Pleasanton Web Design

Google has recently announced 40 updates to it’s search functionality that are supposed to improve the quality of searches and provide added value to searchers. Anyone who has followed Google’s updates for any length of time is aware that the real reason behind updates is generally to make more money for Google. If improving quality and adding value for searchers happens as a serendipitous side effect, enjoy!

Over the next 40 days I’ll try to dig into each announced change and highlight the most salient aspects from the perspective of a small to medium size business trying to get some traffic to their website through organic search.

#1: More coverage for related searches.

[launch codename “Fuzhou”] This launch brings in a new data source to help generate the “Searches related to” section, increasing coverage significantly so the feature will appear for more queries. This section contains search queries that can help you refine what you’re searching for.

The “searches related to” section is found at the bottom of the search engine results page (SERP) and is comprised of a list of eight related search terms. Clicking on a search term will bring you to a new SERP for that term.

• How does this help you as a searcher? If, after reaching the bottom of the results page, you haven’t clicked on anything, Google thinks maybe you used the wrong search term, and is offering some popular terms it feels is related.
• How does this help Google? For one thing, Google has the opportunity to push you to a popular SERP, which in terms of it’s Adwords PPC program, is a more competitive page, with more expensive clicks.
• How does this hurt the small business? People who click on those links won’t be going to Page 2. This becomes increasingly important as Google fills the SERPs with it’s own content and redesigns pages that push more organic results off of Page 1.

With the increase of the number of queries that the “searches related to” will appear on, these effects will obviously become more prevalent. In the end this feature gives Google an opportunity to control where a lost searcher goes, which is primarily good for Google.

Google is at it again. Their “Google Caffeine” infrastructure update was vastly increased their computing power. That update has paved the way for features many of the new features that we’ve seen recently, such as Google Instant.

Today you may notice little magnifying glass icons next the your search results. Clicking on any of these icons will activate “Google Instant Previews.” On clicking you are presented with a thumbnail image of the website in the result, and from then on, rolling over the other results will also display the thumbnail of the associated website.

One positive result of Google Instant Previews, for those of us in the web design business, is that sites that are horribly ugly (a.k.a. not professionally designed) will most likely see a drop-off in traffic. Of course this will depend on the vertical involved, but I think most consumers will use this preview to filter out sites that look cheap, low-quality and unprofessional. Made For Adwords (mfa) sites will hopefully see a significant drop in traffic as will a lot of other spam, which is often easy to identify visually.

Across the board I think people will see less traffic overall, but their bounce rate should also decrease, as searchers no longer need to click in to get a preview of their website.

Another consequence I would expect, would be a lower CTR (click-through rate) for Adwords. Why? 1)Because Adwords ads do not have the Instant Preview feature, they are functionally separated from the natural results more than they have been in the past. In fact many searchers don’t know the difference between sponsored results and natural results, and to them, clicking on one was no different than clicking on the other. Now if the searcher likes the Instant Preview feature, they will be less likely to waste the extra click on the sponsored results that don’t have it. 2) At popular screen resolutions the Instant Previews actually block the Adwords ads.

I must admit I can’t imagine that Google would do anything to decrease the click-through for Adwords. It’s their bread and butter, and almost all of the recent changes they’ve made recently have had the effect of pushing searchers to Adwords, be it by rearranging the real estate, or pushing searchers to more popular key phrases.

What do you think?

I noticed yet another change yesterday in the way Google is displaying results. It’s not the recent algorithm change that has many in the SEO industry complaining that their sites have been trashed. It’s not the also-recent indexing glitch that has yet to be resolved and has many new pages, including blog posts like this one, going unindexed for extended periods. It’s not Google Instant, taking a big bite out of the long-tail. This change has to do with the serving of local maps “places” results outside of the maps box, and over most of the natural results.

One variation of the new format gives a huge amount of real estate to the local results by pulling them out of the maps box and reformatting them to a size that is now twice the height of the natural results. With one or two Adwords results, then two natural results followed by six huge Google Places results, natural result number 3 might as well be on Page 2. If the Google Places ad includes an image, then the searcher is offered a chance to click on it and remain on Google property, and be exposed to another batch of Adwords results. Or in other words another Google income opportunity.

The second variation I am now seeing basically pulls the Places results out of the maps box, without reformatting them, but includes 3 Adwords results at the top and zero natural results before the Places results. With this variation, having the number 1 natural result is not so great anymore. It’s probably more like having a number 5 or 6 position.

For local businesses with results in Places, but not in the natural results, this may be a good thing. For searchers who are looking for a local company, this change may be good as well. Especially with the first variation I noted, the SEO landscape when it comes to natural local search is changing significantly, with Google Places playing an increasingly important role.

This is a blog I created for a law office in the bay area. It’s a WordPress blog with a customized theme.

Attorney Blog Design

Blogs to promote legal practices are getting more and more popular these days. The blog can contain timely analysis of current events relating to the legal practice’s focus, and highlight the attorneys’ expertise regarding the subject. The posts can also link back to the attorney’s main website, adding some SEO benefit.

Myth #2: Search engine optimization alone will result in good ranking in competitive searches.

Doing well in competitive searches primarily depends on off-page factors – factors not directly modifiable by the Webmaster. Why? Because we webmasters are all trying to tweak our pages so they will appear at the top of the SERPs. The “customer” of the search engine is the person performing the search, not the webmaster trying to promote his or her site. Not the business owner looking for leads. Not the spammer trying to make a quick buck. So the search engine engineers look at other factors to determine the quality, importance and authority of the websites they list in their results. What are some of these factors?

Domain Age: How long the domain has been registered by the same entity. Search engines, especially Google, look at this as a trust factor and will give a significant boost to sites that have been around for a while.

Domain Registration Length: Registering your domain for only one year will penalize you as a possible spammer. Domain registration is inexpensive, so register all domains you plan on promoting for at least two years.

Incoming Links: Link juice, link authority, PageRank and backlinks all refer to this important measure. Links pointing to your site are a vote of confidence in your content. The more reputable the site that links to you, the more weight that links carries in the search engine algorithm. Links must be relevent to the context of your site.

Hilltop Authority: In a nutshell, hilltop authority is comparative a measure of how many times a web page is referenced in the initial search engine result set by other web pages in that result set. The rank of the initial result set is based on various factors such as keyword relevance and the other off-page factors previously mentioned. The search engine then reorders the result set giving a boost to the web pages that are linked to by other pages in that result set.

Bay Area SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Services

Web Promotion Articles

It’s pretty common to have the same global navigation items it both the main navigation and footer links of a website. Be careful though, if you are using an SEF URL extension for Joomla 1.5, such as sh404SEF. Having multiple menu items pointing to the same article or ItemId can disable the active menu styling. Instead, use the standard Joomla menu links for the main navigation, and set up the footer navigation with external type menu items, pointing to the sef urls created for the main navigation.

Link exchanges are one way to help with link authority, especially if you have nothing else going for you. Promoting blogs and fresh quality content are preferrable, but some people don’t have time, and reasonable, content targeted link exchanges can at least get you on the map. But you need to be very careful.

1) Beware 3 way link exchanges with junk sites. Generally the person requesting the link will want you to link to their client’s site, but all you get is an incoming link from their throw-away wordpress site that looks like it was put up in 15 minutes. Don’t bother.

2) Ignore link exchange requests that require you to put your link up first. If you do, they won’t. Credible link partners will always place your link first (not necessarily before they contact you though).

3) Ignore link exchanges showing y0u some great PR sites that will link to you, but you have to put up your link first. Hint: those aren’t even their sites! A certain percentage of webmasters will see that high PR and put the link up.

4) Don’t exchange links with any website that is unrelated to yours, i.e. don’t put a viagra link on your golf club ecommerce site.

5) Don’t swap links with any low quality website. The search engines will never count the link anyway, and you will be wasting your time and credibility.

Page titles in Joomla 1.5 are not particularly configurable. I prefer to use an SEO extension, which gives me total control of my page titles and metatags, but I understand the reluctance to rely on a non-commercial extension. Will it be around for Joomla 1.6? Who knows?

The problem with Joomla 1.0.X page titles was that they insisted on putting the site name in the page title. Joomla 1.5 cured that disease, but some people would still like to have their site name in their page title consistently across the site. For that, the perfectly simple solution is the Title Manager extension for Joomla 1.5 (native).

Download, install and activate this plugin, and you will have your Joomla site name, or another text string of your choosing in all page titles. You can even configure whether or not the page title goes before or after the original page title, as well as the seperator character. Here’s a peek at the configuration screen:

1. If I simply build a website, it will show up on page one of the search engine results.
   Many people have no idea how search engines work, and consequently don’t understand how websites get listed,  or consider that it may be difficult to get seen. Search engines are “free” advertising, and there is a lot of competition. If the terms you want to rank for are very unique, then chances are there is little traffic for them. If the terms are not unique, then you have a lot of work ahead of you to beat the competition.
2. Just put the right words in the magical meta tags, and my web site  will show up on top
   Meta tags had a lot more weight when the Internet was young. Then webmasters figured out how to game the search engines, and all that stopped. You still need to know how to use meta tags properly on your web pages, but working on meta tags alone will get you nowhere.
3. It’s relatively easy to get on top of the search engine results if you know a few tricks.
   A lot of SEO companies make promises like “guarantee top ranking in 1 week or your money back.” The catch is that you can’t have top ranking for any term you want. Getting on page one of Google for “Used car with red paint in Hayward California” is easy. Getting on page one for the term “Car” is just not going to happen for a small or even medium size business. If a company makes it sound easy, they either don’t know what they are doing, or they are trying to scam you!
4. If I’m on top of the search results for the terms I have chosen, I’ll be getting traffic and making money.  
   Being on top of the search engine results doesn’t make you money in itself. You need targeted traffic, and to convert that traffic in to sales, or whatever your objective for the web site is. If you rank highly for keywords that aren’t searched for, you won’t get traffic. It may sound obvious, but targeting the right keywords is a step that is often overlooked.
5. Once my website is published to the internet, it should show up in the rankings right away.
   It can take from 2 to 4 weeks for your site to show up in the search engine index, and another 4 to 8 weeks for it to be completely crawled and included in a way that you will achieve optimum results. Also, most major search engines factor in such variables as domain name age, so it may take a matter of years before you can break on to page one for competetive keywords, especially if your competition has been around for a while.
6. Submitting a site to many search engines will result in traffic to my website .
   SEO companies that say they will submit your site to 300 search engines are trying to scam you. There are at most 10 major search engines that will bring all of your traffic.You certainly want to submit your website to them, but if you take other necessary steps, such as obtaining incoming links to your
   site, search engine spiders will find your web site even if you don’t submit. And just because the search engine knows about your site, doesn’t mean that it considers it important enough to rank highly in search results.
7. Pay per click (PPC) is an easy and inexpensive way to get search engine traffic quickly.
   When Google Adwords and it’s copiers came out years ago, it was pretty easy and relatively inexpensive to get good traffic. This is no longer true. It is very easy to waste a lot of money trying to learn how to run a pay per click campaign. It may not even be cost effective to run a PPC in certain niches, and it can be very costly to find that out the hard way.
8. The web designer is the expert, and I don’t need to get involved in the web site design process to obtain great search engine performance.
   Web designers are experts in making your Internet business plan a reality. To do that, we need to know as much as possible about your business, products, and customers. It is not uncommon for different departments in one company to use different terms to refer to the same thing. It is also not uncommon for people inside a company to use different terms than do customers when referring to the same thing. Maybe you offer a service, but it isn’t that profitable and would rather not push it. Not communicating this kind of information to your web designer can result in a website that is less effective than it could be.
9. Search engine optimization is something that can be tacked on after a website is built.
   Web design is more than graphic design for web pages. Even more important than making a website look pretty, is creating an information design that will make the website user friendly. Since search engines should always be considered as a user in the design process, that means making the website search engine friendly. And since the information design is the foundation on which the graphic design is built, it necessarily comes before the graphic design.
10. The website alone determines ranking in the search engines.
    External factors are what makes the difference between page 1 and page 100 of the search results, especially for competetive search terms. Search engines want to serve up the most authoritative and important results to their users. They determine the authority of a website based on the number and quality of relevant links pointing to that site. A related misconception people often make is thinking that linking out to many sites will improve your authority. In reality, linking too much to other sites can bleed the authority from your site and hurt your efforts.

More SEO Articles

SEO Services

Microsoft’s update of LiveSearch launched this weekend. I haven’t read much of the hype, because I expect it is just that – hype. What I have absorbed is that Bing is supposed to be a “Google Killer” and a substantially new way of performing search, with the searcher being kept on the Bing site longer (because it gives them everything they need) so they can be exposed to more advertising.

The first thing I noticed when visiting Bing.com is the nice big graphic on the homepage. There was a little arrow indicating I could change the picture (hot air balloons, how original), but when I clicked on it, I was prompted to install Microsoft SilverLight, with no explanation of what it is.  I happen to be aware that it’s supposed to be a Flash type program that allows rich media experience, but I don’t know that the typical visitor would be. Anyway, I learned my lesson from Windows Vista and my daughter’s X-Box to thouroughly research performance of Microsoft products before exposing my life to them, so, no thanks.

The searches returned results identical to LiveSearch. Focused on keyword relevance rather than link authority. On-page trump off-page factors, so very easy to get good ranking, even for competitive terms. Good news, I guess, if anyone actually starts using Bing.

On Bing.com you are automatically shown local listings, including a little map for certain searches. Not a huge difference from Google, which does that already. Also included are categorized links below the top result, kind of like Google Sitelinks.

A search for Pleasanton Restaurants in Bing resulted in a list of the worst  restaurants in the area. I have a stomach ache just looking at it. The same search on Google results in a list of some very good, and some so-so restaurants. This is probably due to the review feature of Google Local. Bing has reviews listed too, but they are all pulled from Yelp. Bottom line is, as my son would say “FAIL.”

In conclusion, my first reaction to Bing.com is that it is a mediocre attempt to copy Google, so I have a hard time seeing how it is going to be a Google Killer.