Posts by PixelatedKarma

You shouldnt need to pay w3c anything to get an error free result. It should be part of your site QA/QC process; you just need to keep running it and correcting errors; it takes time but it should be done anyways. Error free clean code with good markup is just a good best practice all around.

And if you dont do it for SEO think of it this way; you have a wordpress blog. After a few years you are seeing 25,000+ visitors per month because of this you have migrated from a shared hosting plan to VPS to dedicated server in conjunction with a CDN to handle the traffic load. Maybe you see the potential of it growing even more; so you invest on migrating the site to a cloud environment. These moves become so much easier having clean semantic code because you dont have to worry about the theme having to be hacked together during every move to make the site actually work.

Or how about this reason - wordpress releases a new version; suddenly all the hack code you've used to be browser compatible (and was error ridden in w3c) with your theme now makes you theme no longer work. Now all of that hard work you've dumped into making your website look, feel and act how you want - is now all gone.

Be the SEO person who does things right and do right by your clients; it will take more time, it will be more …

Its not a 90 site experiment. Its 90 sites with 90 sets of google analytics; none of which have suffered in ranking.

Verify that your redirection of cannonical content is actually working; this will include ensuring your htacess is correct and all of your links are pointing to the correct version of the page. If it is then just be patient. Depending on the rate google is crawling the website it may not be doing full crawls or crawls on a regular basis. Already Google on a highly crawled page will be 3 days behind (changes you make today wont show up for 3 days in your webmaster tools). So on less frequently crawled pages this could take a month for the changes to reflect accurately in your webmaster tools.

To try to expedite the process; you can try building links to the correct version of that page through social media/web 2.0/etc. in an effort to get Google to crawl that correct page. Also identify the pages that are crawled the most frequently and work on improving the links to the correct less frequently crawled pages.

I'm going to have to agree with ResourcePool; we tend to migrate people to Magento. It has a decently steep learning curve but the amount of flexibility it has and the needs it fullfills for small business make it an almost go-to solution. Heck theres a reason 1 in 5 e-commerce sites are said to use it.

Presta is a good alternative but you need to be at the point where you require it. If you are starting out Prestashop is a bit of overkill.

@remytargus; In the EU you could be right that that is where Google is going especially with the EUs last judgement on Google (also remember that this happened back in the late 90s and early 2000s with Microsoft who at last count is still a major player in technology). In the rest of the world where Google still has strongholds you need to play the game if you want results in competitive niches. Not playing the game with each search engine is just one more reason your competitors have to rank above you. Think about it, who would you support, your fans or the guy who doesn't like you? Business is about doing work with people you like.

I have yet to come across a top ten Google SERP website, in a competitive niche, which doesn't play by googles rules (not just analytics but also with their best practices). And to say that their best practices are out to lunch you'd also be calling the best practices of Bing, Yahoo, Baidu and Duckduckgo wrong as well since the core fundamentals of their best practices are very similar to Google's. This is how they (w3c and the super powers of the net) arrived at agreeing on what the semantic web is.

Now furthermore, if you are producing quality relevant content with a solid link scheme (two more SE BPs); there is no reason why you should need to hide the popularity of your links from any search engine, Google or otherwise. …

Its impossible to learn SEO overnight;over 2-3 months you could get a feel for it but you still wouldnt know it all. Especially when the SEO world is constantly evolving.

remytargus; although google does exploit data the size of the search engine makes it impossible to ignore. By not playing ball with Google you'll see some pretty scary results for your website in the SERPs. Also dont kid yourself, Bing, Baidu, and the rest of them are just as bad. So pick your poison or dont get listed, either way you just gotta play it smart.

Ya its funny Kelly, because had they been focusing on MozRank this whole time they'd be following the BPs of all the major SEs and if there had been another PR update they would have still benefitted from their work.....but ohhh no, google PR seems to still be king to some people haha

There certainly is; make sure your website's Calls to Action are working, have a newsletter sign up, build trust with your subscribers by not spamming them with viagra offers, make sure that you are following the laws applicable to the country your target market is in, and provide value to the people who you are marketing too.

Without any of those things you become another scam artist that winds up getting nailed by spam filters everywhere and you wont get the end results you want or need.

Here is how we've tackled large website SEO in the past:
1)Inventory all of your potential quality links
2)Rank these links and organize them by highest quality and by their relevancy
3)All of your general high quality links/web 2.0 links/etc. you want to tie directly to your main page.
4)All of your niche high quality links you want to build to each corresponding category. So lets say you have a technology directory within that site; you'd for example build a link from a website like daniweb to that technology directory. By treating each specific directory within the site as a landing page you can also seo each of these sub-directories as you would a landing page on a smaller website.
5)Dont forget your CTAs and content which refreshes on your main directory page / sub directories - this will help you get crawled more often.
6)When you've done your major link building; focus a different sub-directory every week; lets say Beauty Products and Services is one of them....When you are browsing the web looking for links you can then focus on doing quality posts on forums going "hey if you are looking for quality haircuts go to insert directory page link for the company here.
7)Use bit.ly or another service when submitting content/site links to some of the lower reputation websites (mR 2.9-4.5) as this weird little thing happens where using these services will not just help you gain traffic measurements to know …

Most mid-large scale US companies are used to the storm created by black friday/cyber monday (I mean afterall they did drive the trend globally). Canada will be the one to watch this year because they seem to have adopted black friday as if it were their own holiday and I can almost garauntee that we'll see a few canadian servers go plummeting down in the next couple of days.

I bet we still see 5+ posts a month asking on how to increase pagerank. I am glad they finally came out and said it though especially since they have so many stronger ranking signals now that link building is only one portion of it all.

Problem with google stats and analytics is they generally lag behind by 3 or more days. If he is looking for a more up to date solution he will need to hunt down a stats tracking script or create his own.

You ever heard of the 80/20 rule? This CEO is putting his Company into the 80. To get 30-40 UNIQUE RELEVANT QUALITY backlinks a day will be possible for the next 3 months probably (difficult but not impossible). Beyond that you'll be scratching links from websites with less merit and might end up hurting his website more than help it. People like this CEO are all about quantity, whereas SEO has made a major shift towards Quality. Without this SEO recognizing this your being set up to fail (hence why this CEO is putting his company in the 80).

Now if you want your first step; I'd strongly suggest you analyze their current backlinks. Rid yourself of the bad apples to begin with. Then begin researching your competitors backlinks. Beyond that creating stunning copy and sharing that will become your new best friend.

There is no point. It's a bloody toe in the water test before the full dive into shark infested waters :)

I fixed it for you happygeek hahaha

Yeah there is a bit of a difference and we can thank google's effort for local search and the natural geo-location of their servers. Google will always attempt to show the results as cached by the nearest location of their servers - hence why google.ca and google.com SERPs will display slightly different results. The logic behind this is to provide faster loading webpages/more local results to visitors which should in theory provide more relevant results to their query.

By tricking google into believing you are a visitor in a different timezone, it's going to try and line you up with the correct geo-location data center which of course could change where you are placed in the SERPs.

Thats why personnally I am convinced it is impossible to always rank in the top 3 spots in every geo-location google provides search; although it doesn't hurt to try!

Basically it is just a way to describe the way Google verifies if you are ranking correctly. So if you are trying to rank for the keywords "Website Design"; if you just began showing up in the search results for this phrase it might start you off on page 3 of results. If you get a bunch of traffic, google will then compare metrics like bounce rates to verify that you are providing value to those visitors and from there either begin ranking you higher or lower in the SERPs under those keywords.

This is a blackhat technique and commonly found on alot of websites running illegal content. I'm not going to go too far into it but you can get the jist of the idea here:
Wikipedia Cloaking Definition

If and when the search engines catch onto you doing cloaking you will find yourself in the penalty box until the next algorithim update which penalized you. Which depending on which algorithim was used to penalize you could take a year to get reversed.

You won't be able to rank a single page perfectly because you are at a severe disadvantage. However that shouldn't stop you from being able to rank well. First to understand why you wont rank perfectly: Google and Bing both prefer quality content and lots of it. A single page website generally cannot provide fresh and new quality content to keep search engine crawlers visiting your website frequently.

However I assume that you are really wanting to keep your single page website and dont want to waste the time or money you've spent creating it or having it created. So your best option is to create some really great relevant web 2.0 articles, do some social bookmarking, get some amazing relevant followed inbound links, make sure your keywords are in place and working (focus each section of the page on a grouping of keywords which are all related to each other - watch out for keyword density) and constantly work on boosting social media signals. You may also want to consider developing landing pages which funnel your visitors to your main page and which can also help boost your ranking for your keywords - these landing pages will also help get you crawled more frequently especially if you are building some really good inboundlinks. Beyond that if your website is semantically correct and you are meeting every single SE best practice you should atleast have a fighting chance.

1. Depending on if its your website or someone elses - you can either use any one of the free tools that can be found on Google or you can just count the amount of times a keyword appears in your code & copy.

2. Use google adwords, and their keyword planning tool. Chase keywords which are high volume/low competition.

Contact Google support; if you still had access to that account you could atleast login and there are settings within the profile to make the account private. It takes about a week or so for the profile to stop showing up but that would have been ideal.

Beyond that you are kind of in a predictament. You might be able to re-activate it to make it private but I've never had to do that so I wouldn't be alot of help.

They are generally stored within the database itself since ubercart and many other ecommerce platforms are dynamically driven. If he has an online store why would you switch him off a system like ubercart?

https://www.google.com/cse/

thats for your google custom search bar.

As for website performance use a tool like y-slow to find suggestions on changes to speed things up. Compression and caching are your best friends.

@lukaskille - question for you; are you monitoring the effectiveness of your efforts? To clarify, are your efforts reaching people and people just arent converting? Or are your efforts falling on deaf ears?

In the first scenario, things are relatively easy to diagnose. I am assuming that if you are proving successful with your current clients and that you are providing a niche set of web hosting services (most companies in that industry are because its so competitive). The problem probably has to do with your sales/marketing funnel. If people are truly seeing the ads/content but not converting then the problem lies with the way you are trying to convert them. Do you have a call to action on each blog post you are sharing on social media? Is your call to action placed in a good position? Is it clear what you want your potential client to do? Do the colors/layout of the call to action effective?

With the second possibility, which is that you are just being lost in a sea of other web hosts with bigger and better social media efforts you need to take a step back and look at what you are doing. Are your efforts targeted appropriately at the right audience? You may need to figure out who your existing customers are and re-target your SMM efforts to meet that same demographic to basically replicate the clients you have. But wait, maybe your content just sucks, maybe the right people are seeing it - …

Funny how this update lined up with all the legal activities surrounding the founders of pirate bay over the last month and a half.....

Your question is all too open ended; you won't get any sort of solid answer without more solid information. What is your B2B product? What size of company are you targetting?

I highly doubt if you are providing a service/product to large scale enterprise users you will see the ROI you expect from Facebook, sorry but the hype on facebook marketing is just that - hype. C-Level professionals / Vendor Procurement just aren't using facebook to find new products and services - IF they are using facebook (and very few C-Levels actually use facebook - due to the concerns of public image and potential industry backlash); then they are using it to socialize with friends and your ads will probably be more white noise then anything. Noise = Being ignored.

If however your target clients are small home based businesses; then you may find that facebook could be a very effective medium to draw clients in if you can manage to target every small business with its own facebook page.

Linkedin is another beast which can be super hard to tame, you really need to be an extremely social person and you need to engage your targets and provide benefit to you being a connection, all while building trust. Linkedin is a platform where content is truly king when it comes to advertising; this is mainly because many professionals using the service are using it as a newsfeed nowadays. So you'd be best off hiring a person to do copy …

A great practical example of a legit link wheel......you start a reseller company, business is good but you want a bit more incoming revenue to pay bills, so you create a web design business but keep them both seperate. You quickly link the two together.

A year goes by and both companies are doing well but you decide with the demand of seo by your various clients to create a marketing company, you then link all three. Some more time goes by and you want to create a server blog, you reference the design company and the web hosting company and your friend's development company. Some more time goes by and you buy out your friend and host all web apps through your hosting company, pretty soon you have 5 legit websites all linking to the main hosting company. Because you contextualize the links and all the sites have quality relevant content, the link wheel will prove to be very effective especially if they are all on different c-blocks.

Contact their support team....or just create a new account? But try and remember the email id this time

If you do a search you will find multiple references to dublin core on both these forums and on google itself.

The very quick easy way of explaining what dublin core is - its semantic meta tags. If your entire site follows semantic guidelines then dublin core will probably be your next step.

Analyze your competitors, if you do that well you can see what they are doing to rank where you want. Then just do a better job of it than them.

Sorry if you took it the wrong way kelly so let me try a different approach; imagine you were working in php (since most people who are doing SEO nowadays use php based scripts such as wordpress, drupal or joomla I figured this might be the best example). If you are requiring code snippets into your page (versus using includes) and a critical error occurs on one of those requires OR if the require isn't at the location you specify the page cannot load which means the php cannot run so the end user cannot view the page. Now imagine the end user is the web crawler - how can you expect that web crawler to properly index a page which isn't properly functioning?

The same holds true for web crawlers, if they hit a serious error regardless of the web language and they cannot execute the crawl or in some cases can execute the crawl but not complete it, then your website wont be indexed where it should be. This means that everything up to the point of the serious error generally gets crawled but the stuff after doesn't (again, the beautifully written copy occuring past the error doesn't register to the crawler). But again this is for serious w3c errors (in the case of html and css). So minor errors such as the difference between:

<b><p>I am bold</b>I am the rest of the paragraph</p>

and

<p><b>I am bold</b>I am the rest of the paragraph</p>

probably wont …

Thats fine Kelly and you can continue with your current practices but kiss your keyword ranking efforts good bye to some degree. If the crawler terminates the crawl because of errors then your whole page wont be correctly crawled; thus wherever that break is (as almostbob mentioned) is the last part of that page the crawler is going to give you credit for. So thats fine if your errors are found all in the footer section....not so great if the crawlers are stopped before or slightly after the fold which in turn makes all that wonderfully written copy after the termination pretty much pointless in ranking you in SERPs.

One comment I want to throw in.....

I assume that your main website xyz.com is an ecommerce site; although your strategy can be done well, I think it is important that you remember the original reason why you have xyz.com and thats to make sales - convert visitors to customers. By attempting to re-route traffic from another website in order to increase visitors to xyz.com you may find that you might boost traffic but not necessarily turn that traffic into customers if that makes sense.

Its from my past experiences that web surfers are lazy; if they need to work to hard to get a product - they will use your competitors. Heck the reason we do online shopping is for convenience, by making it more difficult for customers to buy you may find this tactic is counter-productive.

Now if you are super sneaky and using this tactic only to increase SERPs; then you may get the results you are aiming for as long as your customers arent going to be going through the link spokes to get to the center of the wheel (if that makes sense since this is a link wheel you are talking about).

w3c errors can and will effect your SERPs if they are serious errors. Alot of crawlers have improved to the point that they can overlook alot of minor errors (forgetting to close a tag for example). However if the error is serious enough or there are enough errors sometimes the crawlers will come back with an error and they are not able to properly crawl your website. If this happens you are only being credited with the content which they can crawl which could potentially lead to contextually misplacing your website within that search engine's rankings - ie. not placing you where you truly should be. The best way to see if your errors are effecting your rankings check the crawl errors under Google webmaster tools.

If you are getting incomplete crawls; you should probably start by fixing those errors. If not then move onto other SEO priorities (ie. creating content). However if you are getting incomplete crawl errors then also remember that its going to take a minimum of 3 days before your webmaster tools reflect the change, and thats if you are being crawled daily.

Remember the web is going semantic and has been for a long time - so all it takes is your competitor to have a semantically correct website to beat you out if they have highly competitive content to yours.

Just to weigh in quick, the only real paid traffic is through ppc campaigns. Other promises for x amount of traffic for y amount of money is a scam. There are several applications available through black hat websites which will spoof traffic to any site, the more sophisticated applications can even trick referral sites (ie Google) into believing that a keyword has triggered multiple visits to a website. If your goal is to make your stats look presentable for Adwords or other such programs then these programs could in theory help you if you didn't get caught, God help you if Google catches you though - welcome to SEO purgatory.

Other then that you need to realize that these services aren't offering real views from real people so if your website is focused on selling a product or service it absolutely will not help you.

Lets get this out of the way first, if you are trying to grow customer base you are fighting an uphill base with facebook without use of their PPC program. Organic reach is about as close to dead as possible for Facebook - so while you have little or no problem reaching customers who have already liked your facebook page or even a select grouping of their friends - generally speaking its really hard to attract new likes on facebook just through content sharing. People are going to facebook to catch up with friends and family - do you enjoy talking to telemarketers while at a family event or during meal times? Probably not, and thats exactly what facebook has become for marketers; you have become the next generation's telemarketer. People arent on there to see what you can sell them which is why you won't see organic growth the way everyone says you will.

Now if your largest concern is just getting your content shared; then you need to listen to some of the advice above - especially stultuske's advice. The largest trick with facebook is advertising without advertising - providing content which is entertaining, seemless in newsfeeds, and content worth sharing. Think of your own facebook browsing habits, when was the last time you shared a sponsered wall post for a product? I know personnally I never have but I have liked the product/service in very few occasions. What I have shared are funny memes from different brands …

To add to what Scott said, one thing we have encountered in the past is a Company will work out a contract flat rate agreement with a shipping company (UPS/Fedex/etc) and if they offer their products in say 3 countries they will average the shipping cost across all three countries (sometimes even weight the average moreso towards the most shipped to out of the three). They will then use that average number and calculate it into the COG (Cost of Goods).

This way it never is a loss in profits but its an amount that is actually factored into the product's cost to the Company; this way when they keystone the product for retail/distribution pricing the customer is actually paying more for the shipping then they actually would have if they just paid the shipping rate - BUT the Company puts on a good face because they offer "free" shipping.

To put it into an example;

You build widgets that cost $4 to build. Shipping costs $2 to the US, $3 to Canada and $6 to the UK. The US accounts for 75% of your sales, 15% come from Canada and 10% come from the UK. So effectively you'd come out with a weighted average of $2.55 (if my math is correct) for shipping bringing your COG to $6.55. You keystone at say 1.5 for distributors/wholesale and 3 for retail so your wholesale prices are going to be $9.83 and $19.65 - because you've calculated your shipping into your COG …

The biggest downfall we have seen so far is has become far more difficult to target and track campaigns. Lets say the conversion ratio is 60% higher on web design services versus website design services. We want to spend more advertising budget on what we know we is going to be more successful of the two; not dump hundreds or thousands into the close varients which may generate leads but isnt quite as successful as going to a proven niche varient. Also now that exact match is gone we can no longer track exactly what exact match advertising is driving those conversions instead we are given a vague idea by knowing its one of say 20 varients of the campaign.

In an overall online marketing campaign this is bad because we know that if one of the two varients is producing better results, historically we have always geared the on-page SEO and SMO towards that working exact match to garner better results for the Client and this has been a tried and proven method. As always we have begun to adapt but it has become a bit more difficult to be as effective as we once were. End of the day every year online becomes more and more of a precise science so when we can can accurately graph our target users with the more tools; then the better the results.

Ok so again what benefit has it brought you guys from an SEO standpoint? Every professional I have talked to that used to swear by facebook for SEO purposes and for brand awareness have done alot of complaining that facebook has next to no organic reach. I have even noticed quite a drastic reduction in the potential for organic reach and its why I barely use it anymore because 80% you can't get paying customers from it (I'm talking in the B2B marketspace and non-profit) - so give me your stats; how effective of a tool has facebook been aside from using FB ppc?

Link wheels can be effective tools but they need to be done right. You need to ensure that each link is sitting on a seperate C-Block to be the most effective (same C-Block will work just not as well) and the content needs to be quality content relevant to your main website. Throwing up multiple websites with garbage content will only hurt you.

opensiteexplorer.org

Well SEO is the only way you used to be able to increase PR as Pay Per Click (PPC) as a tool for your website will only bring you in traffic, think of it like you are renting the traffic (which can be effective if well implemented) it won't actually maintain traffic like SEO will.

SEO also takes awhile but PPC will be nearly instant traffic if done right.

As for Page Rank you really should do a Google search on it, especially a search for the last Google page rank update. Many sites will confirm that there have not been any publicly available PR updates since last December. So any company promising you page rank might be able to deliver on increasing google's internal page rank but you won't be able to tell because when you look at your sites PR on any tool it will still show 0 or the page rank you were given December 2013 ( if your website was around). If you are hiring an outside company remember you get what you pay for and its best to learn the basics or hiring a consultant who has an idea of what you are looking to have done to ensure you don't get scammed and sold on false promises.

Depends on how popular your website is and how you can value your website (this is where alexa rank is handy). If you can prove that you get the visitors/traffic then you can justify larger amounts. I can't tell you what your website is worth; however there was a guy who made $1 million dollars from selling every viewable pixel on his website (sold each 10px x 10px area for $1 and sold a million of them). Was it worth it to the ones paying? Questionable? But he created a viral fad that he could prove was worth that much money. So how much do you want from him? And how do you justify that cost? Those are questions you need to answer not us. I can't verify that you have 1 million real unique visitors a day; but maybe you can prove it to him

@MasterChat

Penguin, Panda, and Hummingbird are seperate algorithims with seperate purposes. Penguin for eliminating or penalizing black hat seo tactics, Panda for making sure high quality sites rank higher then low quality websites, and is a whole new way of how Google views websites. Moz has done a good job of explaining them each in this article:
Moz article

They explain it like this: imagine google search as an engine, penguin and panda are components (ie. filter or fuel pump) which are essential parts to the engine working. Think of hummingbird as a whole new engine for google.

Don't fret about PR; I highly doubt you'll see an increase in it anytime soon unless Google suddenly wants the public seeing this information again public PageRank is pretty much dead. Google constantly updates PR internally, it just isnt something that is viewable by anyone except google themselves. The last PR update was last December (2013).

So what you should actually focus on is mozRank; generally speaking - mR is a more accurate version of PR and if they ever do another public PR update again; the PR should be fairly relative to your mR at the time. So a website with a 4.95 mozRank should be a 5 PR if that makes sense.

Focus on optimizing your channel(s), build inbound links to your content, promote on relevant social media and blogs (one of the few times guest blogging can be done in a non-spammy way), and make sure the content can go viral.

So who is your target audience? I know you said its narrow but who are they? How does you friend intend to monetize this (monthly subscription, outright sale)? I hope you dont think any of this is negative because its meant to be real and not build you a fairy tale that you are going to sell a million units your first day and retire - it just wont happen.

You kinda took a losing bet in my opinion; I've done marketing on similar projects and this is a marathon you are about to run - not a viral sprint. Unfortunately its really hard to sell something when you are competing against free (there are alot of sweepstake type widgets out there). Free wins almost every time. Now I don't know the scope of these products but it does sound like you think you know your target market (alot more then most people know). So you want to find out everything you can about your market; what age are they? what demographic are they? where can you find these people?

Once you answer these questions to yourself then you can proceed. You don't hunt deer in urban areas; likewise you don't find customers where they dont exist. You are selling digital nothingness; its not something people can hold, smell, or taste - so your job has now become increasingly more difficult. You can tell me that your sweepstake software is going to bring my company a million new emails for …

Although adsense is the preferred way to go for advertising on youtube you do need to meet their guidelines which can take awhile. Let us know how your solution works out for you!

2-3 years ago yes it would have mattered. A big push back then was basically keyword stuffing which would include repeating keywords in meta tags, header tags, content, image tags, links, etc.

Back then using www.mysite.com (assuming mysite was a keyword you were trying to rank for) would have been big brownie points because it would have stacked with www.mysite.com/synonom-to-your-site-keyword increasing the chance of being ranked for that keyword. However nowadays the best practice revolves around a more natural way of building keywords so using relative links does not hurt your website rankings.

Shouldn't it be him charging you for publishing links and reviews on his website?