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  • SEO Factor Blog

    November 2, 2006 To continue with my recent rants on alt tags, their importance, and proper use, I wanted to further my stance on this subject with Google backing me.

    Google has been, and continues to work on “Google Accessible,” a Google search engine built specifically for the seeing impaired. It will rely a lot on the same ranking procedures as Google, with the exception of the heavy weight given to sites that are easily conveyed to the vision impaired. This can include making the pages easy to read, preventing visual clutter, and yes, proper use of the alt tags.

    On a personal note, this is a great thing for our online community. I really like seeing Google push further for the better of the Internet by accommodating the needs of not only the mass population, but those with disabilities as well.

    Professionally, this, with the impending suit against Target, will only help to validate my argument that this is a subject to be taken, and dealt with seriously.

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  • SEO Factor Blog

    November 3, 2006 I can’t express how many times the ‘SEO / Flash’ subject has come up. It’s a very valid issue, and carries a lot of debate. The problem with Flash is the inability for the SE’s to read the text in the movie or animation. Well, there is a way to make this better.

    Here is an article on the whole subject at SEO Consultants that explains the process in detail, but basically you are recreating the Flash subject matter in a readable HTML form with the help of JavaScript. The first couple of ideas for this is really for the words in the Flash document for navigation or the page content for a bit.

    I was thinking that it would likely be best for those all-Flash sites out there, to completely recreate the whole site in this fashion, with look and feel and all. This method would require a bit of work, but the benefits would be well worth it. SE’s aside, if a visitor gets to your site and can not see the Flash for whatever reason, even small accommodation may not be good enough. It would be nice for them to have the pleasure of a full fledged website to view and take advantage of.

    So check the link out. SEO Factor will be working a few sites in the near future with this method implemented. We will let you know how it goes.

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  • SEO Factor Blog

    November 10, 2006

    It’s Veteran’s Day, so we will be taking thing a little light out of respect and reflection. I’m just gonna give a little week in review on some highlights in the SEO news.

    • Marketing Pilgrim announced Ben Wills as the winner of the article-writing contest that both myself and Aaron took part in. It was a blast and we learned a little about how intriguing titles play a part in conversion.

    • We introduced 2 members of the SEO Factor team, Alysson and Aaron, and showcase some of their writings. Alysson is a very new addition, and will be providing copy for articles and page content in the future for our clients. Aaron has been a long-time friend and stellar SEO Specialist.

    • Rand from SEOMoz gave away an idea for linkbait. Pretty lucrative for an SEO Specialist needing traffic. I would kill for more time to give it a go.

    • Tizag started a forum, and myself, Aaron, and Billy (another team member) began providing a lot of help this week. Billy hangs out a lot in the PHP forum, but Aaron and I both take major parts in the SEO forums. We were recently accused of being the same person because we started on the same day and have the same links in our signature. You would think the difference in grammar usage and intelligence would be obvious….guess not. Just kidding Aaron.

    • As a team, we recently became involved with a website design company, that will be outsourcing the SEO work to us. This should be interesting as most of the clients thus far were very big and proved time consuming. (For what these clients were paying, they got every ounce of our attention). We were moving a little slow for the last couple of weeks, and then this company approaches us. A lot of the details are still in the works, but basically we will be providing a very simple optimization service on a regular basis to these customers.

    All in all it was a fun week. I was really pleased to shed a little more light on the members of SEO Factor, and plan to continue this in the future. The potential for a different style of customer relations also has us very intrigued and excited. I wish you all a very happy and safe weekend.

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  • SEO Factor Blog

    November 22, 2006 In light of the coming holiday, I thought it would be fun to show some of the similarities between SEO and cooking a turkey. 1. You usually wait until it’s crunch time to get started, then run around frantically getting all your priorities and methods in place. 2. You spend more time online reading about what to do than actually implementing. 3. There is an hour-long debate about whether you should be stuffing it or not. 4. You put in an immense amount of work, then have to sit and wait for…..evverrrrr. 5. Because you are too impatient, you end up hurting your progress because every ten minutes you are in there poking around instead of letting it do what has to be done. 6. There are usually too many people involved, and kind words are not usually the result. Well, that’s about all I can come up with right now. It’s gonna be another light week again ( I know I said that last week, but it’s getting busier. I promise more.) I wish everyone a safe and happy Thanksgiving. In tradition of this particular holiday, I want to share my thanks to all my friends and loved ones that help SEO Factor along. Together we are creating something that can prove bring a lot of happiness to us. There is no way I would be able to do any of it alone. So thank you all.

    Later guys (and girls).

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  • SEO Factor Blog

    November 16, 2006 Yahoo! Google, and MSN will agree on the Sitemap protocol previously supported by Google alone. We all know what a sitemap is, and how it helps your site getting indexed. If not read here. The protocol is basically an XML file uploaded to your root directory, mapping your site and giving a little information on how often it changes, when it was last updated, etc. Though it will not improve rankings in a search engines, it will help with the search engine’s attempt at crawling your site, thus increasing it’s index potential.

    From sitemaps.org, the site released by all of the search engines:

    “Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

    Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata. Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.”

    This marks the second time that the three big guys teamed up for a common, and greater benefit to the online community. The first was with the recognizing of the ‘nofollow’ tag.

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  • SEO Factor Blog

    November 9, 2006 In continuing introductions to the SEO Factor team, we will showcase Aaron Smith. He is versed in SEO, but handles a lot of the logic and landing page layout for optimal marketing and conversion for us. I am the SEO Specialist, he is the layout guy….we fight a lot. Alysson is the writer, we are the nerds, so please don’t hold the very poor grammar against him. 🙂

    Aaron Says..

    By Aaron Smith Let’s face facts our customers only care about SEO if it brings them business. There are many times that we SEO’s get hung up on search engine position and the ensuing traffic that should generate from a top spot. This is all fine and good and is great for our own personal satisfaction but what does position and traffic really do for our clients? The answer to this question is simply, absolutely nothing. I have worked on many sites that I was able to get listed in some really choice positions in several large search engines. This position also generated quite a bit of traffic for each one of these sites day in and day out. The only problem with this comes with the statement “If I have all of these hits, then why doesn’t anyone buy from me?” This is the point that I had a revelation; SEO doesn’t mean squadoosh without appropriate marketing strategies being implemented on the site. There are a few important things that we forget when going about our SEO’ing on a client’s site. We forget that if the site is not appealing then their clients are not going to click to buy. We need to use a little psychology when helping a client out. Don’t be afraid to do a little research about the specific type of business that you are trying to promote. (other than just keyword research) I do this by asking myself a few questions. 1. What colors drive the behaviors that this business needs? What I mean is red incites passion, and blue drives calmness, green sparks a thought of money so what does this business need to happen. A particular color scheme will really help drive the point of the site home. 2. Have I made full use of a call to action in the Title? I have found that the greatest response for a site is if the site title is set up as a call to action. If I can spark the interest of a potential client from the search engine content then I can definitely get them interested in the home page content. 3. Does this business need products up front or would they benefit from a more detailed description of their service? Many business’ need to have some products right up front to drive a customer to an order section of the site, while other business’ need to properly describe their service to merely peak the interest of the reader. These basic questions provide the opportunity to really focus concentrated efforts on conversion AND SEO at the same time. Let’s be honest our customer’s don’t really care about how many hits they are getting. They may ask about hits because it’s what we have trained them to ask, but the real issue is “HOW MANY CUSTOMER’S ARE BUYING FROM ME?” This is why focusing SEO in a way that also touches customer conversion or marketing will ensure that your customer will end up with a solid position in search engines and will be pleased with the amount of contact that they receive from their site. Once this is out of the way then I can start my normal process for SEO. Now, I know that some people may think that some of this is antiquated or more of the same but it does work none the less. I work the content to ensure that I have enough keyword saturation (and no I don’t mean blast the page with keywords). Starting the content then leads me in to Alt Tags, Text Links, Reciprocal Links, and the same old stuff that we do day in and day out. To be honest I’m not trying to re-invent the wheel, I am only trying to make sure that each and every customer becomes successful on the Internet and I think that many times we lose sight of that fact. Now I’m not saying that we need to all only focus on doing this or guarantee a certain amount of conversion for a customer, but what I am saying is that by improving a customer’s conversion rate we are simplifying the daily conversation, “You have blah, blah, blah, number of hits and that is great!”

    At the end of the day, position in a Search Engine takes a back seat in our customers mind as long as we can bring them a response from their site.

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  • SEO Factor Blog

    November 3, 2006 I often speak of the importance of content on a site for SEO. In these talks, the question of placing a certain term on a site a certain amount of times to prove relevancy comes up. This usually sparks in interesting conversation that I will share here…

    On-Page-Optimization. First things first. The idea of optimizing a website is taken to levels that it shouldn’t necessarily go. When I say to someone “I will optimize your site,” I don’t mean to improve the rankings in the search engines, I mean to help improve crawlability (I think I just made up a word) and show the search engines what the site is about effectively. This is all in an attempt to achieve better “relevance” than the other sites in competition. If your site starts to seem as if you are doing something solely for the search engines to rank you higher, they will not. Search engines are in competition with each other to pull up the most relevant results. So a site should be created with the customer or visitor in mind, not the search engines. So, in optimizing a site, we don’t want to do it for the benefit of the search engines, we want to do it for our customers and make it appropriate for the search engines.

    Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). In an ever growing struggle to bring “relevant” results, search engines (read Google) are making use of a technology known as Latent Semantic Indexing. This means that an algorithm will find sites that deal in the most relevant subject matter, even if certain terms don’t appear on the page. For example:

    • In an AP news wire database, a search for Saddam Hussein returns articles on the Gulf War, UN sanctions, the oil embargo, and documents on Iraq that do not contain the Iraqi president’s name at all.
    • Looking for articles about Tiger Woods in the same database brings up many stories about the golfer, followed by articles about major golf tournaments that don’t mention his name. Constraining the search to days when no articles were written about Tiger Woods still brings up stories about golf tournaments and well-known players.
    • In an image database that uses LSI indexing, a search on Normandy invasion shows images of the Bayeux tapestry – the famous tapestry depicting the Norman invasion of England in 1066, the town of Bayeux, followed by photographs of the English invasion of Normandy in 1944.

      • – Insert from www.knowledgesearch.org**

      So this means that a site doesn’t really need to have a term a certain amount of times on a site to appear in a search result. You just have to be the most “relevant.” This is obviously not the end all to optimization. There are still a great number of factors involved, but keep this in mind when thinking of the question, “how many times should I put ‘keyword’ on my site?” The answer is, speak on the subject, make the content relevant, and create the site for the consumer.

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  • SEO Factor Blog

    October 9, 2006 Sitemaps are becoming ever important to a website’s success. Generally speaking, a sitemap is just that, a map of your site. Today I will shed a bit of light on what a sitemap is for, and what it should include. At a minimum, your sitemap should link to ever major page or section on your site, but preferably an all inclusive link list. This can get quite large, and a page with too many links can make a search engine crawler waiver just a bit, so keep the sitemap to a maximum of about 150 links. It serves 2 purposes really. One, for those surfers that prefer to navigate your site from one page. And two, recently really, for a search engine to better crawl your site. The larger your site gets, the more cumbersome the flow of navigation can become. If you have thousands of pages, it’s hard for a visitor to get to a specific page from the home page. The web savvy surfer knows to look for a sitemap link, so as to browse for the proper section he or she may be looking for. For ease of use, there should be link to the sitemap on every page of your site.

    When a crawler gets to your sitemap, it has a very easy time of getting to the other pages. So again, it’s best to have a link to every page on your sitemap. You will also want to make sure that the sitemap is crawler friendly in regards to simple code and preventing the robots.txt file from stopping the crawler. Google helps in a very cool fashion, by providing their own Google Sitemap. This is a neat tool that not only creates a sitemap, but will also allow for Google to give an amount of feedback clueing you in on guidelines that may not be met by your site. This will help in understanding why a page may not be indexed and sometimes ranking. It does require a bit of finesse as the sitemap tool is an XML based product, so try to be careful if you’re not experienced. In respect to coding as a whole, it’s really pretty simple, and the manual makes it almost dummy proof.

    You don’t need to have Google’s Sitemap if you don’t feel up to it. Just as long as you have a page dedicated to being a sitemap, you can submit that to the se’s and be OK. Just keep with Google’s, Yahoo!’s, and MSN’s guidelines during the creation, and be sure to name the page sitemap.html. If you do decide to go with the Google Sitemap, you can visit their official blog and group for specific help.

    A small disclaimer if I may. Having a good sitemap does not mean that you will rank higher. It only means that a search engine can crawl easier, and makes submissions a little quicker. There is a small debate on this, but no proof to show a difference.

    If you have any questions, same as always. Let me know.

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  • SEO Factor Blog

    December 1, 2006 Well, I’m back from vacation and getting back into the swing of things. Over the large feast, a friend of the family asked about link popularity and what the best method of gaining quality links would be. I offered the advice of link baiting. Link baiting is the method of providing relevant and “buzz worthy” content or subject matter on your site, inducing the desire of other site owners to link to you without your request. This will look a lot more natural to Google than the sudden spike in IBL’s due to submitting to hundreds of directories in a day.

    Education

    Ahhh….yet another reason that quality text is important. Having a nice, attention grabbing text is a great way to get others to link to you. Creating something informative and/or useful in writing can help. Articles on you subject matter, giving tricks of the trade or the like will usually yield link bait.

    Negative PR

    Something we are starting to see a lot of is purposefully creating a controversial statement in hopes of link baiting. The problem I have with this method is the idea that it won’t always give you the traffic you want. Also, playing with negative PR is a scary thing on the Internet. A blog that gets more traffic than you will likely post something that will have a lot more staying power in the search engines, resulting in a bad online reputation when someone searches for the company name. Also, once the buzz stops and passes, where will that leave your link popularity.

    Free Tools

    My favorite, and one of the best ways to link bait is to offer a free tool on your site that helps others in your community. This blog often links to neat new tools we find.

    In the end, link baiting was the original way of gaining link popularity, and though it has gone through a few changes in definition and methodology, it’s coming back again. These are just a few and most popular of the methods, and people are coming up with new and inventive ways almost every day.

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  • SEO Factor Blog

    February 6, 2007 Ok, so we all know how important IBL’s are for ranking in Google. I’ve gone over the importance and what factors are taken into account, but one of the most frustrating thing was the idea that you never really had an idea at how many links you were getting credit for from Google. The ‘link:site’ operator was never all inclusive because of the metric’s weight in determining your ranking. Well….Google will now let you, and only you, see this information. So long as you can prove you own the site with Google’s ‘Webmaster Tools.’

    More here.

    This is incredible news. This should help us all understand a bit more on how Google determines where you stand. But also keep in mind that this is new, and as such, will not be void of inconsistencies or errors. But again, and excellent step forward in understanding how the Big G works.

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