Las Vegas Web Design Blog | The Web Squad

When you hire an SEO firm they all pretty much promise you the same thing, first page rankings in the SERPs for certain keywords. How do they do this; by creating lots of backlinks to your website, tweaking your website a little bit, and writing quality content. This is great for most people and as long as they see results they don’t question the firm’s methods. However, like with a lot of things, there is a good way to get on the first page and a quick way (A good SEO can do both, but for the sake of simplicity I will talk about the two separately). Search engine optimization is like a marathon, it takes time and a good strategy to get to the front.

The quick method of reaching the first page involves creating lots of backlinks and content very quickly, kind of like a sprint. With this method a lot of SEO’s will just focus on building links from wherever they can and to the homepage only. Like sprinting in a marathon, this may get you to the front quickly, but you will soon run out of steam and start to drop back. It may take awhile for other websites to catch up to you so you could remain on the first page for a few months or even a few years depending on how many of your competitors have hired SEO firms. SEO companies are able to get away with this because the average person does not know a single thing about search engine optimization, and for those that know a little bit they do not know how to check where the links are pointing to. When people get a summary report from the SEO firm it may look something like this:

Oct. 2009*
	New links: 200
	Total links: 2,000
	SE Ranking “Keyword A”: #3
	SE Ranking “Keyword B”: #5
	PageRank: 3
	Amount Due: $4,000
*Not Real Stats

What they do not tell you is that out of those 2,000 or so links, 1,990 are pointing to your homepage and about 1,000 (maybe less) of those links are actually relevant. They figure that you will never check this or have the knowledge to check it. However, it is fairly easy to check how many links are pointing to your website and where they are pointing to using Yahoo Site Explorer. All you have to do is enter the URL of your website (Note: http://www.site.com and http://site.com will return different results so use the URL that is ranking) and Yahoo does the rest. If over 70 percent of the links are pointing to your homepage that is a bad sign, unless of course you just signed the SEO contract in the past two or three months then 70-80 percent is normal. If the SEO is doing a good job then you should see this percentage start to drop below 70 within the next few months.

If you are thinking about hiring an SEO firm you might want to do some research on their website using Yahoo Site Explorer. If 90 percent or more of their links are pointing to their homepage, chances are that they will do the same to your site. They may tell you that their method is the best way to getting to the top quickly, but remember search engine optimization is a marathon, not a sprint.

The good way search engine optimization strategy is to link to all or most of the pages on your website. A good percentage that will return strong rankings would be 50 percent of the backlinks point to the homepage and 50 percent point to other pages. This method still has most of the links pointing to you homepage which is the most important page of your website, but also have links pointing to the content of your website, this is also known as deep linking. Deep linking is a very underutilized strategy in search engine optimization because it takes longer to reach the first page of the search engines, but in the end the strength of your rankings will be much better and you will even rank above others who used the sprint method.

Another part to the slow and steady method is getting quality, relevant links. Many times SEO’s who use the sprint method will get links from where ever they can whether the site is relevant or not. Some of the best (or worst) examples of this are commenting on hundreds of unrelated videos (i.e. man breaks world record for corn eating and linking back to a law website), commenting on unrelated blog posts (commenting on a law blog and linking back to a health website), and creating a fake program and having the download URL point to the clients website (I have actually seen all of this done more than once). This might yield a lot of links, but since they are unrelated they do not have much weight to them.

A good way to think about links is to compare them to change; the lower the quality the lower the value. For example, using the sprint method will yield lots of low value coins like pennies and nickels, and maybe a few high value coins like quarters and half-dollars. The slow and steady method will yield a lower number of coins but they will be of higher value such as quarters, half-dollar, and dollar coins. So in the end which would you rather have 1,000 pennies, 500 nickels, and 250 quarter(1,750 coins, $97.50); or 500 quarters, 250 half-dollars, and 50 dollar coins (800 coins $300)?

Are You Getting The Most From Your SEO? by The Web Squad is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

A website is the online version of yourself and your business. So it would make sense that many of the things that you need to run a successful business you would need to run a successful website. The designer does not know your business, all they know is how to make good websites and take your ideas and make them into reality. There are a few things that you should have already planned out before calling a web designer.

1. What are you trying to do online?

You should have an idea of what you are trying to do online. Are going to sell things over the internet, or just use it to create leads for your physical business? Do you want people to be able to contact you through email or phone, or both? Knowing the objective of your website will help the designer because it will give them a place to start. They will be able to tell you the kind of things that you should have on the website and how users will be able to interact with it.

2. What is your business identity?

In other words, who are you? This includes having a logo (or at least a basic idea of a business logo), a business name, and a business plan. If you do not know who you are as a business, neither will the designer. This goes along with “what are you trying to do online?” Creating a website is almost like painting picture, you cannot paint what you cannot see.

3. What are you selling

You might not be selling anything online, but your business does whether it is a physical product or just a service. Know exactly what you are selling, what it does, and why people should buy it. When you meet with the web designer, pretend they are a potential customer and try to sell your product/service to them.

4. Who are you selling to

What demographic is your product geared toward; is it made for a large group of people or a select few? Knowing this is vital to the design of your website because it has to appease to your target audience. For example, you would not have dark, aggressive colors on a site that is geared toward women, nor would a site selling children’s toys be super-professional looking.

5. Do you have any content

Content is the nuts and bolts of a website. Without it your site would just be a bunch of flashy pictures and users would have no idea what you are selling. Your content should be a fine mix of copy and information telling the customer what you sell, who you are, and why they should use your products/services. Another reason to have content is that search engines love it and will rank you higher if you have it. Another good form of content to have is an on-site blog where you can tell people about new products in your store or new neighborhoods added to your service area. You can also inform people about news within your industry. A blog is gold to the search engines and you should defiantly consider hosting one on your website.

6. How big do you want your site to be?

Do you want it to be five pages or twenty? Figuring this out before consulting with the designer will help because it will give the designer an idea of the type of on-site navigation you need. The size of the site should be based on the amount of content you have and the number of products or services you are providing. If you ask the designer, “how big should my site be?” they will return with, “how big do you want it to be?” or “how much content do you have?”

7. What are your keywords?

If you are planning to either hire someone to do search engine optimization on your site, or do it yourself, you need to have at least five keywords in mind that you want to optimize for. These keywords will go into the coding of your website as well as in the content on the site. Using similar keywords is very helpful because it makes it easier to optimize for similar keywords like “motorcycles and dirt bikes” versus “motorcycles and rims”. Imagine your business was listed in a thesaurus, what would be under your business name?

7 Questions to Ask Yourself before Meeting with a Web Designer by The Web Squad is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

There has been a lot of talk lately about Rupert Murdoch’s move to remove News Corp publications from the Google index. Much of the online community is calling him a crazed fool, but what if he is on to something and paving the way for others to follow suit on way or another.

In fact, for one of his publications, the Wall Street Journal, striking an exclusive search deal with Bing would not be a bad idea. According to Compete.com, WSJ.com receives the majority of its traffic from Bing already, roughly 18.75 percent, and another 6.3 percent from Yahoo which Microsoft will soon take over anyway. Google only provides about 11.5 percent of the total traffic going to WSJ.com

With the combined traffic from Bing and Yahoo, striking a $50 million search deal with Microsoft and only forfeiting about 11 percent of its traffic may not be such a bad idea after all. In fact Hitwise.com, which estimates that Google delivers about 26 percent of WSJ.com’s traffic, says that the majority of search terms that are driving traffic to WSJ.com through Google are navigation searches (i.e. The Wall Street Journal, WSJ.com, WSJ) and those searches should stay intact even if News Corp blocks Google.

With Murdoch’s plan looking like it will be very profitable and successful, other publishers are thinking about the idea of blocking Google as well. Could this be the beginning of the next era of search wars? We have always heard about news outlets getting exclusive interviews and what not, but what about exclusive indexing by search engines?

If exclusive indexing rights catches on search engines might seem more like television networks in the near future. Much like how people choose their favorite channels based on the programs it shows, people will choose their search engines based on the sites that it indexes. Engines will be fighting over sites like WSJ.com and Bloomberg.com so they can display their exclusive content.

However, with the number of big players in search is quickly coming down to two with Bing taking over Yahoo, and exclusive indexing is against Google’s mission of providing people with the most relevant content available. A few major sites may jump ship to Bing and ask to be removed from Google’s index, but people today are smart enough to find what they want anyway and Google still controls over 60 percent of all search engine traffic on the web. Google has already stated that they have no problem with removing WSJ.com from their index, or any other News Corp site for that matter.

WSJ.com is a rare anomaly on the web where it receives more traffic from Bing than Google, and if Google loses this small percentage of sites from its index it should have very little effect on its traffic anyway.

However, Bing is making a lot of noise in the search engine world an looking to have a 20 percent market share of internet search, providing that the Yahoo deal goes through, and it shows no signs of losing popularity. The next age of search may have just begun, are you ready?

Search Wars: The Fight for Exlusive Indexing by The Web Squad is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.