Contact Us

(609) 630-0764

SEO

All articles and work around SEO

The Future of SEO

Mon, 05/20/2013 - 11:01 -- by John Cashman

Back to the Future of SEOWhat is the future of SEO? Sometimes offering an SEO company is a little bit like shaking a magic eight ball and asking for stock tips. It’s still a guessing game, between people who do SEO and Google who creates search results. Over the last few years we have noticed a few trends that we believe will still be in vogue in the next few years.

On Site Optimization is still a big deal

At least 50% of the sites we evaluate for free don’t have good core SEO. Some of the more common problems we see are old or outdated content management systems, the same keywords being used over and over again and simply blank fields. We still spend a significant amount of time preparing sites to get going with SEO and don’t see that changing in the future.

Not enough time to create content.

We are big believers in blogging to get search results. On average our site gets about 300 visits a day from search and 95% goes to blog articles. Blogging is one of the best ways to build content and build keywords. However, most small business owners lack the time to blog and create content for their website. We continue to believe; SEO will need to create good content in the form of blogs, videos, pictures, infographs, etc. for their clients to keep their sites ranked in search results.

Bad SEO will continue to feed good SEO

At least once a week people ask us to look at their site and see if Panda or Penguin has penalized their sites. These leads typically had a relationship with an SEO company that “delivered great results” but later failed. Almost always this is due to some kind of link spamming. As Google continues to catch these tricks, there is no doubt that today’s SEO gamers, will be tomorrow’s lead of a white hat SEO company that plays by Google’s rules

Google will get better at guessing

One of the things the engineers at Google continue to work on is to understand how a person’s search history influences future searches. For example, if you ask Google about “Who is Tom Cruise” followed by “How tall is he?” Google can understand that the he is Tom Cruise. What the future may hold for Google is asking Google, what is there to do around here? And based on your location, passed searches, postings on Twitter or Google + and what’s in your email, Google may have a pretty good idea about what you like and be able to suggest events. What this means for an SEO is that they will need to continue to convince their clients that they will need to put as much as possible online for their business. Google is only as smart as the information it finds and indexes. If Google doesn’t know about it then it can’t suggest and it can’t provide personal choices.

For us SEOs, we will need to continue to evolve. There will still be a technical aspect to our jobs, but we will need to broaden ourselves into social media, design, content creation and website development, simply to ensure that a wide variety of our client’s business is online.

 

How to Disavow Links Using Google Webmaster Tools

Thu, 05/16/2013 - 20:11 -- by Sean Arnell

Disavow Links in Google Webmaster ToolsI’m sure if you’ve read enough of our blogs by now you know how awesome links are. Which means that you probably think that all links are great, right? Wrong. Actually some links could be hurting your SEO. Sites that are considered spam by Google will often link to hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of sites within one page. If Google catches one of your links on that page, you’re in trouble whether you put it there or not.

Luckily, Google offers a way to distance yourself, or “disavow” these links. We would like to warn you that you should never disavow links unless you’re absolutely sure that these links are harmful to your SEO. Otherwise, you can permanently damage your SEO. Here’s how you can check your links in Google Webmaster Tools.

  1. Go to your Webmaster Tools home page, and click on the site you’d like to disavow links to.
  2. Go to the dashboard and click Traffic. Then click Links to Your Site.
  3. Click on Who Links the Most, and then click More.
  4.  Click Download more sample links. You can also click Download latest links, if you’d like to see dates.

Now, here’s how to disavow links that are considered spam:

  1. Click the link to navigate to the Disavow Links Tool.
  2. Select the Website you’d like to disavow links to.
  3. Click the Disavow Links option.
  4. Choose a File

How to use AlgoSleuth to Check for Google Panda & Penguin Problems

Thu, 05/09/2013 - 18:00 -- by Sean Arnell

We get a lot of requests from businesses that have lost website traffic as a result of Google Panda or Google Penguin updates. They’re not sure when, or why they lost the traffic; they just suspect Google Panda or Google Penguin of causing it. For some, gauging any negative effects as a result of Panda and Penguin was a guessing game. Now, thanks to Delegator’s AlgoSleuth, you can find out where you lost traffic.

The function of AlgoSleuth is simple. If you have a Google Analytics account, you can use AlgoSleuth to find out how much traffic you had 30 days before a Google update, and 30 days after an update. So if you lost a significant amount of traffic after one update, there’s a good chance that you were hit with Panda or Penguin.

Want to know why you lost traffic from an update? No problem! AlgoSleuth includes a brief description of what was employed with each update. While no one outside of Google can tell you exactly what an update does, there are still some helpful hints available, which AlgoSleuth has included in this report. There are also some links to provide you with additional information should you need it.

Here’s how to use AlogoSleuth.

  1. Make sure you’re logged into Google Analytics.
  2. Open the AlgoSleuth website, then click “Get it for free”
  3. Click File, and make a copy of the spreadsheet.
  4. Go to Tools, then Script Gallery. Install “GA API”.

    GA API- AlgoSleuth

  5. A Google Analytics tab should now appear on your screen. Click on this tab, and select “Find profile/ids”. An authorization window will appear. Click “OK”. Then select “Grant Access” when prompted.
  6. Go back to the Google Analytics tab, and select “Find profile/ids” again. Select the account, web property, and profile of your choice. Then highlight and copy your ga number, under ids. (Make sure you also include the “ga:”)
  7. Paste the ga number in cell C23.
  8. Go back to Google Analytics once again, and click “Get Data”. The following window should appear, letting you know you’re done.

AlgoSleuth Report Status

  1. To access your results, click on the AlgoSleuth Data tab at the bottom of the page. AlgoSleuth Data

Now you can find out exactly which Google Panda and Google Penguin updates may have affected your site’s traffic. Should you want to export your results, you can do so by clicking file>Download As. Then simply choose the type of file you’d like to save the data with. You can also see a graph of your data with the AlgoSleuth Graph tab. A graph of our data is displayed below.

DFM Google Panda & Penguin Traffic- AlgoSleuth

 

What is Google Index Status and Why Does It Matter?

Mon, 05/06/2013 - 01:41 -- by John Cashman

One of the common misconceptions people have of Google is that when they use Google, they are searching the web. They aren’t searching the web at all. They are searching Google’s index of the web. One of the best ways to think about this is to think of how a library was once organized. Back in the day, OK ten years ago, when you went to find a book you went to the card catalog to find a book on a particular subject. If the card within the card catalog did not exist, you couldn’t find the book in the library.

Google works in a similar manner. Every hour of every day, Google is clicking on links to see where they go. They start on major websites like Wikipedia, the New York Times and their spiders go through the entire website and click on links that take them to other websites, where they repeat the process and go onto more and more until they reach presumably every website that has a link to other websites. As the spiders crawl over the web, they send information back to Google about what the website is about by looking at various keywords on the site. That information is then stored in Google’s index. When people search Google, the Google algorithm will rank the best results from its index in the order of 1 – infinity.

Therefore, in order to have websites rank within Google, the first step is to make sure your site is within the Google index. No matter the work you do to make sure the the site is on the right content management system or has the right keywords in place, if you don’t have those pages within the index, they will not show up in Google search results.

This can be accomplished in two ways.

  1. You can get a number of links to your website, where eventually the Google spider will come to your website and crawl it and add it to their index. The problem with this methodology is if certain pages aren’t linked to the main page, Google may not crawl them or index them.
  2. You can provide Google with a site map and ask them to crawl the site and submit it their index. This is accomplished in Google webmaster tools and is the preferred way to get websites into the index. Further as the website is updated, the sitemap is updated and tells Google there is a change that needs to be indexed again.

For example, we helped launch a site on 4/25. The site is based on the WordPress CMS, which is very search engine friendly and the yoast plugin which allows us to generate and send a site map to Google. On 4/26, we added the site map from the WordPress to Google via Webmaster tools and requested Google to recrawl and reindex the site as we had made a major site change. The previous version of the site only had 2 pages indexed, once we requested Google to crawl the site we increased the amount of indexed pages to 741.

Google Index Status

This is really one of the first steps in SEO. While the index status has been greatly improved, the actual ranks of each individual page needs to be improved as well. This will happen as the keywords are processed by Google, and links are made to the site.

Predicting Stock Increases or Decreases – The Power of Google Trends

Tue, 04/30/2013 - 14:21 -- by John Cashman

Stock Predictions using Google TrendsIn today’s financial environment, everyone from small time investors v. large institutional investors are always looking for a way, legal or otherwise, to predict whether or not a stock will increase or decrease over time. Many people have made or lost fortunes trying to be one way or another which way a stock will turn.

One predicting factor may actually be Google trends  Google trends shows users the traffic over time for particular search words. Using Google trends may help an investor predict whether or not a company’s product is being searched more than in previous seasons. For example if we look at the following search terms in Google trends for Apple, iPhone, iPad and iPad mini.

 

Google Trends on iPhone, iPad and iPad mini

Looking at the above data since 2007 we can see a huge increase in the amount of searches around iPhone and a decent amount of searches around iPad. This can be a relative predictor of both products successes as they both have done very well over the last six years. Compared to the iPad mini you can make a pretty good guess that Apple’s iPad mini has not been as successful as a product as the iPhone or iPad.

Further, one could look at the chart for 2013 and while there have been spikes, you make notice the trend line appears to be pointing to both iPhone and iPad searches have flat lined or slightly downward. This appears to be somewhat cyclical as Apple introduces new products, but may also indicate that the market for both devices has been saturated and we may not see impressive gains from Apple’s products and indirectly its stock.

How to Determine Which Keywords to Use for SEO

Wed, 04/10/2013 - 22:26 -- by Steve Ott

So much of search engine optimization revolves around which keywords to use that will establish good ranking in search results.  Using the right keywords and keyword phrases in the right places within your website that will yield results depends on several factors.  Just because you want to use specific keyword phrases doesn’t mean they will help. 

We are often asked to review keyword phrases that companies wish to use to help rankings.  Much of the recommendations we make are based on the following:

Website MozRank.  In its simplest form MozRank represents a website’s link popularity score. It reflects the importance of any given web page on the Internet. Pages earn MozRank by the number and quality of other pages that link to them. The higher the quality of the incoming links, the higher the MozRank.  The rank is from 0 to 10 with 10 being the best.  Getting a MozRank to move from 4 to 5 is 10 times more difficult than moving from 3 to 4.  Top MozRank sites like Google are a 10 while small stagnant websites with few or no links might score a 1 or 2.  Growing inbound links (referred to as link building) is the best way to increase your website MozRank score.  You can get your MozRank with the SEOMoz Tool bar. SEOMoz ToolbarWhen you've installed the tool bar, click on the magnifying glass, and use the drop down menu to access the "Link Data" option. That's where you will find the page analysis with MozRank, which is pictured to the right.

Keyword Competition.  By using the Google Keyword Tool we can identify how competitive key words and keyword phrases are.  Competition is graded on a scale from 0 to 1 (in fractions).  The closer the grade is to 1 the more difficult it is to use the keywords to accomplish good rankings.  Competition refers to how many OTHER websites use the same keyword phrase within their websites to achieve rankings.  The more sites that refer to the keyword phrase, the higher the percentage of competition.

How to Choose Keywords

The general rule of thumb is to choose keywords that have competition percentages that are near or below 1/10 of your MozRank.  For example:

  • If your website has a MozRank of 5.40, you should select relevant keywords that have competitive grades under .60.  The lower percentages, the better.
  • If you choose keywords with higher percentage grades (> .60) the less likely you will achieve rankings based on them.
  • This is referred to finding “good” keywords which are “low” competition.

So mapping 1/10 of your MozRank to keyword competition percentage grades should help you make good decisions when selecting keywords.

Screaming Frog Version 2.10

Tue, 04/09/2013 - 19:31 -- by Taylor Ritzel

Screaming FrogOne of the best SEO site evaluation programs out there just got better! Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider Development system, which got its start in 2010, crawls your site and collects important data. It is widely used to identify technical issues and provide a base for SEO recommendations. Digital Firefly Marketing uses Screaming Frog frequently when preparing audits, looking for things like broken links, page titles and clean URLs. But at the start of 2013, Screaming Frog launched two updated versions, including several new features like:

  • Configuration saving – Allows for a number of configurations to be saved and accessed quickly.
  • Speed measurement – Identifies slow loading pages by collecting response times for URLs.
  • Export link data in bulk – Save lots of link data on your hard drive without having to restart Screaming Frog.
  • Accepts cookies – Some websites don’t allow Screaming Frog to crawl the site without this feature, search bots for example do not accept cookies.
  • Response timeout – Now the SEO spider’s URL response time is configurable, so very slow loading websites won’t take as long.
  • New filters – SEO data search tools are more exact due to several new filters, such as page titles with under 30 characters or meta descriptions with under 70 characters.

These are just a few of the updates from Screaming Frog’s newest version. The SEO spider tool can also create filter totals, auto pause on reaching memory, look for 5XX response retry links and give users the ability for request authentication. The newest release in February of 2013 fixed a few bugs, like domain matching and date formatting, however Screaming Frog is constantly improving their software.

Check out some of our earlier blogs on how to use Screaming Frog and its SEO spider tool for SEO evaluation.

SEO Website Evaluation (4/5/2012)  SEO Evaluation (8/23/2012)

Our Presentation on Essentials to Digital Marketing

Thu, 04/04/2013 - 22:21 -- by John Cashman

Yesterday, we had the distinct pleasure to present our Essentials to Digital Marketing to the Mid Jersey Chamber of Commerce. Our presentation covered SEO, Social Media, Reputation Management as well as some of the best content management systems to build on.

 

How to Beat Google Panda

Thu, 03/21/2013 - 15:49 -- by Sean Arnell

Tropic Thunder Ben StillerIt’s been over a year now since the first Google Panda updates were rolled out.  Search results have dramatically changed, and many sites have found themselves either significantly higher or significantly lower in page rank.  For those of you whose visibility has decreased as a result of one of the Panda updates, there is still hope.  Here are some tips on how to beat Google Panda.

 

  1. Don’t overload your site with ads

While it may make good marketing sense to gain as much ad revenue as possible, it doesn’t make the most sense to a search engine.  Sites that are riddled with ads are often low-quality, and full of spam.  Google knows this, and that’s why these sites are disappearing to the bottom of the page rank, one-by –one. 

 

  1. Create a mobile version of your site

With the growing number of mobile phone users, it’s becoming increasingly important to offer a mobile version of your site.  You don’t want mobile users scrolling through your full site to read content.  Join the 21st century, and make it easy for them.

 

  1. Slow and steady loses the race

Make sure your site is optimized to run as quickly and efficiently as possible.  Pages that load quicker are usually in better standing with Google.  If pages on your site are loading to slow consider using smaller sized images, or move your site to a better server.

 

  1. Only quality content

You shouldn’t feel the need to fill your site with page, after page of useless content just to get more pages indexed by Google.  It is far better to have fewer pages with good content, rather than hundreds of pages with unnecessary content.  Sites with a lot of pages can often get out of hand.  Pages that the administrators might not even be aware of could be penalized by Google for poor quality.

 

  1. NO DUPLICATE CONTENT!

Do you have any pages on your web site that are being omitted in Google’s search rankings for being too similar?   Yes?  Then get rid of them!  Google is not a fan of duplicate content.  If you have any pages that you feel are too similar, merge them, or delete them. 

 

When working on your site, keep in mind that Google’s Panda updates are not intended to make things easier for computers.  They were created to make searches more efficient for humans.  With that in mind we offer this simple piece of advice:

“Write content for humans, not for SEO”.

Google Instant and SEO - Choosing Keywords for a blog

Wed, 03/20/2013 - 14:56 -- by John Cashman

When you write blogs on a daily or multi daily basis, one problem that can surface is trying to figure out a blog title. The blog title is important in relation to how Google indexes your site and more importantly whether or not that search term is already being used.

Google Instant was launched in September, 2010,and shows search results while you type in your search to offer suggestions around what you may be searching. The data is similar to keywords and phrases Google shows when you use the keyword tool or Google trends but without as much data.

What this can do for people looking for a blog or web page title is give you a quick title or subject to blog about without having to go through Google keyword tool. For example for this blog, I knew I wanted to write about Google Instant and keywords. So when I type in “Google Instant and keywords” in the Google search bar I don’t get any searches that are relevant so chances are other people won’t see it as well.

Google Instant 1

However, when I change the phrase around to “Google Instant and SEO” I end up getting more keywords people are searching for along with adding “Choosing keywords for a blog”.

Google Instant 2

Google Instant 3

Now once Google indexes this blog, we will appear in those searches, maybe on the first page, maybe farther back, but we know those searches already exist.

 

 

Pages

Subscribe to RSS - SEO