Google's Shakeup: To SEO or Not to SEO

Many folks in the SEO circles as well as individual website owners noticed a lot of changes to Google's ranking recently. There talks about the "end of SEO" and how Google essentially put out of business a lot of SEO companies and SEO tool providers. I hear these talks even in the educated Ottawa SEO community.

Well, there are changes for sure! I don't think there is a reason to worry about the "end of SEO" because it is like saying "the end of search". Website owners will always need to optimize their websites for search engines so there will always be SEO work that has to be done on a website. The question is how "secretive" this work can continue to be.

There are many SEO tools that uninformed website owners sign up for and pay $50-90 per month. Well, most SEOs know that you can get the same results free of charge - just need to know where to look. And there were always 4-5 different places where you would go and run your reports.

Well, now, Google Chrome has come up with a web store - and it has everything your soul can desire for SEO and it is all in one place. Hip Hip Hurray!  But of course, those "secretive" SEO tools will probably go our of business, unless they lower their prices significantly or offer something of real value.

We noticed that on-page content matters much more. Google loves words. Lots of them. And it now pays more attention to the word order. In the past, "website design Ottawa" or "Ottawa website design" were almost interchangeable, but not now. Now you have to optimize your copy individually for each.

We also noticed that links from websites and blogs and forums specialized in your area of expertise give very fast results.

Oh well, all this is not new to us, and as a result, not much has changed for us. Our ratings did change, but slightly, we did not experience a serious shake-down.

SEO has been and still remains the three things: content (lots of it), keywords stuffed everywhere, and quality back links from other websites in your field.

Joomla 2.5 Released

It is now Joomla 2.5.1

Our question is - what happened to all the numbers in between version 1.7.5?

We are eager to try this Joomla version, but will be very cautious about using it for large projects. Joomla 1.7 did not make us fall in love with it, and it took a while for all the plugins and components to catch up.

With all that said, we will use Joomla 2.5.1 for one of our small web design projects this month and will report back the results.

Our main search terms are: web design Ottawa and website design Ottawa.

For SEO help, please contact me via my SEO Ottawa website.

Google changes: Ten recent algorithm changes

If your site got downgraded by Google in the last couple of days, the announcement below is probably the reason why.

The most important ones for SEO are these five changes in Google's algorithm:

• Snippets with more page content and less header/menu content: This change helps us choose more relevant text to use in snippets. As we improve our understanding of web page structure, we are now more likely to pick text from the actual page content, and less likely to use text that is part of a header or menu.
• Better page titles in search results by de-duplicating boilerplate anchors: We look at a number of signals when generating a page’s title. One signal is the anchor text in links pointing to the page. We found that boilerplate links with duplicated anchor text are not as relevant, so we are putting less emphasis on these. The result is more relevant titles that are specific to the page’s content.
• Fresher, more recent results: As we announced just over a week ago, we’ve made a significant improvement to how we rank fresh content. This change impacts roughly 35 percent of total searches (around 6-10% of search results to a noticeable degree) and better determines the appropriate level of freshness for a given query.
• Refining official page detection: We try hard to give our users the most relevant and authoritative results. With this change, we adjusted how we attempt to determine which pages are official. This will tend to rank official websites even higher in our ranking.
• Retiring a signal in Image search: As the web evolves, we often revisit signals that we launched in the past that no longer appear to have a significant impact. In this case, we decided to retire a signal in Image Search related to images that had references from multiple documents on the web.

The last two are rather vague, but the first three are quite clear: less consideration to Title tags, Headers, menu items and much more consideration to the actual copy/text on the page, so less emphasis on hieararchy - which will make SEO even harder..

This seemed to have affected my website design Ottawa site but has not had any impact to my SEO Ottawa site.

Referrer Data from Signed-in Searches on Google is Now Encrypted

This October Google launched a new SSL-based restriction on search data, "making search more secure". For users who are signed into their Google account (gmail, blogger, analytics, etc.), while searching on Google for certain keywords, their search terms will not be "passed" along to the websites they visit. So the website owners won't know what keywords those users typed to get to their sites. Note, this affects only signed-in users or those who chose to search from Google's encrypted platform: https://www.google.com (note the 's' after 'http').

This is not a great news for online marketers, as many SEOs were quick to point out. Although Google insists that only roughly 1% of all searches will be affected by this restriction, SEOs expect that keyword research and analytics data will be less specific and less accurate. I personally find it hard to believe that 1% of the search value was a good business case justification for Google to undertake this SSL project.

Google is gradually moving towards monopolizing information and, unfortunately, I see a lot more people "signing up" for Google accounts, buying into the teaser of their privacy being "protected". In the future, I won't be surprised to see Google Analytics "selling" some add-on features, for example, keywords from SSL-encrypted searches. What a novel idea, eh?

Ohh, but lets not to forget to mention: this SSL change will NOT affect paid ads on Google AdWords - why am I not surprised?

In hard economic conditions all companies will look for creative ways to increase revenue, i.e. force users into spending more. I think this SSL-encryption for signed users is one such measure by Google to continue to grow revenue: you get more people sign up to your accounts because their "privacy" will be protected and you also get more people buying ads from you to get better analytics data about their websites.

I am waiting for the next announcement..I am guessing, something to do with selling info based on "personalized" or searches: beware of the wolf in sheep's clothing!

Best Quality Links

Everyone knows that SEO entails link building. In fact, link building is the most important part of SEO. But what kind of links? Any links, from any website?

Well, the answer is any link is good to have but links from specialized reputable websites in the field of your desired keywords is what will affect your SEO in the most noticeable way.

Define "related" and "reputable" websites.

"Rebutable" has nothing to do with PR. In fact, a link from a website with PR0 can be quite valuable if this website is specialized in your area of expertise (i.e. in the area of expertise covered by your desired keyword).

"Related" is best understood in terms of specific keywords AND in terms of general specialization of a website. Again, websites specialized in your area of expertise are a much better link material than general websites.

Plus, ideally you'd want to have a link from a page that has a title containing the same keywords that your website is about and include the same keywords as an anchor text of the link that leads to your website.

If all your links come from these type of websites and these type of pages on those websites then you can only have a few links from each, with the total of 200 or so links, and you will be very high on Google, provided your content is unique and is well saturated with the same keywords.

If you have any questions, contact me via my webiste design Ottawa website or via my SEO Ottawa website. We revently launched a new website design ottawa 4u site, check it out and let us know what you think.

SEO Tart is Here!

My SEO Ottawa website is getting old, but I have an emotional attachment to it, so I don't want to redesign or change it. Instead, I created a new search engine optimization site - SEO Tart.

I wanted to free myself from the burden of the business style presentation and have a fun site with tons of useful SEO information.

I still maintain that SEO is easy and fun and anyone can learn how to do it well within a few hours. The level of SEO expertise becomes apparent with numbers: how many sites were optimized, for how many keywords, for what level of competition - things like that.

Every now and then I come across nice SEO articles and even SEO books with a lot of good SEO information, but after a couple of minutes of reading it I can tell that the author has very little hands-on SEO experience.

You can also find me via my website design Ottawa site.

Website Design Ottawa

Yesterday I got a call from a sales person asking if I need help closing on my customers. I politely refused. During the conversation he informed me that one of Ottawa's most prominent website design agencies receives 25 registrations per day. They are on the 1st page on Google for "website design Ottawa".

Here are some of the new websites our designers built:

• Website design Ottawa
• Renovations Ottawa
• Joomla web design
• Search Engine Optimization

If you have any questions, contact me via my SEO Ottawa website.

Website Design Ottawa

How long is too long to close on a customer?

Not sure what other web designers are experiencing in Ottawa, but we certainly noticed an unpleasant trend this summer: it takes much longer to sign a contract. People seem to think much harder before parting with their money than before. And this includes some well off people, like lawyers and dentists. I've had two occasions already when the client took almost three months to sign up, and not for large and expensive web design project; we are talking $1500 web design projects.

With SEO, I also noticed that most clients prefer it if you charge them a certain amount per month. For some reason paying for something for an indefinite period of time gives them confidence. They are afraid to understand that with SEO there is little maintenance required, you don't need to do much to maintain your ranking, once youj've achieved it. Some work might be required, yes, mostly link building (which you can do on your own if you care to spend 45 min once a month, this is all it takes for most small businesses). After the initial investment, the maintenance fees should not be as high and you should definitely not be paying for SEO indefinitely... I guess clients follow the infamous classical logical fallacy "if everyone is charging monthly fees for SEO, they can't all be liers". (wishful thinking). Oh, well, a little research can save them thousands of dollards..but hey, good for my fellow SEO agents, right?

Your Ottawa SEO here..

My new SEO website, just for fun (okay, okay, not just for fun, we are testing some ideas).

CMS for SEO and Web Design

Why Not Use Proprietary Content Management Systems (CMS)
This week I had a meeting with a business owner here in Ottawa who was looking for order SEO for his website. He told me that they are using a proprietary content management system for his website that was provided to him by his web design firm. "Oh, no", I said to myself.

A web content management system (CMS) is a must for any website nowadays. Not having it is like not using email, well, almost. But proprietary CMS would be analogous to buying pipes for your house that were manufactured by your developer who followed their own specifications. So if you want to replace or fix some portion of the pipes you can't just go to Canadian Tire and buy it, you have to go back to your developer. Besides, if you ever want to add some a bathroom or powder room, you will also have to ask your developer to design them all for you FROM SCRATCH - instead of going and buying those pieces ready-made and installing them. This is exactly what you will be doing if you sign up for a proprietary CMS instead of open-source CMS.

But don't listen to me, do your own research. Simply Google "open source content management systems" advantages and disadvantages. Pluses and minuses.  Here is a list of open source web CMS. Focus on the ones based on PHP.

The three most popular open source CMSs based on PHP are Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress. I prefer Joomla because it is much more flexible and scalable than Wordpress and much easier to use then Drupal. Security and load time are virtually identical for all three of these CMSs.

Doing SEO with Joomla or other reputable open-source CMS is much faster. The main reason: there are dozens of plugins and components developed in the last 12 years that make SEO faster. Those plugins and components (i.e. extensions) will not be available to you if you are using a proprietary CMS, so your SEO will need to be done page-by-page by hand.

I had another conversation recently where a company has just built a new website - without any CMS! Using HTML, can you imagine? This was a 800% longer and more expensive project than it needed to be. The reason why they decided not to use Joomla? Someone told them it is not good. Joomla is the most popular CMS on the planet. Does this fact not deserve a little research? How can you rely on one person's opinion without checking it out for yourself? I find it hard to understand. Oh, well, this company paid a huge price tag for this decision. What's most surprising is that the company is in the high-tech field, you'd expect them to be more savvy than an average non-technological business, right? Not so. It is not the first time I encounter this. My coffee business and landscaping clients end up being more clever in web site decisions than many of my high tech clients. Even software development companies - go figure!

I even wrote an article explaining why open-source software is often better than commercial software. Take 10 min to read it and you will understand that using a proprietary CMS would be a very costly mistake.

If you have questions or need help, do not hesitate to contact me via my SEO Ottawa website or Joomla web design website.

Link Building for Top SEO

It has been noted that the anchor text embedded in the hyperlinks adds a lot of SEO value - and it still holds true. It seems now more than ever.

We recently launched Joomla Bliss, our website design Ottawa shop, and we are now doing directory registrations for it. There aren't too many Canadian directories!  And there aren't too many for web design and Internet Marketing.

In my view directory links have a higher impact on your SEO than links from blogs and forums. With directory registrations the focus should be on relevant directories. One link from a relevant directory is worth five general ones. What is important is directory listings need to be indexable, i.e. easily accessible to search engines. And above all, links from websites with high Page Rank (PR) is what matters the most nowadays. Any website with a PR of 5 and above is a great catch. It is not easy to find such igh PR sites which would not have a "nofollow" tag set up for their outgoing links.

So your best choice for top SEO: relevant directories with PR of 5+ and without 'nofollow' tags. And if you can find a category for your geographical target - bonus!

Oh, and should you worry about paying for your links? Google says yes, yes, and yes again. Google talk so mcuh about the danger of paid links that it should make anyone suspicious (why do you need to talk? just get paid links penalties implemented and it won't take a long time for the SEO and web design communit to notice, in fact, those folks are so savvy, it won't take more than a week - and you won't need to talk about those terrible awful paid links.

In my view, paid links work fine, especially directory links. And how would search engines know you paid for your link anyway? Besides, directories need to be maintained, so charging webmasters a fee for the listing is legitimate business if you run a huge directory website.

Then Google is pushing this "nofollow" business. Again, why would you need that if your spiders can distinguish between paid and non-paid links, eh? I suspect, along with some other SEOs, that those nofollow links still count.

I posted a few comments on two websites related to web design with PR8 and PR9, and within a couple of days, my site jumped 30 links up! Google denies that nofollow links matter, of course, but I am not the only one who noticed that they do.

Try it for yourself and you'll see. Just make sure not to do anything else in the meantime, i.e. do not optimize your site, do not register in directories or build any other links. Give yourself a few days, then post a comment on a related website with PR8 or PR9 with a link back to your website (include your keywords in the anchor text). Then wait another few days - and check the results. And then come back and let me know, the more we know about it the better it is for all of us. There is no other way to find out but trying it with different sites, Google is not going to reveal its secrets anytime soon.

And if you need help with link building, contact me via my SEO Ottawa website.

Directory Links for SEO

We just completed a link building package for a client. I was pleasantly surprised to see that directory links now seem to give a faster boost to a website positioning on search engines, especially Google, than other types of links. Registering in Yahoo! directory alone - for $299 per year mind you! - boosts your site's positioning significantly. So much for Google's grudges against paid links. Some paid links are less paid than others, eh?

To get the most value from your directory back links, register your site in related directories with high page rank (PR), which is anything over 4.

If you need help with link building, contact us via our website design Ottawa office or SEO Ottawa office.

Joomla SEO

Over the last two years, at our Ottawa SEO consultancy we began offering website design services. This year, we decided to branch it out into a separate business - Joomla Bliss.

Why Joomla?
There are number of reasons. Some of the most important ones are these:

1) Joomla has the largest support and development community among all other content management systems. There are thousands of free and commercial extensions and add-ons that are available for Joomla. This is not the case with other content management systems. Not yet.

2) Website templates that are designed specifically for Joomla are much better looking than those designed for Wordpress and Drupal, and the sheer number of Joomla websites is impressive.

3) Joomla has an excellent in-built SEO framework. It fas fantastic SEF components, article editing and formatting components, META tags modules and plugins, etc etc.

4) Joomla is very easy to use. And if you have a question, you can find an answer to it within second by Googling it. The amount of information and help tips for Joomla is incredible!

So we are very close to finishing the website, which we already hosted live to start accumulating age and back links. We believe that our background in SEO would allow us to offer a turn-key website marketing solution to clients of all budget size.

Check out our nw site and send us your feedback, but keep in mind, it is not finished yet. We need a few more days..

SEO: Indexed pages

Pages indexed by Google is one of the most important factors in SEO. What's interesting is that Google does "see" all pages on a site but it does not include all of them in its index. Yahoo, on the other hand, seems to index all pages that it sees.

To find what Google has indexed on your site, go to Google and then type in the search bar the following: site:www.yoursite.com . Note, there is no space after "site:"

But note that this will not work with the "link" operator. In fact, the best way to see what Google has on you is to go to their Webmaster Central, signup and add your site. Once you get the ownership of your site confirmed, you can run a lot of vital statistics on your site using Google's tools. And you will get a lot of valuable information.

To find what pages Yahoo has indexed, go to Yahoo site explorer and enter the URL of your site in the very top search bar. The difference between Google and Yahoo is usually quite stunning.

Unfortunately, there is only partial control over how to make Google index more of your pages.

One of the most common SEO tips for page indexing is to create a Site Map, put it a link to it on your home page, and ensure that the Site Map contains links to all other pages of your website. The second SEO tip is to have no more than 3 levels in your site's navigational hierarchy.
And the third SEO tip is to interlink your site's internal pages as detailly as possible. Together, these three SEO tips will ensure that more of your site's pages get indexed by Google.

In my experience, I noticed that websites that are using a content management system (CMS) of some sort - such as Joomla or Drupal or Wordpress - get much "deeper" indexing by Google. In addition, using a CMS like Joomla, for example, allows you to install a Site map component which automatically creates a Site Map page and lists links to all your other pages on it. All new pages are added automatically and all archived pages are removed automatically as well - which is very convenient. Both Joomla and many of its components are free and very easy to use.

So, if you want to have more of your pages indexed by Google without too much work, I suggest you use Joomla and install a Site Map component (Xmap is the one I like).

And if you need help, do not hesitate to contact me vi my Ottawa SEO site.

SEO: The Most Important Thing

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is a set of techniques that one needs to apply to one's website to make it search engine friendly. There is also a set of techniques one needs to do to increase the site's popularity (i.e. back links). All this is done in relation to a particular set of keywords. In other words, you can't SEO-optimize a site in general. You would always SEO-optimize it for specific keywords, for example: "SEO Ottawa", "Ottawa SEO", "Search Engine Optimization Ottawa", and similar related keyword phrases.

It is commonly said that SEO cannot be done well by doing just one thing. For example, you can optimize your META data and copy all you want, but if you have few back links pointing at your site, your SEO will always be poor.

And yet, if you were to do just one thing for best SEO, what would it be? I'd say, clearly, build back links. Quality back links, that is.

How many back links do you need to have a noticeable effect on your SEO?

There is no scientifically proven answer to this question, but in my experience, a site with 3900 back links usually gets PR7 (page rank) on Google, which grants it to be displayed in SERPs (search engine results pages) as one of the very first links for very competitive keywords. But in that, there is always a good number of high quality links, i.e. the ones coming from .edu or .gov domains or large media outlets or other "important" destinations. So the number of back links matters significatnly less than quality of those links, but it does matter. Here is more information on this topic: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-link-command-busting-the-myths

Note that PR7 is a very - very - high rank. For comparison, Yahoo has PR of 8. So, for an average business, PR5 usually guarantees a very good SEO positioning on Google. Anything over that is simply fantastic, if you can get it. In my experience, back links are the most influential factor in Google's ranking decisions.

I did notice, however, that in certain instances sites that have PR0 (zero) still get displayed very high on SERPs, and, in fact, Googlers themselves were open about the fact that the page rank (PR) does not always play the main role (whatever that means!). Since noone really knows exactly how Google makes ranking decisions (it is, indeed, a very well kept secret), we can only form opinions based on our observations. And in this case, my observations are in agreement with the mainstream SEO community: link building is the most important thing for your SEO. And quality links, i.e. the ones coming from reputable outlets, are best.

So get started at it!

And if you need advice on how to build quality back links quickly and cost-effectively, do not hesitate to contact me via my main SEO Ottawa site.

SEO Tips for White Papers and Case Studies

If you are responsible for lead generation campaigns at a B2B company, white papers and case studies would always be your best SEO tools.

Assuming that you have already done your keyword analysis, here are some of the things you need to do in order to achieve good SEO results with your white papers and case studies:

1. Try to get your site to contain as many static pages as possible (indexable URLs)
2. Arrange all files in as many directories as you can, do not place them all in the root.
3. Name your directories and your files using your most desired keywords (separate words with underscores)
4. Include your keywords in all Page Titles
5. Include your company name in all Page Titles
6. Do not worry about META tags if you don't know how to add them, your Page Title is your most important tag
7. Include your keywords in H1s, H2, and H3s. Make sure you use these tags!
8. Create a style format where each title of a PDF document is accompanied by a short abstract, as opposed to being a simple link, and use keywords
9. Add both an 'abstract' and a 'summary' component to your white paper template, this will allow you to use your keywords multiple times without annoying your readers
10. Add a 'table of contents' component to your white paper template, this is a great way to repeat your keywords again
11. Add a 'company name' component in the footer of your white paper template and provide your website URL
12. Interlink your site's internal pages as often as you can (e.g. use margins and place "Related Info" boxes with links to other pages on your site)
13. Your links should have your keyword embedded within, do not use “click here”
14. Try to ensure that each page (i.e. each URL) has approximately 500 words on it with your most important keywords repeated 10-12 times per page
15. Make sure all your press releases contain your most important keywords and are published in full on your website
16. Give out your white papers to your partners and customers and try to get them to post it on their websites
17. Add an RSS component to your website and place each white paper there
18. Register your RSS feed in as many RSS directories as possible
19. Convince your management to allow you to distribute your RSS content via PRweb.com or PR.com. Do this in addition to using your company's official PR firm.
20. Use PayPerPost and similar services to earn back links on the cheap (bloggers will publish comments about your company and a link to your website on their blogs; make sure to request permanent links)


Good luck and call me if you need help with your SEO and Internet Marketing projects, remember your first 30 minutes is free of charge: http://www.annatulchinsky.com

http://sites.google.com/site/trainingsitenow/seootttawaannatulchinsky