Thought for the day….
19. June 2010
Jim Gras
Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass, It’s about learning to dance in the rain!
As we all know, our results are only as good as our plan. One of my mentors, taught me that it’s not what happens that determines the major part of our future, because what happens, happens to us all.
Instead, he taught me the key is what we do about it.
If we start the process of change by developing a plan, doing something different in this next year than we did the previous year, it won’t matter how small those efforts start.
Start doing “different” things with the same set of circumstances – the ones we’ve always had and cannot change – and see what miracles occur.
If we start the miracle process and change ourselves, then everything changes. And here’s what is interesting: the difference between success and failure is so subtle.
Let me explain by giving you my definitions of failure and success.
Here it is: Failure is a few errors in judgment repeated every day. The man says, “Well I didn’t walk around the block today and it didn’t kill me, so it must be okay.”
No, it’s this kind of error in judgment that after six years has him out of breath and panting as he walks from his car to his office. You can’t make those kinds of mistakes; it will end up costing you.
Now, here is my definition of success: A few simple disciplines practiced every day.
Do you see the distinction? A few disciplines. Here’s a little phrase we’ve all heard: “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” And my question to you is, “What if that’s true?” How simple and easy is that plan?
The fact is, when you look at successful people, you will almost always DISCOVER a plan behind their success. They know what they want, they work out a plan that will get them where they want to go, and they work their plan.
It is the foundation for success. We as humans have the unique ability to produce change in our lives; it is through our own conscious choice when we engage in the miracle process of personal development that we are able to transform our nature and our lives.
A Little Inspiration When You Need It :
These quotes tell a different tale, one of survival, endurance and the ability of a willing human spirit to conquer most anything.
Do you have all the traffic and sales you need?
Ever wondered what it would take to get your site on the top of the engines? Want to conquer social media and actually see results? Let a Business Growth Expert at SEO-Specialist-Online.com review your site and prepare a custom proposal. No obligation!
If you prefer to speak with someone right now, please call Jim Gras, Senior SEO Strategist at 800-897-6458
Cookie-cutter SEO won’t get you the results you are looking for. We provide custom SEO solutions.
Simply complete the form and we will send you a custom proposal within 3 business day. Thank you!
WORDPRESS 3.0 RELEASED!!
17. June 2010
Michael Augustine
WordPress 3.0, the thirteenth major release of WordPress and the culmination of half a year of work by 218 contributors , is now available for download (or cialis 20 mg ndc)!
Major new features in this release include the following:
A sexy new WordPress default theme called Twenty Ten!
Move over Legendary WordPress Kubrick Theme! Theme developers have new APIs that allow them to easily implement custom backgrounds, headers, shortlinks, menus (no more file editing), post types, and taxonomies. (Twenty Ten theme shows all of that off.)
MU and WordPress Finally Merge Together!
Developers and network admins will appreciate the long-awaited merge of WordPress MU and WordPress, creating the new multi-site functionality which makes it possible to run one blog or ten million from the same installation.
A lighter Interface with many bug fixes!!
As a user, you will love the new lighter interface, the contextual help on every screen, the 1,217 bug fixes and feature enhancements, bulk updates so you can upgrade 15 plugins at once with a single click.
SEO Specialist Online is a proud user of the WordPress platform. Blogging is essential when it comes to good search engine optimization techniques for your website, and WordPress is no doubt the way to go when getting your website online and acheiving top ranking on Google and many other search engines . The video below gives you an inside look at some of the features in WordPress 3.0. Blogging is alive and well, and the future is now!!!
Do you have all the traffic and sales you need?
Ever wondered what it would take to get your site on the top of the engines? Want to conquer social media and actually see results? Let a Business Growth Expert at SEO-Specialist-Online.com review your site and prepare a custom proposal. No obligation!
If you prefer to speak with someone right now, please call Jim Gras, Senior SEO Strategist at 800-897-6458
Cookie-cutter SEO won’t get you the results you are looking for. We provide custom SEO solutions.
Simply complete the form and we will send you a custom proposal within 3 business day. Thank you!
Google’s “Reasonable Surfer” Patent
14. June 2010
Jim Gras
So What Happens Now?
On May 11, 2010, Google was granted a new patent that basically states that all links on a page do not have to carry (or pass) the same weight.
The concept is that the value a link should pass to a target page will be largely based on the probability that a user would click on it (hat tip to Bill Slawski who wrote a great post deconstructing Google’s reasonable surfer patent).
Some simple examples of how this might work include:
- Links to unrelated content are highly unlikely to be clicked
- Specific types of content, such as “about us” or “privacy” pages, may be more—or less—likely to get clicked, depending on context
- Location of the link on the page (above the fold should get more weight than below the fold)
- Emphasis to make links more prominent, such as changing size or color, should add weight
These are just a few examples, and Bill’s post provides a much more comprehensive list. The question is, how does this affect the way that you look at SEO? Here are some thoughts.
Emphasize your most important links. When you create a new page, or modify an existing one, consider which outbound links on the page you want to pass the most value to. On the home page of the site, these might be links to your bestselling products. Perhaps you have a nice list of these in the right column of a three page layout, and it is currently below the fold on the page. Since these are the products which make the most money for you, consider moving the list to the left or middle columns, and figure out how to get it above the fold.
Leverage image links. For my first controversial idea, imagine the impact on image links. Images are far more likely to get clicked on. Does that mean that image links pass more value than text links, even without the anchor text? Probably not as yet, but it is an intriguing idea..
Use embedded links. Links embedded in the main content of the page are more likely to get clicked than those elsewhere on a page. Remember those key product links I mentioned? In addition to emphasizing them for more visibility when a page is initially displayed, consider integrating one or more of them into the content most likely to be seen by a user when they arrive at your web page.
De-emphasize navigation. It may be that basic global navigation links could pass less value for many reasons, including the fact that people tend to develop “snow blindness” with page elements that are frequently repeated. Navigation links also may be considered to have a lower degree of relevance (for example, a link to your automotive products from your lawn and garden products page).
Forget footers. Footer links will certainly be less likely to pass value. Not only do they have the snow blindness problem, they tend to be way below the fold.
Skip the ads. Anything that may be perceived as an ad, whether or not it is an ad, or is labeled as such, would be likely to be devalued.
Link only to relevant content. While this is not covered by the patent as far as I can see, I’d be willing to conjecture that a page linking to non-relevant documents could be seen as less relevant itself to the original content of the source page. Taken to its extreme, this could mean lower rankings could result from linking to pages that are low in relevance, even if they are not necessarily “bad” pages.”
Reconsider purchased links. Devaluing links to non-relevant content would provide further discouragement for authoritative or trusted sites from selling links. Link buyers will likely see less value from those links on the right rail, or in the footer, and will press harder for in-context, in-content links. Higher quality sites are generally not willing to provide such links.
As a practical matter, processing CSS to understand the details of page layout is a challenging task for Google, or any search engine. Patrick Altoft of Blogstorm argues that Google may use click data from Google Analytics, the Google Toolbar, Google Reader and other sources to evaluate link value.
My own opinion is that Google is surely going to find as many signals as they can to help them understand the importance of a page’s outbound links. If they are using click data as Patrick argues, the users themselves will identify which links are the most important ones. The only underlying requirement is that the page has enough traffic for the click pattern data to be statistically significant. But, of course, pages with material traffic tend to be the most important pages on the web.
The concept of how a reasonable surfer would behave appears to have a lot of merit, and the search engines are investing everything they can in better ranking systems, and ones that reduce the impact of spam. But ultimately, basic usability guidelines still apply. Understanding how a user sees your site and their behavior when they interact with it has always made sense. Now consider the idea that this can influence the ranking of a given page, but also the value of the links it provides to other web page.
Do you have all the traffic and sales you need?
Ever wondered what it would take to get your site on the top of the engines? Want to conquer social media and actually see results? Let a Business Growth Expert at SEO-Specialist-Online.com review your site and prepare a custom proposal. No obligation!
If you prefer to speak with someone right now, please call Jim Gras, Senior SEO Strategist at 800-897-6458
Cookie-cutter SEO won’t get you the results you are looking for. We provide custom SEO solutions.
Simply complete the form and we will send you a custom proposal within 3 business day. Thank you!
Worst SEO Blunders
13. June 2010
Jim Gras
According to Search Engine Land Many consider search engine optimization as a sort of black box. But once the essential features of a search engine optimal website are laid out in a concise list, SEO is not nearly as mystifying.
The Big secret is, “There is No Secret”
Every web site owner wants more traffic and higher rankings in the search engines. In the midst of an SEO campaign, however, it’s easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees. So before you change a single title, you might want to shift your focus to answer some important questions.
So what do I mean by losing sight of the forest for the trees anyway? You’ve probably heard that expression since you were a teenager at least. You may even know that it means focusing on the details to the point that you lose sight of the big picture – and with the amount of detail work that goes into a proper SEO project, that’s easy to do.
The mission of search engines is to supply their visitors with relevant results, so penalizing or banning sites that appear to interfere with that mission is a necessity. Understanding which blunders adversely impact your search engine rankings is a prerequisite to a well-optimized site.
1. Do you use pull-down boxes for navigation? Search engine spiders can’t fill out forms, even short ones with just one pull-down. Thus, they can’t get to the pages that follow. If you’re using pull-downs, make sure there is an alternate means of navigating to those pages that the spiders can use. Note this is not the same as a mouseover menu, where sub-choices show up upon hovering over the main navigation bar; that’s fine if done using CSS (rather than Javascript.)
2. Does your primary navigation require Flash, Java or Javascript? If you rely on search engine spiders executing Flash, Java or Javascript code in order to access links to deeper pages within your site, you’re taking a big risk. The search engines have a limited ability to deal with Flash, Java and Javascript. So the links may not be accessible to the spiders, or the link text may not get associated with the link. Semantically marked up HTML is always the most search engine friendly way to go.
3. Is your site done entirely in Flash or overly graphical with very little textual content? Text is always better than graphics or Flash animations for search engine rankings. Page titles and section headings should be text, not graphics. The main textual content of the page should ideally not be embedded within Flash. If it is, then have an alternative text version within div tags and use SWFObject to determine whether that text is displayed based on whether the visitor has the Flash plugin installed.
4. Is your home page a “splash page” or otherwise content-less? With most webites, as mentioned above, the home page is weighted by the search engines as the most important page on the site (i.e., given the highest PageRank score.) Thus, having no keyword-rich content on your home page is a missed opportunity.
5. Does your site employ frames? Search engines have problems crawling sites that use frames (i.e., where part of the page moves when you scroll but other parts stay stationary.) Google advises not using frames: “Frames tend to cause problems with search engines, bookmarks, emailing links and so on, because frames don’t fit the conceptual model of the Web (every page corresponds to a single URL.) “Furthermore, if a frame does get indexed, searchers clicking through to it from search results will often find an “orphaned page”: a frame without the content it framed, or content without the associated navigation links in the frame it was intended to display with. Often, they will simply find an error page.What about “iFrames”, you ask? iFrames are better than frames for a variety of reasons, but the content within an iframe on a page still won’t be indexed as part of that page’s content.
6. Do the URLs of your pages Include “cgi-bin” or numerous ampersands? As discussed, search engines are leery of dynamically generated pages. That’s because they can lead the search spider into an infinite loop called a “spider trap.” Certain characters (question marks, ampersands, equal signs) and “cgi-bin” in the URL are sure-fire tip-offs to the search engines that the page is dynamic and thus to proceed with caution. If the URLs have long, overly complex “query strings” (the part of the URL after the question mark), with a number of ampersands and equals signs (which signify that there are multiple variables in the query string), then your page is less likely to get included in the search engine’s index.
7. Do the URLs of your pages include session IDs or user IDs? If your answer to this question is yes, then consider this: search engine spiders like Googlebot don’t support cookies, and thus the spider will be assigned a new session ID or user ID on each page on your site that it visits. This is the proverbial “spider trap” waiting to happen. Search engine spiders may just skip over these pages. If such pages do get indexed, there will be multiple copies of the same pages each taking a share of the PageRank score, resulting in PageRank dilution and lowered rankings.If you’re not quite clear on why your PageRank scores will be diluted, think of it this way: Googlebot will find minimal links pointing to the exact version of a page with a particular session ID in its URL.
8. Do you unnecessarily spread your site across multiple domains? This is typically done for load balancing purposes. For example, the links on the JCPenney.com home page point off to www2.jcpenney.com, or www3.jcpenney.com, or www4.jcpenney.com and so on, depending on which server is the least busy. This dilutes PageRank in a way similar to how session IDs in the URL dilute PageRank.
9. Are your title tags the same on all pages? Far too many websites use a single title tag for the entire site. If your site falls into that group, you’re missing out on a lot of search engine traffic. Each page of your site should “sing” for one or several unique keyword themes. That “singing” is stifled when the page’s title tag doesn’t incorporate the particular keyword being targeted.
10. Do you have pop-ups on your site? Most search engines don’t index Javascript-based pop-ups, so the content within the pop-up will not get indexed. If that’s not good enough reason to stop using pop-ups, you should know that people hate them – with a passion. Also consider that untold millions of users have pop-up blockers installed. (The Google Toolbar and Yahoo Companion toolbar are pop-up blockers, too, in case you didn’t know.)
I expect many of you will look at these questions and think that they should be asked well before a site goes live, very early in the design process. That’s probably true. But it’s also true that web sites evolve over time, rather like people. They change, grow, and adapt to conditions in the marketplace. By the time a web site has been up for a couple of years (or even less), it might be a very different creature from what the site owner originally had in mind.
This kind of change is not a bad thing, per se. We all get a certain amount of satisfaction out of growing and tweaking our sites, and then watching what happens. If we’re not looking clearly at what the site is turning into, however, we can’t see what it needs.
Search engine optimization could be a tiring task but with time it sure helps you get better traffic.
Today Google Real-Time Search Changes Everything. Not being where your customer is looking could be costing you their business! Search engines are tightening up the loopholes to manipulate positioning.
So called “doorway” pages, tricks with meta tag/keyword files, etc. no longer are effective. Keyword positioning, along with indexing, is the way to be seen on today’s Internet.
•The vast majority of clicks occur within the top 5 positions on a search page.
• As a rule, the more competitive the business category, the harder it is to attain decent placement. Conversely, the more competitive the business category, the more important placement is to success of the business.
Entrepreneurs and small businesses constantly find themselves looking around asking themselves why they can’t quite seem to find a good fit for what they need from service providers.
People do business with who they like, who they trust and who truly care about their business. In fact, a recent study by US News & World Report revealed that when clients leave their current provider it’s not because of a pricing or product problem, but a “people” problem. People that no longer value their business, or seem indifferent to it. A whopping 68% of them.
• A fractional 14% defected because of a pricing issue followed by 9% who were successfully wooed by a competitor.
• With Google Real-Time Search the playing field has been leveled.
• No longer can you or your competition sit back and think they own their TOP organic Google positions!
To Improve Web Site Search Engine Rankings, it’s SEO Specialist Online for all your search engine optimization needs Why not let us do a Free Website Evaluation for Your Business TODAY!
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