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Google uses human raters to manually review many websites in order to ensure their search results are truly relevant and helpful to searchers…not everything can be sifted through with their almighty algorithms.

Last week, a Google document was leaked that’s essentially instructions and guidelines for rater team members to do their job. This means SEOs now have a better understanding of how Google evaluates sites.

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Writing descriptions for your products or web pages is easy if you have 5, 10, or 20 web pages. However, we work with a few larger clients that have 100′s of web pages or sometimes even 1000′s of products in a web store.

While our recommendation is to have unique descriptions for all of these pages / products (which is good for SEO), it’s something that takes way too much time for most clients (and sometimes doesn’t happen due to the time constraints).

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In the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Google Analytics can be a very useful tool. Reports can be tailored using some custom features of the system. This gives valuable information that can be used in analyzing how to increase revenue on a site.

In a post by Sajeet Nair on SEOmoz, he used some custom reports to find out how he could increase revenue on a website.  While reviewing the reports it was discovered that a couple of the browsers (Opera, Opera Mini) had about the same number of visits, but one had higher revenue. While analyzing this, it was noticed that one of the other browsers (Android) had fewer visits but was receiving over 5000% more revenue when compared to Opera and Opera Mini.

The discovery was made that when searching for the website on these three browsers, both Opera and Opera Mini (which is a mobile browser) link to the desktop versions of the website, but Android links to the mobile version of the website.  The takeaway form this analysis is that when mobile users were taken to the mobile version of the site, then revenue will improve.

For a review of your website to understand if you are missing out on revenue or if you have any questions, feel free to contact us or comment below.

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Image credit: Via Flickr user welendcashhouston

According to the SEOmoz Daily Blog by Cyrus Shepard, Google’s Panda Update looks at the entire site instead of just pages. You may ask how this affects Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Well, it means that while a site might have a great page or two, if other pages have some of the following mistakes then it can make the ranking with Google lower for the entire site.

Too Much Almost Duplicate Content – does the site have enough original content or have you re-purposed your (or other people’s) content?

Empty Pages – does the site contain pages that do not have much in the way of content; is most of the page blank?

Repetitive and Coincidental Articles – does the site have several posts that talk about the same thing with a little different keyword phrases?

Too Many Ads – Even though Google’s Adsense wants sites to have their ads on the site, Google’s Panda update will lower the ranking of a site if their are far too many ads.

Automatic Content – if the site contains pages built by machines then Panda will devalue the site. This is related to the content quality recommendations above.

Does your site need to be remodeled  or redesigned to take care of any of these issues? Contact us or comment below.

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Image credit: Via Flickr user Henry407 ( HL )

According to an article by Jennifer Van Iderstyn on SEJ Search Engine Journal, link building has an element of seasonality to it. This can be helpful to your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) campaign and specifically any link building campaigns you’re pursuing.

In summer, response rates on link building campaigns can be slower than the rest of the year, because people take vacations and are outdoors more than other months. Fall is back to school time and it is a time to develop content that will appeal to teachers, parents and students- take this into account when pitching content to bloggers. Winter is cold in the northern parts of the world, so people tend to be online more and with all the holidays during this time of year it is a great time for special offers, discounts and sales. Spring is a good time to evaluate and plan.

Link building is a multi-part single strategy and has to be adjusted to different circumstances and times of year. That is why it is good to have a team that understands these seasons and can build a plan to follow.

What is your organization’s or company’s best season? Let us know in a comment below and feel free to contact us today with any questions.

It is generally known in the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) realm that Google PageRank is not the primary metric used for link building analysis. This is partially due to the fact that Google has infrequent and random PageRank updates. It has been known to take up to 11 months between updates, though this is rare.

There are some practical ways of using PageRank. One would be as a “raw” indicator. For example how many pages are pointed to the page and how important the pages are that link to this? How important is this on the grand scale of the Web?

It is also useful to compare with other metrics to find out if there is something wrong with the site. For example if Google has a page rank of 2 but another such as MozRank has a page rank of 5, it might be something to look into to find out why- Google may be having trouble access the site.

The history of PageRank can also be helpful to gain insight into the direction it is going. Is the page rank improving and going in the direction intended, or is it drastically down which could mean the page is being penalized for some reason.

Most SEO’s understand that PageRank only measures pages, not domains. That means that it ranks the page within the domain- for example the SEOmoz.org home page is ranked as a 6.83 on MozRank, and their Plans and Pricing page is ranked as 6.32. In some cases a deeper page on a website (i.e. website.com/category/page) can rank much lower than another page on the website.

To find out more about this topic you can watch the video by Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz.

In the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) field there has been some talk lately of boosting your Google rankings with search volume through social media such as Google + and Twitter. Basically what this means is that the number of people searching for the exact same link and the click through rate of websites in the search results will affect the rankings on Google.

As shown in an SEOmoz case study, the search volume may affect the page ranking for more specific topics, but does not have a noticeable effect on general topics. For example Compete on Web when searched for “blog compete” does not show up on the first page of Google. However “blog compete on web” shows up as number 6 on Google search.

The SEOmoz study indicates that if more people search for the same exact topic (i.e. blog compete on web) and then click on the same link, then this will cause the link to appear in a higher position. If the link is posted on Google + and Twitter the number of people who repost or retweet also may have an effect on the ranking.

You can find out more about this study performed by Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz.

Since the launch of Google+ in late June the site has hit 20 million plus users and continues to grow. It is being heavily debated regarding what impact this will have on Search Engine Optimization SEO.

Most people seem to agree that it will have a big impact in the way pages are ranked. This is because Google+ seems to provide Google with link data that the other social media channels (i.e. Facebook, Twitter) do not (at least not as easily).

If you want to find out more about the impact of Google+ check out these sites: Social Link, SEOmoz, Search Engine Journal and Search Engine Land.

If you have any comments or questions, please comment below or contact us.

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Image credit: Via Flickr user bruceclay

The goal of any search engine optimization (SEO) company is to increase the exposure that their clients receive online (i.e. increasing rankings, etc.).

While there are quite a few methodologies to follow in SEO, Matt McGee’s “SEO Success Pyramid” over at SmallBusinessSEM.com is a well thought-out approach.

In short, the pyramid covers the basics such as internal company commitment to pursuing SEO, ensuring the quality of products and services being promoted, and understanding of the time it takes for an SEO project. The pyramid then goes through multiple levels of an SEO project, including ensuring website accessibility to search engines and keyword research.

These are similar methodologies that we follow with our own client projects. Feel free to reach out in the comments section with any questions you have after reading Matt’s post or contact us directly.

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Image credit: via Flickr user vkreay

Lately there has been a significant amount of talk about how social media is taking over traditional Search Engine Optimization (SEO). There have been studies done by “Techies” and the results show that traditional SEO is still very relevant.

Social media does have an effect on SEO but it is not taking over the traditional forms of link building, keyword research, and quality content. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and now Google + all do help to rank your site higher depending on the number of times the information in shared on these sites. One single post will not do much to boost your ranking, but having your post shared through a multitude of users will increase your rankings significantly over time.

If you would like to read more about the study that was performed, check out the SEOmoz post by Cyrus Shepard.

Are you currently using social media in your business? If so, have you seen any influence on your rankings recently? Let us know in the comments.

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image credit: via Flickr user carolos_maya