SEO Blog

Advice on Mobile SEM and SEO from Inside Google

Google Office in Atlanta

Google invited 150 search marketing professionals along with Bing, Yahoo, Razorfish and 360i into the Atlanta Google office for a mobile search marketing event.  Each of the major search engines sat side by side along with Razorfish to speak on upcoming trends in mobile search and to answer our questions from search engine optimization consultants, internet marketing companies, web designers, creative agencies and any company providing SEM and SEO services among the 150 first people to make it through the door in Atlanta.

I was one of those 150 people.

The event was simulcast from Google Atlanta to offices in New York and Boston.  Limited audiences were invited to attend the event in New York and Boston.  A live feed from each office was projected on the wall in the Atlanta office alongside the speaker presentation screen.  The speakers responded to questions from all three locations.

The mobile search marketing speaker panel consisted of:

• Bing: Director of Bing Mobile Product Management – Andy Chu
• Yahoo: Senior Director, Mobile Sales Strategies – Paul Cushman
• Google: Senior Account Executive (Mobile Ads Team) – Elliott Nix
• Razorfish: VP of Mobile – Paul Gelb

I showed up a little early to make sure I had plenty of time to explore the Google office.  The office in Atlanta is a satellite office for Google, and as you might imagine looks like a small version of the California office descriptions, decorated with big red, yellow, green and blue circles in the carpet, carved into the walls, in the ceiling and repeated playfully throughout the decor.

After networking for about an hour with other SEM and SEO agency, marketing and designer SEMPO Atlanta members we settled down for the presentations.  After introductions by various sponsors and SEMPO officials we got to the speaker presentations.  Razorfish went first, followed by Yahoo, Bing, then Google.

Whether intended or not, the reoccurring theme behind was how human behavior drives mobile search. Here’s a synopsis of their presentations. …continute reading this SEO article »

Have you decided to create a blog in addition to your main website?  Is it time for a company blog?

How you setup your blog is crucial for SEO.

1. Where To Install a Blog:
   - Subfolders?
   - Subdomains?
   - Separate Domains?
2. How to Integrate the Blog into the Main Website Architecture
3. Optimize Website Navigation Anchor Text
4. Optimize Blog Categories
5. What to Remove from the Blog

Steps 1 and 2 (concerning blog location and navigation) were discussed in a previous article on the 5 step process to setup your blog for SEO.  As a quick review of these two steps, the strategy for blog SEO is to integrate your blog within your main company website.  Typical blog architecture creates a strong web of interlinking.  Blogs also attract links from other blogs and directories.  The inbound links hit the web-like framework of interlinking and spread authority throughout the blog.  Search engines naturally view a blog as a tightly interlinked section of your website.  That is why, if you want your blog to benefit your main website, it must be actively interlinked.  That means, install it in a sub-folder of your main website, so link authority will count toward the domain, not toward a sub-domain or separate domain.

Step 3 is your first act of optimizing your blog using keywords.  Imagine if you were a s search engine starting at the top level of your website.  The first thing you read is the domain name.  Optimize it.  You might take a quick scan of the text near the top of the homepage, and then go right through the main navigation.  What do each of the links say in the navigation?  What is the file name of each page where they link?  The internet is too big to read every inch of every website, so you pull what information you can from a quick preview.  Using meaningful keywords in the main navigation anchor text and file names is only logical.  And its something every SEO consultant can agree upon.

This concept carries right into the next topic, optimizing blog categories. …continute reading this SEO article »

Change Site Domain Name – Keep the Traffic

I am changing my business name and the website domain name.  How do I keep search engine traffic?  What do I do for search engine optimization so that I don’t throw away my past SEO efforts?  How do I redirect traffic from other websites and marketing to the new website?

If you are in this situation, there are two things to consider:

1. people’s perception of the name change
2. technical aspects of the name change for search engines and internet traffic

Name Change Perception

At the very least, I expect you will inform your current and potential customers and  that the name will be changing before it happens.  For example, I plan to change my business name from GLiD to Blend.  The name change has been long overdue.

People may want to know why and what to expect?  Will services change under the new name?  Is management changing?  For example, GLiD will be changing to Blend.

For GLiD, the core services have evolved from industrial design, to graphic design, to search engine optimization and internet marketing.  GLiD initially was created for Greg Lee Industrial Design.  Keeping the same name, the acronym transitioned to Greg Lee I.D. (for identity) and later to Greg Lee Intelligent Design (encompassing identity, print and web development).  Since 2004, SEO and internet marketing slowly infused deeper into the services while providing extensive graphic design and website development while working in tandem with an influential internet marketer in Charleston, South Carolina.

The internet evolved and GLiD did too.  Learning from experts in internet marketing and SEO, GLiD knowledge base grew.  In January 2009, I moved the GLiD office to Atlanta, a hub for the internet marketing and SEO community.  By January 2010, I began serving as the search engine optimization research and development department for the Atlanta internet marketing firm, Medium Blue.  In summer of 2011, GLiD will transition to Blend, dropping industrial design to completely focus on SEO, website development and graphic design.

During the transition period, www.GLiD.us will be co-branded with banners advertising the name change to Blend.  After the transition to Blend, there will still be prominent messages showing formerly GLiD, to address traffic from old links that promote GLiD. …continute reading this SEO article »

How the Demand Media Content Farm Works

If you are in the SEO business or work with a search engine optimization consultant, you’ve heard about the recent Google algorithm shift known as the Panda Algorithm update, Farmer update, or Content Farm update.

The big break on the story is in an interview between Cutts and Singhal of Google with Wired Magazine.

Here are the major take-aways as of now.

Little has been said about link farms.  The main issue seems to be your content, as apposed to your back links.  Scraper websites are those that automate content by republishing that which is already on other websites.  Content farms generate content with little value in order to capture search traffic.  Take a look at the info graphic about how the Demand Media content farm works [Source: OnlineMBA.com].

This is not a new issue.  Apparently, Google’s technology on how they filter, analyze and make decisions on duplicate content has changed.  As far as white-hat SEO, the rules are still the same.  The penalties just got a bit more serious.

…continute reading this SEO article »

An essential part of SEO is designing your website so that it conforms to standards.

The below table of Microsoft Core fonts is no longer freely available from Microsoft, but these free standard fonts are available here, completely legally thanks to the terms of Microsoft’s font license.

…continute reading this SEO article »

When addressing duplicate content for SEO, the subject inevitably comes to 301 redirects and URL rewrites. However, what do you do when a client owns multiple websites and decides to combine websites into one domain, or eliminate a website domain?  If content is left live on the old domain, it will duplicate the content on the new domain.  Google may think the new domain is scraping content off the old domain and use the Panda filter to penalize the entire new domain.

The usual answer is… 301 redirect the old website to the new website.

But How Exactly?

Here’s the problem that always happens.  They end up redirecting the homepage from the old website to the homepage of the new website.  But what about all the interior pages?  There may be hundreds of back links to interior pages that get completely wasted as soon as the old website is deleted.  If you are hosting on a Microsoft IIs server, you may be limited without installing ISAPI or some other rewrite module. However, if you are hosting on an Apache server, the .htaccess file gives you an extremely flexible means of handling redirects.

…continute reading this SEO article »

Do you create landing pages for your PPC ads?

Do You want to maximize their SEO benefit?

Being raised with a thrifty mindset and borderline hoarding tendencies, I am compelled to use every website asset to further SEO success.  This article will reveal to you:

1. How to know if your landing pages are causing duplicate content for organic search engines
2. How to eliminate duplicate content penalties
3. How to reclaim unused back links
4. Long term strategy to build organic traffic using your paid search landing pages

Are Your Paid Search Landing Pages Causing Duplicate Content Penalties?

A lot of clients don’t realize that their PPC landing pages end up in the search engine index.  If your landing pages have nearly identical content as each other or other pages of your website, they will potentially cause duplicate content penalties without you realizing.  Your website will not completely drop out of the search results, but those individual pages will waste resources (link authority, PageRank, crawl budget) that should go into other areas.  And, Google will remember that your website has useless duplicate pages, which affects your website’s overall profile.  Over the years Google has told us to disallow, redirect and apply canonical links to those pages.  Depending on how you address duplicate pages can hold back your potential for Google PageRank and high search engine rankings.

Check Google for your landing pages by searching…

site:yourwebsite.com/landingpage.php

A lot of times I find duplicate versions of the same landing page in Google or Bing, the only difference being different strings in the URL.  The URL may have some random looking string at the end such as ?src=W4THMJHWWZRP. Because these have different URLs, the search engines assume they are supposed to be different pages. They may have identical content with only slight differences. Unfortunately, search engines are penalizing you for duplicate content in the organic results.  You can turn this around to your advantage!

So the first thing you’re probably wondering is how do these pages find their way into the Google or Bing index?  You don’t have any links to them, they are complete islands, pages hosted on your server with no links from any part of your website.  So how does Google find them?

Easy… someone else landed on the page from your PPC ad and created a link to the page.

Here’s the proof.  Once you find a page in a search index using the “site” search above, check that page for backlinks. Go to Yahoo Site Explorer and enter the URL for the page. Make sure you click “Inlinks” and chose the drop down “Except from this domain”.  Here you will see other websites that link to that landing page.

How to Eliminate Duplicate Content Penalties

Some people would say to use your robots.txt file to disallow search engines from listing those pages in their results.  For a long time, this has been the standard way of addressing duplicate content.  However, there is always the potential for other websites to link to your landing pages.  Even if you don’t see back links in Yahoo Site Explorer, there may still be back links not shown (search engines just refuse to show you everything they know and there’s nothing we can do about it), you need to plan on the possibility of people creating links in the future.  Using the robots.txt to disallow a page with potential back links does not let you take advantage of potential back links.

How to Regain Unused Back Links

Every back link you have is one more that your competitor may not.  …continute reading this SEO article »

If you already have a Google Places page, and your listing appears when you zoom into your location on the Google Map, but how do you get it to rank higher for the initial search?

…continute reading this SEO article »

Almost identical to Google Instant was LiveSearch, created by Yahoo R&D in 2005 and released on its lesser used property AllTheWeb.  Why was this radical search concept not released on Yahoo search?  At the time, Yahoo Search was barely surviving, and decision makers chose not to implement radical ideas in favor of smaller improvements.

See the video demonstration below of Yahoo’s instant search product on AllTheWeb.

It makes me laugh when I see statements like this:

SEO copy software – The Death of Search Engine Optimization

Reciprocal link building became widespread by webmasters and SEOs in the 90′s and continues today.  Some people do it manually one link at a time, while others use automated programs to search prospects, contact them, check for the back link and publish the reciprocal link.  Some internet marketers sell reciprocal link building software while others sell against it. In some cases it will get you penalized by Google.  But in other cases, you can find websites that dominate their targeted keywords whose backlinks are filled with insestual reciprocal links. You may wonder…

• “If I trade links with someone who emailed me with a reciprocal link offer, will it hurt or help me?”
• “Can I use a reciprocal link building program without penalizing my website?”
• “I think its OK if they link to me, but should I link to them?”

…continute reading this SEO article »