April 7 Development Techniques galin
Search Engine Optimization is a very hot web topic. I prefer a simple strategy in regards to SEO. I treat it like obeying laws that Google and other search engines make. Obey the laws and you will see a benefit. Not everyone sticks with this philosophy though. Some prefer a “laws were meant to be broken” mentality. An example of this is with “The AOL Way” that has been all over the tech news world as of late. 
http://lucfr.co.uk/wp-json/wp/v2/posts/433 AOL’s news department recently laid out a blueprint for a plan on generating more web traffic through search engines. Here is a leak of the strategy called “The AOL Way”.
Sticking with the law comparison, Google actually differs from legal systems. Google is a lot less beauractric than the U.S. legal system we are used to. They can actually react quickly to changes. Exploiting loopholes can be very difficult since Google can easily realize a loophole and change their algorithms accordingly. “The AOL Way” is a blatant attempt at ignoring what Google wants in their top search results.
Recently Google made an algorithm change aimed at hurting “content farming” SEO practices in an attempt at improving search results. Here is a blog post I wrote about it. “The AOL Way” should of been hurt by this algorithm change. That is because a lot of the practices preached in that leaked article are of a content farming nature.
Essentially AOL thinks they can ignore Google’s long-term algorithm goal because they are smarter. Google works every day on their algorithm and a big mission of theirs is the quality of search results. But AOL, being like the arrogant child stealing from the local convient store, thinks they can break the rules. The amount of resources required to stay ahead of Google’s resources amazes me. It seems impossible. If I had these types of resources, I’d focus on a lot more productive of ideas and gone with a K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple Stupid) philosophy in regards to SEO.
K.I.S. tells me this. Play by the rules. Listen to Google. They want quality, content driven, spamless, keyword intelligent sites. Or for you to pay for results. Not sites ran with a content-farming philosophy to get a search hit and in turn lose all their quality. Engadget, the popular AOL ran tech blog, is losing its staff. Let’s see if this trend follows.
April 4 Customer Website Tips galin
We prefer setting up your site on Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a web traffic reporting tool developed by Google. It is loaded with features and has a very simple interface for analyzing your traffic.
Analyzing web traffic can be useful for more than the obvious monitoring your site purposes. One incredibly useful purpose is for SEO. With Google Analytics, you can easily see how much traffic you are generating from search engines. You do this from your main Analytics screen by navigation to “Traffic Sources>>Search Engines”. Once here you will see a break down of your hits from all of the search engines. Clicking on the search engine will then give you a list of all the search terms giving you these search results.
This is great for analyzing SEO. You can easily see which keywords are doing well. In addition, you can check to see if any keywords you wish to have be hits are on the list through a simple search.
Understanding your site in this manner is an important step in the constant research that is involved for proper search engine optimization.
April 1 Customer Website Tips galin
Customers may sometimes be contacted by other websites about putting a link to their site up in exchange for a link on their site. This is called a “link exchange”, and they are definetley useful for generating more traffic to your site.
Link exchanges are great because they generate additional traffic to your site in multiple ways. The obvious way is by people on the other site clicking on the link to go to your site. This direct effect is nice but not the main reason people are interested in link exchanges.
Link exchanges also help your search engine results. Google and other search engine “crawlers” see a link on a site and then follow it the link destination. By having links on other sites, it will increase the number of crawls you get to your site. There are some important factors to both be cautious of and to look for when deciding whether to link exchange with a site.
Important Factors for Link Exchanges
- Traffic of the Partnering Site – This can be researched through Alexa Ratings. Higher traffic sites will help you more.
- Relative Content of the Partnering Site – Do you have a law site and the partnering site is about basketball? That link wouldn’t be smart. Partner up with sites that have similar content but are not direct competitors.
- Dofollow Links – The link must be allowed to be followed by search engines. This means the link should not have the parameter “rel=’nofollow'” in it. Here is a blog post about html links that explains the ‘nofollow’ parameter.
- Link Text – If the partner is willing to put nice keywords in their link, then this should help SEO. That is, instead of “GPM Web Solutions” saying something more keyword rich like “Affordable Website Designs”. Search engines take note on the words in the link and what they should indicate for search results.
Always make sure to give careful thinking to who you decide to partner up with for link exchanges. They can be very useful, but one link can be more effective than 200 links. It is the quality of the link that matters.
March 22 Customer Website Tips galin
This is a pretty simple way to see how many and what pages Google or other search engines have “crawled” of your website. Go to Google and type in “site:yourdomainname.com”.
The results will be all the pages of your site on Google that have been indexed. These pages will always be possibilities of pages that could show up in a search.
This is useful for analyzing SEO. If you don’t have many pages indexed on Google, that could be the first step towards your sites SEO issues. No one is going to be able to find pages that aren’t there. As far as Google and other search engines are concerned, pages that aren’t indexed aren’t there.
If you are concerned about your sites SEO, this is step one to making sure you are making the best attempt at search engine optimizations. I check mine periodically and see that it is doing fine since 10+ pages of results appear.
March 21 Customer Website Tips galin
I will always suggest running a blog on your site. A lot of times the reactions I get are of the “puh” variety. The “I can’t believe you are telling me to blog, blogging is for teenagers” mentality.
I don’t take much offense to that because I really am just an overgrown teenager sometimes. Just ask some of the students I tutor. But that is besides the point. You should blog! Here is why.
There are two big reasons you should blog. It builds a larger sitemap, and it is constantly changing content for your site. Your site may have mostly static content that you want people viewing. A completely static site is bad in the eyes of Google and the other major search engines. This is where blogging comes into play.
You don’t even need people reading your blog. You just need content changing so the “crawler bots” see that your site is changing and changing in a content rich manner (“crawlers” are the tools developed by search engines to make search engine pages). Your initial site may of had only ten pages of advertising about your business for which recommend this editable free pay stub template. Blogging ten simple, industry related posts about your business will double your sitemap. Search engines love seeing this!
So you should blog, but what should you blog about? It is important that you keep the blogging related to the content of your website. For example, my site’s blog is all about computer or web topics. This tells search engines “this site is about computers, the web, and technology”. This is what I want. I don’t want people coming to my site searching for pasta recipes.
If you have a site about law, blog about law. If you have a site selling a product, blog about your product and the industry it is involved with. You don’t have to blog frequently, but the more frequently the better. And yes, this has everything to do with optimizing search results. As a consequence you might as well try writing something your audience may find interesting though. For instance, this post I am hoping helps search results and at the same time tells customers to blog!
