-
houston party planners	198	-	-
party planning houston	59	-	-
party planners houston	62	-	-
event planners in houston	198	-	-
wedding planning houston	31	-	-
party planner houston	64	-	-
wedding planner in houston	42	10	-
houston wedding planning	37	18	-
houston party planning	182	-	-
party planning in houston	175	132	-
houston wedding coordinators	52	-	-

About 6 weeks after the relaunch (August 15), the site was ranked as follows:

Keyword	Google.com position	Yahoo (United States) position	Bing position
houston event planning	-	153	-
wedding planners houston	27	17	66
wedding planner houston	24	22	48
houston wedding planners	27	33	120
houston wedding planner	39	34	105
event planning houston	90	-	-
wedding planners in houston	33	15	81
event planners houston	83	-	-
event planner houston	84	-	-
wedding coordinator houston	15	-	-
houston party planners	78	-	-
party planning houston	54	-	-
party planners houston	52	-	-
event planners in houston	95	-	-
event planner in houston	101	-	-
wedding planning houston	33	15	33
party planner houston	53	-	-
event planning in houston	140	-	-
wedding planner in houston	34	15	48
party planner in houston	144	-	-
houston wedding planning	37	24	67
houston party planning	136	85	-
party planning in houston	85	105	-
party planners in houston	126	-	-

Keep in mind I changed everything from the platform the site was built on to where it was hosted to the URL structure of the pages.  Literally everything that could be changed was changed.  And those results are based on absolutely no off-site effort on my part whatsoever – these results are based solely on the proper implementation of a comprehensive on-site SEO strategy.

A Half-assed Approach vs. A Complete Strategy

The ranking results being reported for the phantom keywords in parts 1 & 2 of the aforementioned case study were comparisons over a 6 month period…6 MONTHS – from March to August.

Basically what was accomplished with “minor tweaking”, “a few off-site optimization techniques” and “some Search Engine Optimization” in that case study over a period of 6 months, I accomplished with on-site SEO alone in 6 weeks.  THAT is the difference between the results from a “see…it’s SO easy” novice and an experienced SEO who actually understands the big picture.  SEO is much more than a laundry list of tasks that can be carried out by any trained monkey with a keyboard.  It is a little bit of art combined with a touch of science.  It takes experience.  It involves understanding not only the individual ranking factors, but how those factors work together and how their cumulative impact affects a site’s ranking.

This statement is particularly nonsensical and misleading:

I started to believe what other people were saying. I was believing Ignorant people that stated that the only way to rank high for Google was to pay someone to do it for you… Can you believe that? That’s the most absurd thing I had ever heard… first thing is how would you pay someone and second is why would Google do that? It made no sense to me at the time and it makes no sense to me now.

Why it DOES make sense:  the ability to achieve better results based on the on-site SEO efforts alone in 6 weeks.  While hiring a professional may not make sense to him, it does make sense to real small business owners.  Measurable results in 6 weeks.  Not 6 months.

A comprehensive strategy is essential to the long term success of any small business website.  Ranking well is only part of the equation.  Conversions are really where the rubber meets the road.  In a niche with little competition it may be possible to rank well for some target terms without incorporating every aspect of on-site SEO, but why wouldn’t you do it anyway?

The ranking factors are not created by search engines without rhyme or reason.  Well-written text content serves to inform site visitors.  Proper site architecture makes the site easy to navigate.  ALT attributes make it easier for the visually impaired to browse a site thanks to the use of software like JAWS.  Internal links help visitors find the information they need more easily.  Optimized images help pages load faster.  Faster load times get users where they want to go faster.

Virtually everything the search engines incorporate into their algorithms as a ranking factor is specifically intended to improve the user experience.  Search engines want to lead people to the websites that offer the best user experience.  And you should want your website to offer the best user experience.  Whether a site ranks in the #1 position or the #300 position, if it isn’t user friendly, doesn’t convey the right message and isn’t visually appealing people will go elsewhere.  A complete SEO strategy takes into consideration how A will impact B, how B will impact C and how A+B+C will cumulatively impact both ranking and user experience.

This is why the SEO industry suffers from such massive reputation problems.  A little bit of information in the wrong hands can be a dangerous thing.  Ignorance has its own unique opportunity cost.  Egregious oversimplifications hurt everyone.

photo credit: MrB-MMX, photo credit: cogdogblog and photo credit: Aaron_M

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Countless times I’ve talked with prospects and I ask them, “What do you hope to achieve with your website?” More often than not, they just stare at me confused. It’s almost like they didn’t realize they needed to have a purpose. So let me give you some ideas on what types of direction your website can have.

1. Make money directly from your website.

This generally comes from selling products online or selling advertising space (AdSense, text links, etc).

2. Promote your brand.

If you have a brand image that people are going to be searching for, you likely already have a website, so most small businesses aren’t in this category.

3. Customers want/need your website.

This is where I see the biggest need for small businesses. If you have customers asking you about a website, email, and looking for your website/address online, it’s time for a website with purpose.

If you’re in the third category and wanting to get your website online because of pressure from customers, before doing anything you need to determine what success will be.

Do you want a good looking informational website? This will give customers info about your company, history, staff, location, hours of operation and phone/email/contact info.

Do you want to start selling your products online? Have you done keyword research? Do you sell better/cheaper/smaller/faster (Unique Selling Position) products than your competition? Figure out these answers and determine when you will consider your website a success. Move that direction.

Now let’s look at your website. Who created your website? Does this person have any clue about on-site content, page titles, sitemaps, internal nofollow (for junk pages) or LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing)? If this is all Greek to you, talk to a professional.

So now you have your website online and you’re ready to see your site live on the internet. You go to Google and type your keyword, but you don’t find your website. In order for your website to show up in the search engine result pages (SERPs) you’ll need to build links to your website. Links are like votes, and each link tells the search engines that your site is worthwhile and should show up in the SERPs for a specific term.

There are many ways to build links, do it yourself or outsourcing. If you decide to do it yourself, you must realize that it’s a long and tedious process.

If you decided to do it yourself, here is a tip.

Grab low hanging fruit first – You can buy a few links without getting penalized (What? You don’t know about penalties?). You can buy links at a few big directories like Best of the Web and Ezilon Local Web Directory. These sites offer you a link based on your location which is good for search engines because it shows them geographically where your business is.

If you decide to outsource link building, here are questions to ask.

1. What specifically will you do for our company?
2. What kind of time frame are we looking at?
3. When will we begin to see results?
4. Why canve achieved?

Don’t make the decision to get your website online lightly. Most small businesses get a website online and don’t make changes for years, so get it right the first time!

Brandon Hopkins is a freelance link builder and Madera website designer. Contact him if you want to discuss web design or link building.

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Just like how other modes of marketing tools need some forms of monitoring or measuring tools to analyze their effectiveness, video marketing needs some yardstick to grade its performance, too. This is where “Video Analytics” comes in. Video analytics is a tool that is used to measure the actual effectiveness of your video marketing campaigns on the internet. It is a grading system that can measure all the parameters required for analyzing the reach and impact of your videos. After all, everybody likes to see returns on their investments. The same applies to video marketing strategies. Video analytics helps you to study the viewer patterns, their responses, number of views, geographical viewership, impact, and also the results of your video marketing method.

Basically, video analytics works on streaming videos, and can get you results on the following metrics. The start and end times of your videos, pre-roll and post-roll advertisement metrics, time played in seconds, negative and positive consumption metrics, and core content analytics. Geographical response in terms of who watches your videos from which regions are also analyzed and recorded. YouTube has a video analytics tool called “YouTube Insight” that can help you analyze the popularity of your videos in relation to other videos, whether your videos are reaching your target audience, how much time people spend on your videos, and also the rate at which your videos reach peak viewership figures.

YouTube has become a separate search engine unto itself, and most video marketing strategies are directed at YouTube these days. However, the importance of other sites including social networking sites in helping you with video marketing campaigns cannot be undermined. Having to upload your videos on all the sites that your customers or peers frequent, one by one, is very difficult. Sites like www.tubemogul.com help you with this. TubeMogul can be the single point of entry for your videos. You can upload your videos here, and have your videos posted on all the video sharing sites of your choice. TubeMogul also has a powerful video analytics tool that analyzes viewership frequency and geographical viewership.

By using video analytics tools such as the ones above, you can know precisely who is watching your videos and for how long. You’ll know if your target customers are viewing your videos, and if your videos are not reaching your target audience, you can analyze the data, and change your video marketing strategies accordingly. Just as how Google analytics has been an effective tool for analyzing the results of your SEO campaigns, video analytics is just as effective a tool to measure and improve your VSEO strategies.

About The Author: Ryan Sammy is a Social Media Analyst for Search & Social.

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The information contained within many a website SEO audit is a confusing mix of technical jargon and a laundry list of problems with very little information that you, as the small business owner, can take action on. If the audit states the site is suffering from canonical URL issues, poor internal link structure, duplicate content problems, keyword cannibalization, etc., what does all of that mean to you? If you’re like most small business owners, it may as well be written in Chinese. Many SEOs create these audits specifically to result in your hiring them to resolve the issues for you. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this practice, but it’s important that you understand that to be the case.

Let’s face it…not all small business owners are in a position to pay thousands of dollars to optimize their websites. Does that mean they should abandon all hope, throw their hands up in frustration and resign themselves to perpetually poor performance in the organic search results? Absolutely not. What it DOES mean is that where to spend marketing dollars and what to invest in SEO efforts is essential. If you’re among most small business owners, you don’t have a lot of free time, but you have more time to spend these days than money. For you, choosing the right SEO audit – one that will provide you with more than just a laundry list of problems – is very important.

What Will You Do After The SEO Audit – Have A Basic Plan

Have you stopped to think about what you intend to do with the information contained within the SEO audit? If you haven’t, don’t have an audit done – yet. There is a LOT more to consider when deciding who to hire to do your audit than price. Audits can range in price from a few hundred dollars to several thousand dollars. Before investing a dime of your small business marketing budget on a website audit, you need to have some idea what you intend to do with what you learn from it. If you spend $2,000 on an audit, how much of your budget will then be left to put toward actually fixing the site’s problems? If your answer is, “nothing”, you need to find a more affordable SEO audit.

Is your plan to hire the company that conducted the audit to resolve the issues? Do you intend to have the site’s original designer address the issues? Are you going to fix the problems yourself? Your goals, what you hope to learn and your future plans for resolving problems once they are identified are all important things to take into consideration BEFORE deciding who will audit your site. Not taking these things into consideration can cost you a LOT of time and money. The only thing worse than avoiding SEO audits is choosing the wrong one. If the audit doesn’t ultimately result in the necessary changes being made, it’s a complete waste of money.

Resolving On-Site SEO Issues – Understanding Your Options

You don’t HAVE to hire SEOs or SEO companies to improve your site’s organic SEO performance. If you have the flexibility within your marketing budget to contract a reputable SEO or hire an SEO professional to handle optimization for you in-house, that’s fantastic – and is obviously the optimal solution. I suggest you stop wasting your time reading this and do so immediately. That isn’t, however, a realistic option for many small business owners facing today’s economic challenges and shrinking marketing budgets.

The truth is that there are many on-site SEO tasks that can be tackled by designers, developers, or even by YOU – the small business website owner. While there are numerous things to consider in a comprehensive optimization effort, resolving basic on-site SEO issues is a huge step in the right direction toward improving your site’s search engine friendliness and organic SEO performance. That said, HUGE mistakes can be made if you or your designer aren’t careful or aren’t provided with the right information.

Let’s be clear: if you’re going to rely on whomever designed the site initially to resolve the issues, you should assume they know little to nothing about SEO. Why? If they knew much about building a search engine friendly site, they likely would have done so from the get-go and the site wouldn’t suffer from basic issues like unoptimized titles, poor META tag relevancy, lack of text navigation, etc.

That said, if you intend to rely on your designer or developer to resolve the issues, be prepared to tell them exactly what the issues are and provide them with information about how to go about fixing it. Many designers and developers claim to understand SEO, but more often than not this simply isn’t true. In this case, the usual “laundry list” SEO audits won’t cut the mustard.

Knowing the site doesn’t have an adequate internal link structure won’t be enough for the typical designer or developer to know what to do next. Telling them to fix the keyword cannibalization issues won’t be enough to ensure that it actually gets done. And if YOU don’t have a basic understanding of what keyword cannibalization is, you won’t know where to begin to check to see if the issues have been taken care of.

Not only will they (or you) need to be told what’s wrong, but – more importantly – what is involved in resolving those issues, some of which may be specific to an individual page and some of which may be site-wide issues that will need to be fixed on every page throughout the site. Unless the SEO audit helps create an understanding of not only what must be changed, but how and why it is important, someone who doesn’t already understand SEO will find it useless.

Website Audits Are A First Step – Not “THE” Solution

Think of a website audit as a diagnosis, not a solution to your website’s problems. Just like fatigue, fainting or a fever are indications to your doctor that something is amiss with your health, a site that performs poorly in an organic search is merely a symptom of the website’s underlying problems. An audit is a diagnostic tool. The treatment program, i.e. the overall SEO strategy, begins to take shape once the specific problems have been identified.

The right audit will help you better understand what aspects of the strategy you can carry out yourself and what is best tackled only by an SEO professional. Choosing the right SEO Audit – like choosing the right doctor – is an important first step toward reaching your goals. The most important thing to understand about any SEO effort is that it cannot be approached as a simple, one-time “project”. Successful SEO is an ongoing process. Websites that perform well in the organic search results are constantly monitored and changes continue to be made on an ongoing basis in order to maintain consistent, long-term success.

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For those who aren’t familiar with canonical URL issues, also referred to as url canonicalization (and sometimes “canonical home page issues” – which is technically incorrect as it does not just apply to the home page), put simply it is having the same page show up on multiple URLs inadvertently – not to be confused with purposely having multiple pages that contain the same text content.

If, for instance, your home page is accessible at both www.domain.com and domain.com, your site is suffering from canonical URL issues. In the worst case scenario, some pages are accessible at up to 6 or 7 different URLs…or more.

What URLs Are Being Linked To

While the duplicate content created by canonical URL issues may or may not have a negative impact on ranking, one thing is certain: it DOES have an impact on the link equity of the page. What does that mean? Well, in short, if the same page can be accessed using two, three, four or more URLs, it means each of those URLs could be bookmarked or shared on a variety of social media outlets or linked to by other websites.

Let’s say that 100 sites link to your home page, but your home page is accessible at www.domain.com, domain.com, www.domain.com/index.html and domain.com/index.html – all of which contain the same useful, and clearly popular content, based on 100 sites linking to it. Now, let’s say that 25 of those sites link to the URL www.domain.com, 25 others link to domain.com, another 25 to www.domain.com/index.html, and the last 25 to domain.com/index.html.

All of the links ultimately serve up the same content, so it doesn’t make any difference…right? WRONG! Instead of the home page being given credit for having 100 links, those four separate URLs are considered individual pages by the search engines and each is given credit for having only 25 links – even though the links ultimately lead a user to the same content. DOH! In a world controlled by Google and PageRank, the number of external links pointing to an individual URL can have an enormous impact on ranking.

What About Duplicate Content?

While some were put at ease by Google’s post back in September, entitled “Demystifying the Duplicate Content Penalty“, some in the search marketing industry still remain convinced that duplicate content issues can hurt a page’s ranking in the search results – myself included. I, and many of my search marketing colleagues, have enough experience to understand that leaving Google to figure things out for themselves and determining which URL should be the preferred URL in the search results is like playing Russian roulette – a point that I elaborated on in a previous post, “Duplicate Content – Did Google Do A 180?“.

The Solution: A 301 Redirect

Creating a 301 redirect is somewhat technical and involves making changes to the .htaccess file in the root directory of your domain, so most small business owners aren’t comfortable creating or modifying the file themselves. This is generally something that is best undertaken by an IT professional. That said, here is the redirect code that should be placed within the .htaccess file on (provided your server is running Apache with mod_rewrite enabled):

NOTE: this is the 301 rewrite code for a server running Apache – if your server is not running Apache, the redirect code is likely different from what is included above. This is yet another reason that creating a 301 redirect by modifying the .htaccess file is often tackled by an IT professional.

A 301 redirect points the browser to a single, preferred URL – the typical choice is www.domain.com. That means that if someone were to follow a link that pointed to domain.com, www.domain.com/index.html, or domain.com/index.html it will be redirected to www.domain.com automatically.

The biggest advantage to creating a 301 redirect is that existing links to any of the variations of that URL will continue to pass “link juice” – meaning you don’t have to inform the sites that may have linked to one of the newly redirected URLs of the change and there is no risk of losing the link juice being passed by those links.

Referring back to the previous example, adding a 301 redirect for domain.com, www.domain.com/index.html and domain.com/index.html will result in links to those URLs being recognized as links to www.domain.com, so www.domain.com will receive credit for all 100 links, rather than 25 links being attributed to each of four individual URLs. Problem solved!

Related posts:

1. w3 Total Cache & Canonical URL Issues

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Whether you’ve already hired someone to optimize your small business website or you’re just entertaining the notion, SEO audits can help to ensure that your marketing dollars are being spent wisely. Every day it seems as though there are hundreds more companies looking to make a quick buck by charging you for search engine optimization whether they know anything about SEO or not. If they don’t, I’m sure you’d prefer to know now rather than later…right?

SEO Audits Equal Peace of Mind

An SEO audit is a sure-fire way to determine whether your site is following the search engines’ accepted best practices. Unfortunately what you don’t know can really hurt you. SEO audits help to identify the issues that may be causing your site to perform poorly, as well as helping to discover if you’ve been wasting precious marketing dollars on an SEO scam.

The unpleasant truth is that there are an inordinate number of companies out there that sell search engine optimization services with no real understanding of how to properly optimize a website for long term success in the search results. Contrary to the claims of many a search marketing charlatan, there is no “quick & easy” solution for optimizing a website. There is no way to guarantee a #1 ranking in Google. There is no method for achieving a page one ranking in 7 days and keeping that page one ranking for long. Optimizing a site takes time and real work. Simply implementing the on-page SEO basics can be a time consuming endeavor, depending on how well your site your was built initially.

Many companies will charge for SEO services with absolutely no understanding of how search marketing has changed over the past couple of years or the direction its continued evolution will likely take. Website designers and development firms are often the worst offenders. Keeping up to date with the search marketing industry requires dedication and ongoing training. In the last year alone search engine optimization strategies have begun to incorporate Social Media campaigns as an integral part of the process of driving traffic to a site. Why? Because that is the direction that search marketing is moving. If you’re working with a firm that isn’t aware of that, you’re at a huge disadvantage and probably wasting your marketing dollars. The fact of the matter is that SEO is incredibly involved. Actually understanding SEO is a full time job in and of itself.

Bad SEO Is Worse Than No SEO

Many small business website owners trust their optimization strategy to a company they know little or nothing about. Are you one of them? What does the company optimizing your site actually know about SEO? Do they even understand the importance of basics – like how title lengths and what should be included within them? What tactics are being used in the optimization of your site? Do you know? When the future of your small business is at stake, it is better to be safe than sorry.

Are You Already the Victim of an SEO Scam?

An SEO audit can help you learn more about how well your site has been optimized and whether or not your SEO firm even understands the basics of on-page SEO. There is a lot more to SEO than the on-page basics – but I can all but guarantee that if they don’t take the time to do the basics, they likely know little or nothing about any of the many other aspects of SEO either. There are no super secret, proprietary or magic tactics that any one company has exclusive access to that can guarantee top rankings in the search engines. There are, however, questionable tactics – such as participating in link farms and purchasing links – that can be used to manipulate the search engines’ algorithms. Those tactics will ultimately result in a domain being banned from the search engines altogether. Many a small business website has suffered that fate due to the negligence and malicious intent of SEO charlatans. Don’t let that happen to you.

If the success of your small business depends upon potential customers finding your site in the search results, nothing is more important than finding a reputable company or individual to optimize your site. The tactics and strategies employed by your SEO can do more harm than good if Google’s Webmaster Guidelines are being violated. And SEO audit can help you to identify these issues before your site is penalized. Even if there is no risk of a ban, simply understanding where your existing site falls short and incorporating SEO best practices can help your site perform better in the organic search results and bring a lot more visitors to your small business website – often resulting in higher sales and greater profits.

No related posts.

For a limited time, save 50% on my already insanely affordable small business website design service. Or learn more about SEO audit and keyword research services.The post, Can SEO Audits Help Small Business Websites?, originated on SEOAly and may not be republished or reproduced without my written permission.

Calling it a “penalty” vs. a “filter” is nothing more than semantics.  Stating that there is no such thing as a “duplicate content penalty” is Google’s feeble attempt to make it seem as though they aren’t unfairly penalizing individual URLs in their self-appointed role policing the Internet.  The fact of the matter is that it doesn’t matter whether a page suffers from an actual “penalty” or not.  If it is “filtered out” of the results for having content that is too similar to another page already listed in the index, does it really matter if it’s technically referred to as a “penalty” or a “filter”?  The ultimate result is the same – people will be able to more easily find one page than another.  Period.

I completely understand Google’s goal in eliminating duplicate content from their search results.  Imagine what SERPs would look like, taking into consideration the number of cookie-cutter, affiliate websites in existence today, if duplicate content weren’t factored into a site’s ranking?  Part of any search engine’s goal, Google included, is to provide its users with relevant and unique information.  If searching for the term “weight loss supplements” resulted 100 identical Herbalife sites, each with a different URL and the exact same information, how reliable would you believe those results to be?  There is a reason duplicate content is frowned upon…and it should be.

It appears that Google, at least in this latest official post, is referring specifically to inadvertent and non-malicious duplicate content within a given site.  I have suspected for some time that this sort of duplicate content has a low level of impact on a site’s ranking.  Think, for example, about the number of WordPress sites that rank highly for competitive search terms.  Many of those sites contain sidebars that are identical on every page.  If that sort of duplicate content were penalized…or, uh…excuse me, if that sort of duplicate content were to trigger Google’s “filters”, that would likely have a negative impact on the ranking of each page.  That hasn’t been my experience.

What about duplicate content from other sites (i.e. scraped content)?  How does Google determine whether or not a site that scrapes content is malicious?  In my opinion, stealing my intellectual property and regurgitating it on your own site as if you created it IS malicious under any circumstances and should be penalized accordingly.  Google apparently doesn’t agree, as illustrated by a number of documented experiences with scraper sites outranking the original source due in large part to having a higher PR than the site where the information was originally published.

Google doesn’t do as good a job at this as they’d like to believe.  Many a webmaster, SEO and search marketing guru has weighed in on the issue and the consensus, at least from what I’ve read, is pretty clear:  duplicate content, regardless of its source, can have a negative impact on ranking and DON’T LET GOOGLE FIGURE STUFF OUT ON THEIR OWN!  These posts seem to reiterate that it is important to put forth a modicum of effort to address what is within your control when it comes to the issue of duplicate content within your own site:

http://searchengineland.com/080915-121927.php
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-pagerank-play-doh/5504/
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/
http://www.sugarrae.com/be-a-normalizer-a-c14n-exterminator/
http://janeandrobot.com/post/canonical-url-canonicalization-domain.aspx
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/canonicalization-update/

I mean, seriously – are all of these experts full of crap?  Matt Cutts included?  I’d venture to say that they’re not…and preventing duplicate content issues from occuring in the first place is likely the best option for anyone concerned about driving traffic to a site via Google’s organic search results.  As for duplicate content from another site…I think we all know there is little, if anything, that can truly be done about that and we have no choice but to leave it to Google to sort out those issues on their own.

Google likes to toot their own horn and proclaim that they’ve “got it covered”, but the fact of the matter is that the more you leave to Google’s bots to “figure out” the more time must be spent doing so…meaning greater resources and server load.  Why?  Why not just make things as clean and simple as possible?  Does this recent clarification by Google mean that we should no longer concern ourselves with resolving a site’s canonical homepage issues?  Does it mean that it’s no longer necessary to restrict bot access to printer friendly versions of pages?  Does it mean that multiple URLs resolving with the same content will be ignored, but have no negative impact on the ranking of the preferred URL?  No…I don’t think their claim to have a handle on duplicate content issues means any of that.

What it does mean is that Google is, as always, making every effort to improve the experience for its users – with or without consideration for the impact to webmasters.  They will likely always error on the side of caution when it comes to preventing SPAM and other malicious activity within search results.  To a certain extent, that is for the good of all…provided that Google recognizes the disconnect between what they claim to be true vs. the real-world experiences of many SEOs in dealing with duplicate content issues to this point.

If duplicate content wasn’t factored into ranking, the SERPs would be dominated by a large number of identical affiliate sites and little else in some queries.  “Penalty” or not, there is a definitive reason that a search for “Herbalife” doesn’t result in finding Herbalife’s thousands of identical, cookie-cutter affiliate websites…and I believe at least part of that reason to be duplicate content.  Don’t piss on my leg and then tell me it’s raining, Google!  Give me a break!

See what others within the industry are saying on this issue at Search Engine Roundtable and Sphinn.

Related posts:

1. Canonical URL Issues and Link Equity

For a limited time, save 50% on my already insanely affordable small business website design service. Or learn more about SEO audit and keyword research services.The post, Duplicate Content – Did Google Do A 180?, originated on SEOAly and may not be republished or reproduced without my written permission.

I officially started this test on 09/24, using Rank Checker to run an initial analysis.  Check out the results, should you so desire.  At the time the report was run, the site had one <h1> located within the header.  All other paragraph headings were <h6> and that had been the case for several weeks prior to beginning the “test”.

After running Rank Checker, I adjusted the headings on the site’s home page to include the <h1> in the header (unchanged), remaining paragraph headings were adjusted to include <h2> and <h3>, rather than <h6> as before.  I used CSS to maintain an appropriate font size, style and color within the content of the page.  No other changes were made to the page content and/or site structure.

I will be interested to see if headings have any impact on the ranking of the homepage whatsoever.  Some still believe that headings have an impact on ranking, but some believe headings to be an antiquated aspect of on-site SEO.  Having used an established and indexed domain, as well as a page with content that is relatively static, should ultimately offer some insight as to whether or not headings play into the ranking of a page.

In the meantime, I welcome anyone with similar documented testing on the use of heading tags to share your experiences here!  I’d like to get more feedback on this issue, as there appears to be a great deal of confusion and/or disagreement on the potential impact of headings among search marketing experts these days!

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1. How Important Are Headings These Days?

For a limited time, save 50% on my already insanely affordable small business website design service. Or learn more about SEO audit and keyword research services.The post, The Jury Is Still Out On Headings…, originated on SEOAly and may not be republished or reproduced without my written permission.

At that time, it was my understanding that NOSNIPPET would allow me to better control what appears as the description within Google’s SERPs.  I assumed Google would automatically default back to the description META tag itself.  I was wrong.  Wrong…wrong…wrong.  What NOSNIPPET caused Google to do in my case was to show no description of the page at all – opting instead only to show the page title.  Upon realizing this (on August 15th…shortly before writing the original post) I promptly removed all NOSNIPPET arguments from all pages.  Testing…isn’t that we we SEOs do?  I guess that’s what they mean by “trial & error”.  ;)

Here is the result of my having removed the NOSNIPPET argument from my robots META tag:

As you can see, the pages are now appearing with the appropriate descriptions as they should have been initially.  And as they likely would have been  if I’d just left it alone in the first place.  My goal to begin with was to control something that hadn’t even become a problem.  I’ve always been the type to attempt to anticipate a problem and prevent it from occurring…I’m very proactive in nature.  At least in this case, my proactivity caused a problem that may never have occurred in the first place.  Lesson learned.

It was important that I test the NOSNIPPET argument at some point, but I likely should have done a bit more research on it’s original intent prior to doing so.  Now that I know what it does, or at least what it did in this case, I can’t imagine a reason for wanting to use it.  I can’t think of a page worth listing in the index that wouldn’t benefit from having a corresponding description.  Why would anyone want a page listed in the index without a description?  And if there is no ultimate goal of increasing click-through rates, why not just NOINDEX the page and keep it out of the SERPs altogether.

I’d love to get some feedback on the legitimate use of NOSNIPPET and any thoughts on the logic behind having a page listed in the SERPs with just a title and no description!  Did I mention that I have removed the nofollow commands from my post comments?  To dissuade spammers, you do have a leave a certain number of comments before the NOFOLLOW is removed…but it is a low number and I know you’ll all understand.  :)

Please feel free to discuss away!  ;)

Related posts:

1. Unexpected Results Using NOSNIPPET

For a limited time, save 50% on my already insanely affordable small business website design service. Or learn more about SEO audit and keyword research services.The post, Final Results of NOSNIPPET Testing, originated on SEOAly and may not be republished or reproduced without my written permission.

Todd Friesen (a.k.a. Oilman) has since informed me that the nosnippet argument instructs Google not to show a description in the SERPs at all…and that appears to be confirmed by at least some of the results above.  It doesn’t, however, explain why some pages/posts appear with the META description and others appear with nothing at all, despite all pages/posts having included the nosnippet argument when they were indexed.

I have since removed all of the nosnippet arguments from all pages of SEOAly to see how long it takes Google to update the info in their index.  I will also be interested to see if they elect to use the description META tags I have created for each page/post or simply choose their own random text to display.  Equally confusing is the fact that ALL pages of SEOAly previously included the nosnippet tag…yet, as you can see in the image above, some results DO include descriptions – and the text is clearly what is included within the description META tags themselves.  A little consistency…that’s all I ask, Google!

On the flip side, before fully understanding the apparent outcome of using a nosnippet tag, I also decided to use it for our Welcome Home Pet Sitting website.  I hoped it would help me better control the information included in the SERPs and thereby increase the click through rates to our site.  As illustrated by the image below, the results of using nosnippet on that site weren’t exactly what I had anticipated…the results are also measurably different than what has occurred with SEOAly.  Nonetheless, nosnippet did function as I believed it would for the other static pages of the site, allowing me to achieve the goal of having a modicum of control over what potential clients learn about us solely from SERPs.

As you can see, despite the use of the nosnippet argument on the home page, Google elected to generate the SERP description for that page automatically based on the page text – much to my dismay!  The second result in the image above, one of two blog articles I have written for that site, shows no description at all.  The second blog entry (result 7 above) shows the actual META description of the post, as do the rest of the static pages of the site – all of which included the nosnippet argument when they were indexed.  Those results are what led me to believe that my theory regarding a nosnippet argument resulting in Google defaulting to the META description to be correct.  It now appears my theory clearly wasn’t correct.  I now don’t have a clue why anyone would want to use nosnippet at all, if the intended result is having no description included in the SERPs…

Prior to my incorporating the nosnippet argument into Welcome Home’s pages, Google was randomly generating the description for all pages of the site, despite the existence of a unique description META tag on each page.  That is what prompted me to test the use of nosnippet in the first place.  Initially I got the results I expected – Google replaced the randomly generated SERP descriptions with the text included within the description META tag itself – they did NOT eliminate the SERP description altogether.  “Sweet…”, I thought…”theory confirmed”.  Uh, yeah…not so much, it appears.  I’ve also since removed the nosnippet tag from Welcome Home’s site to see how things shake out without it.

Despite the issues I’m trying to resolve in fully understanding the purpose of the nosnippet argument, BIG kudos to Danny at SEOmoz for including that on his SEO Cheat Sheet.

Related posts:

1. Final Results of NOSNIPPET Testing

For a limited time, save 50% on my already insanely affordable small business website design service. Or learn more about SEO audit and keyword research services.The post, Unexpected Results Using NOSNIPPET, originated on SEOAly and may not be republished or reproduced without my written permission.