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Useful SEO Sites

SEO-Dashboard As the SEO industry continues to grow more and more sites are popping up on the web with their version of a dashboard. Each of these dashboards offers something different, and they can also be useful when scanning a site for SEO. Here are a few sites that we like to use when we look at a site.

SEO Moz- Perhaps the most important SEO tool is SEO Moz. When scanning a site, we like to use SEO Moz’s Open Site Explorer, which will tell you how many links there are for a website, as well as how many domains those links are coming from. This is really important in determining where a site might rank on Google for two reasons. First, the number of links can be a big factor in ranking one site ahead of another. This is why we constantly preach things like blogging, and proper social media use as this is a great way to increase the number of links. The other reason is something known as a link diversity ratio, or the number of total links divided by the number of linking root domains. This is a simple and effective way of comparing the number of links to the domains that those links are coming from.

Virante- Virante is unique in that it offers a “Duplicate Content” dashboard. Google often penalizes sites that contain multiple pages with similar content as a cheap way of increasing their page rank. This tool quickly scans your site, and lets you know if you have any pages with content that is too similar.

Majestic SEO- Majestic SEO is a great tool for a couple of reasons. First, it gives you great insight into the anchor text that is contained within your links. The site will break it down into a pie chart, and show you what anchor text is being used the most. Another reason is the link profile tool, which breaks links down by two metrics- citation flow, and trust flow. Citation flow is weighed by the number of citations to a URL or domain, while trust flow is weighed by the number of clicks from a seed set of trusted sites to a URL or domain.

Pingdom- Have you ever clicked on a site, then hit the back button only a few seconds later because the site was taking way too long to load? This is where Pingdom comes in handy. Pingdon tells you the load speed for your site in seconds, so you can avoid this issue.

Raven SEO Tools- Raven might be the most comprehensive website out there. Loking for how many visits you get from your keywords, your social activity, or what sites are referring to your website the most? Raven has it all, and more. Raven also gives you the freedom to edit your dashboard. So, you can bring in the data that you find usefeul, and remove everything else. Last but not least, Raven allows you to run reports of your sites, which you can then download as a PDF file.

There are dozens of helpful SEO sites on the web. These are just a few of the many great SEO dashboards out there. Feel free to share some of the sites you use with us in the comment section.

How Social Media Helps SEO

Many people come to us and say “I need some SEO done to my website”. This is typically because they have seen a drop off in inbound calls/inquiries or never seem to be found through search. Of course there are many things that can be done to a website that improves its search rankings.

However, what many don’t realize is how much impact Social Media can have on the SEO success. All too often we see websites with links to social media profiles only to find that either the link to the social network is just a placeholder or a profile that was thrown together with no real appeal or recent posts. Of course, we see companies with real good social media too – they are the ones that have already “gotten it”.

What to do and why:

Step 1 – Create or acquire new fresh content. Companies should always be creating fresh content for use on or through their website. This content could revolve around: company news, press releases, industry news and trends, events, webinars, newsletters, presentations, video presentations, blogs, guest bloggers, breaking news, product announcements, client success stories, case studies, whitepapers, industry announcements, promotions and a host of other sources. Keep the content coming, as content drives what goes on in your Social Network profiles and give Google more to index for search

Step 2 – Post content or excerpts of content in your social network profiles. These MUST contain links back to your website for the whole story or for more information. These “Link Backs” begin the organic process of expanding links back to your website through social media and through your own audience that may link back to your original article. Remember the greater the number of links, the better your search rankings. Your posts should be consistent across your Social Network’s, however, your presentation may be different between them. The way you post in Facebook is different than what you tweet about in twitter yet both should be related to the same topics.

Step 3 – Set up a Queue of Content to Post. The easiest way to stay on top of your social media is to create a queue of content that is to be released (posted, tweeted, Pinned, etc.) at the beginning of a week and trickle it out daily throughout the week keeping all your social media up to date.

What Happens

As people read company posts, tweets, Pins, etc. they begin to “Like” them, “Follow” them, “Comment” on them, “Share” them, “Repin” them, “email” them, etc. Soon the company realizes that they have Followers and others “Talking” about them AND Linking back to their website. Result: more people hit your website INDEPENDENT of just pure search. And, it really doesn’t matter what industry we are talking about. We see companies that garner 1,000s or 10s of 1,000s of followers from the financial industry to consumer services to etailers to entertainment to food and beyond.

The viral nature of social networks is unprecedented in anything we use to “spread the word”. Using them to drive interested people back to your website could have a dramatic impact on your overall SEO success plan without spending much money – it only takes time and effort. Ok yes, we know, time is money too!

Why Facebook Search is a game changer

Today, Facebook announced that it will start rolling out search. On first glance this might not seem like such a big deal, after all there already is a nice little search box on Facebook already. However, graph search is an entirely different search for things on Facebook.

Presently the Facebook search box does one thing well, it helps you search for friends or people you might want to friend. It helps you answer the question, what ever happened to______? Once we find those people we are able to connect with them and start to share our lives. The next step in that relationship is going to be powered by Facebook search. And it let's you ask A LOT more questions

What graph search will be able to do (so we are told) is to search though all your friends activities from when they have been on Facebook and come up with a list of things you may be looking for. Think about it this way, it makes everything you and your friends and their friends' activities searchable and discoverable. For example:

People - People who live in my city and likes to hike, or people who live in my city and are single, or people who like to fish, etc.
Pictures - Look for a particular picture taken on a particular date or of a particular object like the Sydney Opera House
Places to go - Stuck in a city - find a place people in your circle have been and recommended
Movie, Music and TV show to watch - what shows are big with your family, close friends, or their friends?
Services - Looking for a dentist? See who has recommended and how many dentists have a lot of "likes"

The search results that come back are the recommendations within Facebook. Unlike Google that redirects you to another site from its search results, Facebook wants to keep you in their walled garden a little longer. Also, all of the information in Facebook is not publicly available and is unique to you and your circle of friends which may make it a better source of "local" knowledge than Yelp or Google.

Facebook is making a big bet that the data they have been collecting will be able to inform those searches. If the search comes up empty, then Bing which is a Facebook partner will search the web. My guess is that more most things it will not come up empty. They just have too much information on what people have done over the last few years.

What this means for marketers and business is still a little foggy as the product is brand new and will likely be improved in the months and years to come. However, what we can surmise, is that marketers and business that have invested in Facebook should be rewarded early as they will appear in search results and most likely higher in each result based on likes, the posts they made, check-ins and recommendations. Those businesses that have not invested or ignored their social media are going to be forced to play catch up in a hurry so they can get ranked in Facebook searches.

It is not surprising given the number of ex Googlers at Facebook that they have made search a priority. Over the next couple years, this search will improve. What any business should keep in mind is that just like SEO for a website, they will need to be vigilant about their social media and particularly Facebook. Ensuring you spend time on Facebook every day or pay someone to do it for you will ensure your business is found soon via Facebook.

Changing Fonts

Using the correct fonts for a client’s branding is just as important as using their logo consistently. Using the font throughout their collateral is vital to marketing, but it isn’t always easy.

Often times, clients come to us very disorganized and can’t find original files. And even if they can, fonts are often turned to outlines in order to be web compatible, which eliminates your ability to identify them directly in AI or PS. So how can you match the fonts if you have no clue which font it is?

Luckily, there is a handy dandy app called, “WHAT THE FONT?”

It’s a quick and simple, yet an incredible lifesaver. Just take a snap of the font on your smart phone and upload it. What the Font will ask you to verify the characters in the photo. Here you can delete any that aren’t being used correctly. Then click “identify”.

Changing Fonts with What the Font?

The app analyzes the characters and gives you a list of fonts that match. Typically, there is more than one option unless it is a very easily identifiable font (Arial, Helvetica, Palatino, etc.) You can either email the list of fonts choices or select the font that matches best. Here, additional information about the font can be obtained. You can then use this information to search for a font file online, or ask your client to see if they have any font files that match the fonts on the list. It’s likely they will be able to do so, considering the file had to originate from somewhere. But instead of blindly looking for a font amongst hundreds of files, you have a better place to start.

What is Exact Match Domain penalty in Google and how to fight it

EMD Penalty One of the best parts about being an SEO company is when Google changes their algorithm to something new. This invariably causes a number of sites who have used shady SEO or put their eggs in one basket to all of a sudden drop in the search rankings. One of the latest changes to the Google search algorithm is something known as EMD, or Exact Match Domain.

EMD refers to the use of a possible search term for your website's URL. For example, howtoinvestinstocks.com is your URL. "How to invest in stocks" is an exact phrase that someone might type into Google when looking for financial advice, so Google could be penalizing a site with and exact search phrase in the URL - seeing that as an unfair advantage over other sites offering financial advice which don't use this practice. While it may not be intentional, there are sites out there which name their domain after a search phrase in order to get found on Google. EMD is just Google's method of cracking down on these sites.

However, if you do have a site with some exact search names, you can still overcome a penalty simply by following usual SEO best practices

Make sure you have plenty of legitimate links coming back to your site. While an EMD penalty might take away your advantage, having more links than your competition can get you to the top of the search rankings.
Use social media to your advantage. In our experience, the people who tend to get hit with penalties don't use social media so they aren't getting their sites out there for people to consume them.e
Keep your site up to date by adding at least one piece of original content each week and then send it out via social media
Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Too many times, we have seen people lock in on one keyword only to find that later once Google makes a change they lose all of their work spent trying to outsmart Google.

As we start 2013, it's becoming clear that Google is not being shy in weeding out every low quality site technique out there to grab traffic. By creating content regularly, investing in social media and a legitimate linking strategy, will make sure you aren't penalized in the future.

How Twitter Has Changed Sports

This weekend, the Divisional round of the NFL playoffs begins. While the outcome of these games, and the matchups for the AFC, and NFC championship games are yet to be determined one thing is for sure; Twitter will be going crazy with NFL-related tweets. This is the case with any major sport, as Twitter has had a major impact on sports, and the way in which sports fans get their news, and react to it.

We’ve already seen some big sports news hit Twitter this week. On Monday, Kobe Bryant, and Dwight Howard had some fun with the media via the social networking site. Reports broke out on New Year’s Day that Howard had to be restrained by other players as he was going to confront Bryant following a loss to the 76’ers. Kobe Bryant, who just hopped on the Twitter bandwagon last week, posted this image of himself and Dwight Howard jokingly putting their fists up, with Lakers’ coach Mike D’Antoni in the middle.

Kobe Bryant-Dwight Howard-Mike D'Antoni

As expected, the Twitter world went nuts about the photo. As of right now it has been retweeted 24.2 thousand times, and favorited 13.1 thousand times.

Aaron Sele Trending Twitter An uproar broke out on Twitter last night after it was revealed that none of the 37 players on the 2013 Major League Baseball Hall of Fame ballot, (including Mike Piazza, who should have been voted in), were elected into Cooperstown. Baseball fans quickly took to the site to vent their frustration. As with any other year, there were players on the ballot that many wouldn’t consider Hall of Fame worthy, and didn’t receive any votes. In fact, 11 of the 37 eligible players didn’t get a single vote. Surprisingly, former starting pitcher Aaron Sele, who only won 148 games, and posted a 4.61 ERA actually received a vote. Twitter users had some fun with this news, as Sele’s vote was turned into a joke, and a statement about the flaws of the current voting process. So Aaron Sele, whose 15-year baseball career was largely one of mediocrity, became one of the top trending phrases on Twitter last night.

So if you’re going to miss a game this weekend, don’t worry. Just whip out your smart phone, and open the Twitter app. It won’t take long before you find out what happened. Oh, and feel free to tweet your opinions. You won’t be the only one.

Why I Run More Thanks to Nike

I like to think of myself as a fairly experienced runner. I originally took up the sport back in 2004 as way to get into shape for the upcoming winter snowboarding season because I was tired of getting “winded” every time I completed just a couple of runs in the Colorado Rockies. It turns out that running really had no effect on getting acclimated to a higher altitude, but it did give me an alternative to working out in a stuffy gym.

I hit the running trails and soon signed up for my first 5K which then turned into a 10K and before I knew it, I had completed my first marathon in 2005. Years later I carry a sense of pride having completed five marathons including two in New York City (I might have completed a sixth, but Hurricane Sandy forced the cancelation of the 2012 New York City Marathon). But after seven years of running, I began to experience complacency and some amount of “burn-out.”

This past summer, my older brother introduced me to the Nike Running App for my iPhone. I was initially hesitant to use it since my Garmin GPS had worked so well in the past. But giving it a try I was pleased with the range of music I could listen to as well the “atta-boys” that congratulate the runner after a long run, new record set, etc.

But the real motivation to run more took place just before Christmas. This was when Nike updated the app so that not only could I see how many miles I was running, but how many miles my friends were running as well. All of a sudden, I was getting quite competitive when I saw that a friend of mine had logged more miles in a month than I had. This pushed me to get in a 10K run on Christmas Day when I felt that others wouldn’t be quite so motivated to run. It also pushed me to run seven miles on December 31 so I could be assured that the top running spot for the month of December would be mine.

You could chalk this up to good old fashioned competition between friends, but actually it is more interesting than that. What Nike has done is taken the social media aspect and placed into a program to motivate people to exercise. Would I have been motivated to run seven miles the afternoon of New Year’s Eve without it? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe if I had a friend nearby who ran with me, but my friends live in New Jersey and California.

Thanks to Nike and social media, I was driven to be the top runner for the month of December. . . and yes when the clock struck midnight, I did check my phone just to make sure my friends hadn’t snuck in a few miles to unseat me.

Creating a mobile site using responsive design

What is more annoying than visiting a site on your iPhone, pinching to see read the content, then having to continuously scroll only to be able to read one sentence at a time? Absolutely NOTHING!

Fortunately, there is an easy solution to this issue. Its called Responsive design and creating a mobile site using responsive design is one of the ways websites can show the same site on multiple form factors.

The unfortunate thing is many websites are still using the same designs for a page visited on a desktop as a mobile device. And frankly, I’d rather not visit the site than deal with the annoyance mentioned above. Responsive design takes into consideration the screen size and resolution of the device being used to visit a website. This means, when you visit a site on your mobile phone, it is in a layout that is actually conducive to reading and browsing on that device. No pinching necessary; just easy vertical scrolling.

To turn a desktop design into a responsive mobile design, you have to consider the site in terms of blocks. Each area of a webpage is considered a block—the header, sidebar, content, buttons, etc.

All the blocks on a desktop design are rearranged vertically for better usability on a mobile device. Any of these blocks can be hidden if it is unnecessary to have them on a mobile site. But because the content is rearranged according to the location of the blocks instead of content itself, there cannot be any content on the mobile site that isn’t on the desktop site.

For instance, if you consider the Digital Firefly Marketing website, you can see how much easier it is to read the responsive mobile content vs. the non-responsive mobile content. By simply stacking the blocks vertically, the design is much easier to read and incredibly user friendly, incorporating all the visual elements of the original site.

Site speed, Image Cache and location in SEO and websites

Recently, we moved our site and our clients' sites from Hostgator to Linode. We did this for two reasons: speed and localization. Beyond just moving to Linode, we also configured the websites to do a better job to cache images so the websites load faster. By increasing the speed of the site and the localization, we believe the sites will not only perform better, but also get better SEO results.

Site speed or how fast a site load has both direct and indirect SEO results as well as direct results of the consumer experience. With Google's Panda update, one of the changes in the search algorithm was to take the site's speed into account when ranking sites. Speedier sites move up and slower sites move down. Google also measures bounce rate from search results and will push websites down that have high bounce rates from search because it is an indication people have not found what they are searching for. Therefore, by increasing the site speed less people will bounce away due to a slow website. Using Pingdom, we were able to monitor our sites and along with some clients who don't have their sites on our servers and we are able to show that moving to a better facility increased our site speed.

Stats for hosting

Looking at some of the stats above for clients not on our servers, you can see that they are wasting up to one second of load time on just getting the server to respond!

The second reason we moved to Linode was due to its proximity to our offices. As search becomes more localized, we feel its important for people to have their site as close to their core customers as possible. We believe this helps not only because lag time has decreased, but also because Google takes the local IP into account as people search.

Once we had moved our servers, we started to look for better ways to cache our images. One of the main drivers in site speed being slow or fast is how many images are on the page and whether or not those pictures are large files or small files. Using an image cache we are able to tell a browser to download our images that are used on every page like our logo. When the user asks the browser to go to the next page, the browser doesn't have to request the image again and can load that much faster. This takes load off of the server because it isn't doing repetitive tasks and everyone using the website gets a site that loads faster. The second thing we did was look at each individual page in Google Analytics to see which page loaded slowly. Typically this was due to many images being on the page or an image that was not optimized meaning it was over 200 kb in size. Saving those files so they are smaller in memory size but not actual physical size helped use reduce the load time on those pages.

While we still have many more images to optimize and more tuning to do, the first month's results speak for themselves with the avg. page load time decreasing by 46% and the avg server response time decreasing 62%.

Improvement in site speed

What is Reputation Management?

We recently began offering reputation management as one of our marketing services here at Digital Firefly. This makes us unique in that reputation management is not typically offered by digital marketing firms. So what is reputation management?

Reputation management is essentially a loop of reporting about an entity’s actions. That entity can refer to a company or a person. The loop starts with tracking an entity’s actions, and the opinions of other entities regarding those actions. The next step is reporting on these actions and opinions. Finally, the loop is finalized by reacting to these reports.

There are three different categories of reputation management; building, maintenance, and recovery. Building a reputation involves releasing your own positive press. Did your firm just gain a high-profile new client? Great! Now, why not tell people about it?

Maintenance simply refers to keeping an eye on the opinions about an entity’s actions, and ensuring that the public opinion of that entity remains positive. This is done when the entity is well established, and already has a positive reputation.

Recovery is involved when an entity has earned a negative reputation. This is where reputation management really comes into play. In order to repair an entity’s damaged reputation, steps must be taken to “hide” the bad press, and create positive content. We like to refer to this as “reverse SEO”. Typically with SEO we try to get our clients listed in the top search results on Google for the best possible keywords. Reverse SEO is a process by which positive content is created and pushed to the top of Google’s search results, while the negative content is pushed down the rankings where it is less likely to be found. This can be accomplished through creating blogs, hiring someone to write a direct review of an entity, syndicating article writing, and using social media effectively.

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Useful SEO Sites

How Social Media Helps SEO

Why Facebook Search is a game changer

Changing Fonts

What is Exact Match Domain penalty in Google and how to fight it

How Twitter Has Changed Sports

Why I Run More Thanks to Nike

Creating a mobile site using responsive design

Site speed, Image Cache and location in SEO and websites

What is Reputation Management?

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