Pleasanton Web Design

Almost a month ago Google removed the keyword referral data for searches made by logged in Google users.  At the time Matt Cutts estimated that the overall effect as a percentage of the overall keyword data would be in the single digits. WRONG! At least for me.

My initial test for the couple of days it had been running when I wrote the first article showed minimal effect, along the lines of Matt Cutts’ statement. However as my weekly reports came in, I found that “(not provided)” was always on top, and was an alarmingly high percentage of the total. So high, in fact, that the data was functionally useless to me. In fact, over the month since the keyword referral data has been removed, the total percentage that is “(not provided)” is 24%.

So, think fondly of the days when Google supplied you useful data that would help you improve your web site promotion efforts and better serve  your business, customers and partners. Google just poked you in the eye!

Hey, maybe NOW you’ll start using Adwords!

There has been some talk in the seo industry about Google PageRank becoming obsolete due to their exclusivity rights to the patent expiring this year. They can renew those rights,  however (not sure why they wouldn’t).  Even if they do, the patent expires completely in 2017, at which time any search engine can start using PageRank.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with PageRank, it was the concept that launched Google into the forefront of the search engine universe. It is the part of the ranking formula that counts links pointing to a website as part of that website’s relevance to the search phrase, as well as sign of that website’s authority on the subject. It made what is linking to a website more important than the content of the website itself, when it comes to ranking in competitive searches.

The thing is, that in the years since PageRank’s invention, the overall algorithm has become so complex, PageRank itself is now only a small piece of the puzzle. Looking at that little green bar is a favorite pastime of seo neophytes, but they soon learn that PageRank obsession is unproductive, and can often be an exercise in wheel spinning. PageRank SchmageRank, I say. I’m tired of hearing about it! As an SEO that needs to get results, PageRank is more a thorn in my side, especially when clients are familiar with it, and fixate on it, sometimes to the expense of the overall promotion campaign.

Ok, this concludes my first and possibly last post from my iPhone. Boy are my thumbs tired!

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.

I have never really understood why web applications, like Drupal, that have the capability of producing search engine friendly (SEF) URLs don’t have them enabled by default. Who doesn’t like SEF Urls?

To Enable SEF URLs in Drupal 6, follow these steps:

1. enable mod rewrite – this can be done through .htaccess or httpd.conf
2. from admin: enable site building>modules>paths
3. enable site configuration>clean urls
4. create aliases site building > url aliases > add aliases

You have to add aliases manually using this process. Perhaps Drupal has, or will have a module that is more automatic in the future. We can only hope (but not hold our breaths)!

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: