Pleasanton Web Design

Or should I say, “Google breaks local business listings.” I noticed a major change last week, with the number one spot in local business listings of the moderately competetive keyphrase “bay area web design” being taken by a company that looked to be defunct and was not taking on new clients.

When I checked yesterday, I was presented with this bizarre scene:

The “Digg” result is apparently a laundromat categorized under web design:

Could the engineers at Google actually be that inept? Or is it something else?

When Bing launched last summer, I noted how horrible their local business listings were. A search for “Pleasanton Web Design” resulted in not one business located in Pleasanton, and only one in the (925) area code. Now, almost 3 months later, there has been no improvement, and my local business listing is still marked as “Pending.” I also noted that Bing had sponsored results located prominently in the failed local business search area. Let’s face it – sponsored listings are search engine’s bread and butter, and is it really so much of a stretch to think the would throw local businesses to the wolves in order to get more clicks on their sponsored results? The typical searcher doesn’t know a sponsored result from a natural result so most people don’t notice. Maybe they will get a little frustrated, but Bing has shown significant growth after its launch, so maybe they are copying their model of short-term profit before quality. Or maybe Google’s destruction of their local business listings was purely an accident and will be fixed soon. Only time will tell.

Search leaders Google and Bing have reached and agreement with Twitter to include “tweets” in their search results. “Tweets” are the short messages that are generated by the numerous Twitter users. This new “real time” search component is aimed at getting current information, like news, sports and events, in the search results immediately.

At this moment it is unclear how Twitter will be integrated into the results of these two search giants. If you actually use Twitter, you are aware of the potiential for garbage (spam or otherwise) that the service can produce. The way to control this, as a user, is to limit the people you are following to only trusted friends. It’s a good bet that Google and Bing will do the same, and that only the tweets of prominent businesses or trusted experts will be included in this new real-time search component. After all, Google uses this model to an increasing extent in their standard natural search results.

So if you are small business or individual, don’t get too excited about your tweets showing up on Google or Bing just yet. It may not be happening.

These may seem obvious, but I have seen them all!

1. Your concept is not unique. Too many would-be entrepeneurs see a successful online business and think “If they can do it why can’t I?” Well, there are probably a lot of reasons, not the least of which is their headstart in the market. Are you prepared to outspend an established business in marketing?

2. Your concept has limited appeal. Such a small number of people would be interested in your product or service, that cost of marketing to those people would put your project in the red.

3. Your target audience doesn’t have money. Marketing to a segment of the population that is frugal or has limited spending power means little or no money for you.

4. Your product or service is available elsewhere for free. Even if it’s a little better, free will always win.

5. Your concept is so unique that people won’t know to search for it. In this case you’ll need to build demand and educate the world about your product or service. Certainly possible if you have a significant budget set aside to do so.

Microsoft Windows Internet Explorer 8 was released a few months ago, and since then my automatic updates have been bugging me to install it. In fact I did intall it on one of my machines when it first came out. I do web design and development, and in order to do cross-browser testing I have a number of machines with a wide variety of browsers and versions of those browsers installed. With the possible exception of Netscape 7 for the Mac, I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a buggy browser. Here are some of the problems I’ve had:
1. Frequent crashes
2. Many popular websites not functioning or displaying correctly (there is a compatability mode, so maybe I should have had that enabled all of the time).
3. Inconsistent cookie handling.
4. Frequently incomplete downloads. More often than not, when downloading files to my computer using Internet Explorer 8, the downloaded file would be incomplete and unusable.

On the positive side, IE8 does appear to comply with css standards better than any other microsoft browser to date. I will ONLY be using Internet Explorer 8 for cross-browser testing. It’s not ready for the big time. Add it to the list of microsoft problem products like Windows Vista and XBOX 360. Only a monopoly can get away with putting out such junk on a huge scale.

I ran aross this problem with the way Internet Explore 7 (IE7) handles the background-position css property, and thought I’d post it just in case I could save someone some time. I was working on a layout, and it looked great in IE8, Firefox 2, Firefox 3 & Google Chrome 2. When viewed in IE7, however, the background-position of one of the elements was off.

After a bit of experimentation, as is a normal part of cross-browser testing with Microsoft Internet Exploder, I narrowed down the problem to the fact that I had overflow hidden for this particular element. All other browsers used the declared dimensions of the element to position the background. The problem is that there was some overflow, and all browsers but IE7 properly ignored it. IE7 used the dimensions including the overflow to determine the background-position.

In this situation I was able to size the element in such a way to eliminate the possibility of overflow, and then was able to remove the overflow:hidden declaration.

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:

This is an intesting glitch in Adwords I just experienced when testing an ad I have running. The search for “Bay Area Web Design” results in a mix of swimming pool ads, then appropriate ads for web design. I wonder how often this glitch occurs, and how many bad clicks are charged because of it?

I manage clients’ search engine promotion on a regular basis, and every once in a while see some natural clicks in Google Analytics from a search engine called “Search.” I had assumed that “Search” was “Search.com.” Since the traffic from “Search” was very minimal, there was never a need to dig any deeper into the subject.

This month was different. In analyzing the data for one of my clients, I saw a spike in hits from “Search” for one of their important keyphrases. A check “Search.com” showed no position that warranted the traffic for that keyword. A little bit of research revealed that other webmasters were seeing the same thing and asking the same question. What is the “Search” search engine in Google Analytics. Some evidence pointed to http://search.ovguide.com, which is a video search engine that has been gaining popularity.

Sure enough, a search using my client’s keyphrase put them right at the top of the search, however ONLY with a sponsored “Adwords” result. So it looks like Analytics was counting Adwords clicks as natural clicks. Mystery solved, however confirmation is still required from Google. I bumped an existing thread on the Google Analytics forum on the subject. The thread was started a month and a half ago, but still no reply.

I received a big traffic spike a couple of days ago, and my logs say 94 unique visits came directly from a network named Kintiskton LLC. Obviously it is some kind of spider. Upon further research, it appears to be a company looking for trademark infringement. Unfortunately their excessive crawling is a nuisance for those of us who use our traffic data. Another blogger posted this suggestion – block the IP addresses of the Kintiskton spider using your .htaccess file like so:

Deny from 65.208.151.112/29

Sounds like a plan. I’ll see if it works to keep these pests away.

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.

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