SEO

San Antonio SEO Consultant shows 8 Ways Web Sites Sabotage their Search Engine Rankings

The recent public opening of Google+ and the announcement of sweeping changes for Facebook underscore the growing complexity of search ranking factors (SEO), and the need for website owners to ensure they aren’t sabotaging their own sites, according to San Antonio SEO consultant Wayne Baumgarten.

“We see a number of clients who need help in pulling their sites up in search rankings,” said Baumgarten, owner of San Antonio website design firm Cook Profitability Services. “And in many cases, the first step is to undo problems the previous web developers or the clients themselves have created.”

SEO sabotage comes in various forms, Baumgarten says. The most common include:

1) SPEAKING THE WRONG LANGUAGE

One of the most common reasons for SEO problems is the failure to speak the language of the search audience. For both SEO and for internet advertising, it’s critical to do the research to find out which search terms are being used most to find the goods, services or topics relevant to a particular site. Unfortunately many sites – especially those operated by professionals – often use industry jargon or technical terms, rather than common language that syncs with the way people really search. A good place to start is with a program such as Google’s keyword tool – the one accessible inside Adwords. The first step taken by a good SEO consultant is to research keywords and help the client translate his “professional-speak” into “search English.”

2) DOMAIN GAMES

There are many non-SEO considerations that go into a domain name – from existing bricks-and-mortar branding to audience retention to perceived image. But for businesses without an existing domain, SEO should be one of the factors. A search engine-friendly domain name isn’t necessary to SEO – there’s significant clout to owning a 10-year-old domain, for example – but it does count. Especially for local markets, geography is important, as well as product or service keywords. If you can snag FortWorthWidgets.com or Denver-Doodads.com, grab them quickly.

3) IGNORING GEOGRAPHY

The changes and importance placed on Google Places in search rankings underlines how important it is that a site is clearly and prominently tied to a geographical area. If your potential client is searching for “Houston dentist,” the practices that have most closely tied themselves to the Houston market show up at top of the results, tied to the mapping. This year’s overhaul of the Places presentation blurs the line between old-style map listings and “organic” listings.

Claiming your business listing on Google Places is critical. As is prominent placement – in bot-readable text – of the business’s local phone number and address. Geography should also be included in the site title and description.

4) GIVING IN TO THE DARK SIDE

Any website with contact information only has likely received one or more emails or call out of the blue from a company guaranteeing that its services can push the site to the top spot on Google. The proper response is “No thanks” or delete. This is the SEO equivalent of the Nigerian bank scam.

Google has a well-deserved reputation for dealing harshly with people and sites trying to game its algorithms, and a website desperate to move into stunts and end-runs may well find itself dropping to the bottom of the search results, or even blocked. Such bad practices includes keyword-stuffing (loading a page with repeated keywords), keyword cloaking (hiding repeated keywords with non-visible text colors or tiny sizes), keywords that don’t reflect the actual content of the site, backlink spamming and many others.

5) LIVING IN A BAD NEIGHBORHOOD

No legitimate business should consider a site on a free host. The web equivalent of perverts, pimps and drug dealers use such hosts for everything from scams to junk backlink sites and unsavory operations of all types. Many legitimate sites have found themselves deleted from search rankings as search engines redline entire servers that host bad sites.
6) BEING UNSOCIAL

With Google now indexing Twitter and other social media, there is more reason than ever to establish accounts and be active for SEO reasons. The activity is key, because anyone can create a social account in minutes. But creating a presence in any social media is about regular streams of content, whether status updates or newsfeeds or Facebook’s new Timeline. Google+ is also picking up steam, with more than 40 million users.

7) DEAD CONTENT AND OTHER ONSITE FOLLIES

Google has said repeatedly that its goal is to present the highest-quality sites and pages that match a user’s search terms. Its algorithms are intended to look at on-site and off-site clues to the quality of the site. Most shaky SEO strategies hinge essentially on faking these clues. There’s another strategy: to actually create relevant, dynamic and compelling content, showcased in a site technology and coding that makes it easy for search engine spiders to navigate and index.

Do’s: Take advantage of all standard HTML tags, including image titles and alt text; create page and blog titles and article content that use relevant keywords; use content links to other pages on the site; use links that contain keywords, rather than “read more” or “related information”; use relevant keywords as high in the content as possible; blog frequently and share often.

Dont’s: Overuse keywords; use image-based headers and titles unless you know how to make them SEO-friendly.

8) IGNORING OFFSITE SEO

Backlinking schemes are grounded in truth: In its quest to put high-quality content at the top of search results, Google considers backlinks to a web site. The more legitimate or authoritative sites that link back to your site, the better for your site ranking. Obviously this is part of the formula that’s open to gaming, and Google works to keep spammy links from interfering with its algorithm. Purchased links, link-trading and swarms of links generated by black-hat companies and backlink software are in dangerous territory. But good backlinks are another thing, and can be nurtured in a number of legitimate ways, from guest-blogging, social media, comment links and others.

“The best SEO is a commitment to a well-coded site with continually updated, value-added content that follows best practices for style, headline writing and keyword placement, along with ongoing outreach through social media,” Baumgarten said. “Taking shortcuts can be expensive, ineffective in the long term, and can even result in penalties.”

Tips from San Antonio SEO Expert Wayne Baumgarten

CPS is a national full-service marketing, new media development and management consulting firm, based in San Antonio, specializing in comprehensive profitability services for dental practices and professional offices.

Why a Press Release?

You don’t have any big company news to report, so why consider a customized press release?

As a dental or medical practitioner, you’re likely aware of Search Engine Optimization – the art of moving your site up in search engine rankings through an array of strategies.

One major factor affecting search engine rank is quality “backlinks” – a link back to your site from another credible website.

One legitimate strategy is to combine a well-written, compelling news release that will be read for months, or even years. And distributing it on a service such as PRWeb, which offers extensive SEO and multimedia tools. A good article can be picked up by thousands of web sites, including major media sites that provide extremely high-quality backlinks.

A press release get’s it’s own internet listing, creating more on-line visibility for you. It also impacts your search engine optimization by referring visitors to your website.

A good example of a press release impacting search engine optimization is a press release we did for a dentist who had spent considerable time and care to create an eco-friendly office. This release was picked up by some of the major “green” oriented news outlets in the United States and resulted in considerable traffic being generated, a lot of positive feedback, and of course increase search engine optimization for his main website.

Cook Profitability Services includes a Pulitzer Prize-winning veteran newspaper journalism who can craft compelling releases – 210-601-1050.

SEO for Non-Geeks: In the beginning was the Info Superhighway

Editor’s note: This is the first of a multipart series on SEO, designed to educate small businesses and organizations insight into the important, but often-deceptive, world of SEO consulting. The series is meant to give website owners enough insight to carry on a well-informed conversation with a consultant, as well as tips on steps they can take themselves to improve their sites.

Part 1 of a Series About SEO

In the beginning, we called it the Information Superhighway, a cliché that now seems quaint. But to follow that analogy, the web was a highway with few exits, no billboards and no maps.

The newly public World Wide Web was fresh from the incubator of universities and think tanks, which shared favorite links to help spread the word about new and interesting sites. Those were the days when a link might be an IP address, rather than a domain name, and DotNet had much more credibility than DotCom in a tech world that debated the idea of even having a commercial world.

We navigated the web by looking at lists of links on well-known sites, where we learned about other cool and useful sites. Almost immediately, web sites emerged that collected and shared links, organized by category.

The colossus of this era was the original Yahoo, with thousands of wannabe’s and “cool site of the day” listings trailing in its wake.

But this type of site required human editors to collect and post links, a job that quickly became unthinkable as the web mushroomed. It also led to one of the first ethical controversies of the web: link-buying.

When the bills came due, the big operations needed cash, and they began selling directory placements – and they didn’t label them as paid ads. The constant surge of new sites found they had little way to break into the directory listings. So directories began to lose credibility; people could no longer trust that the sites displayed prominently in the directories had really been chosen and endorsed by an unbiased web editor.

Grey Hats take the stage

The directory system also spawned the first schemes to game the web link business. Most directories included a way for a website owner to submit their site for inclusion – or at least consideration – on the list. The schemers developed and sold standalone software – or in some cases, services – that allowed you to enter your web address, and then automatically submitted your URL to hundreds or thousands of web directories.

(This is still a popular “grey hat” scheme today, updated a bit for the search-engine algorithm world.)

Building better ways to catalog and map the web became one of the top priorities for entrepreneurs, and they began to focus on search technology. Searching a database is a fairly old technology. Every database has search functionality, from blunt-instrument to extremely sophisticated. A database that’s not searchable in a useful way is, well, useless. And the web, to stretch a definition, is a database – an aggregation of billions of bits of information residing on websites linked directly or indirectly.

The early search sites developed programmed “bots” that moved from link to link within and outside a website, and from site to site – like a spider moving across a web – and sending information on sites and link text back to the search site. Visitors could then search the collected information on the search site in various ways.

And in come the Black Hats

Unfortunately this information covered only a portion of the web, and was poorly organized. And a new wave of black hats learned they could capture the top pages of search results by “stuffing” their sites with hundreds of hot links that didn’t necessarily match the site content. Search results became increasingly useless.

Popular early search engines such as Excite, Webcrawler and Alta Vista were a step up from web directories, because they showed you everything they turned up, instead of cherry-picking and showcasing paying customers. But seeing everything isn’t necessarily useful. The static drowns out the ability to pick out the object of the search.

Using even a top-rated search engine of the day often meant having to flip by the first several pages of results, which generally were occupied by various spam sites – very often porn sites using respectable key words to lure visitors. You had to go much deeper into the search results to find what you were looking for.

Google changed all that in the late 1990s launching with a system called “PageRank,” the foundation of an incredibly complex algorithm that seeks to do one thing: clear away the black-hat and low-value links and deliver high-value relevant content, based on the search words. This algorithm is updated continually to tweak performance and dodge attempts to game the system.

Gaming the system today

And there are more gamers than ever. An entire industry has grown up around the idea of taking actions on and off sites to push a client further up the search results page. Some Search Engine Optimization (SEO) work is transparent and open, some involves “trade secrets” that are of value only if held close to the chest, and others that are move into black-hat territory. And of course, there are a significant number of flim-flam “consultants” who promise things they can’t deliver, or use sleight-of-hand to inflate success rates.

In its legitimate form, SEO experts work with a web site’s underlying coding, proper page and content structures and other strategies. Google itself encourages this type of SEO. The search company even offers tools that analyze sites for their transparency to the indexing search bots, as well as tips for legitimate ways to improve the way you present your site to Google.

But the darker side of the industry works continually to find new loopholes and ways around Google’s “anti-gaming” safeguards, while Google works continually to close loopholes and shut down the latest schemes. SEO work in this area is brinkmanship; at best, it’s a continuing effort to keep a step ahead; as soon as the crowd learns the loophole, Google will certainly move in. At worst, a misstep can result in a client’s site facing Google’s “death penalty” – being zapped from search results.

The SEO for Non-Geeks series focuses on Google, as its algorithm delivers most search results in much of the world, and a site that is properly optimized for Google is also generally good for other search engines.

In the following parts of this continuing series, we’ll cover several major topics, including:

SEO starts with the right platform
Content is still king
Things you do that hurt your SEO
Your site updates
Warning flags: Scams, cheats & black hats

Our SEO Services

Cook Profitability Services offers complete SEO services, from site setup on search-engine friendly web platforms, to tweaking content and processes for a client’s top search terms, to ongoing maintenance and training. While we do have our own proprietary systems, our methods are strictly “white hat” and above board. Our SEO clients have seen their critical search rankings reach near or at the top of Google search engine results pages. For a free evaluation of your web development, SEO, internet marketing or public relations needs, call us at 210-601-1050 or submit a contact form.

SEO- Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization is the art and science of BEING VISIBLE ON THE INTERNET.

This post is a short overview of SEO, just providing a perspective on the subject and why it is so important to you.

For something so advanced, the basic principle of the internet is extremely simple. The internet is pure and simple lots of computers all connected so that any one computer can access any other computer. Of course computer users have the option to keep some files private and make others public. That’s the simplicity. The place where this starts to get complex is how to find anything. Imagine for a moment that the contents of every computer on planet Earth was printed off and placed in one large bin, and that you could fish around and find everything from drink mix recipes to instruction on building an atom bomb. How long would it take for you to find what you are looking for? It was this problem that confronted users of the internet very early on.

The solution was a software package that would search the contents of the bin for any items containing the phrase “best type of oil for my car” or whatever it is that the user is seeking. This is also pretty simple stuff.

However as the volume of material available on the internet exploded, a new problem presented itself. It was easy to present ALL the answers to the question, perhaps as many as 3 million of them. The new problem was how to present the BEST answer to the question.

The people who solved that problem became a household word for most of the population of the Western world- Google. Google designed a software that would find all the answers to a question and then sort them so the most useful, the most relevant and the most trusted answers appeared first. And since day one they have guarded that formula more closely than the famous and mysterious formula for Coke.

In the world of science this was a huge breakthough. Important information was sorted and presented in a moment.

But in the world of commerce it created an incredible opportunity. If Google would rate you as the best, most important and most relevant, well you stood to gain a huge influx of business. The first time anyone realized this, Search Engine Optimization was born. The race to make your website fit the criteria that made it “the most important” and “the most relevant”. Our SEO specialist has been practicing SEO since the early days of the internet and has a deep understanding of these factors and how to make them work for you.

More on Search Engine Optimization coming on this blog and also available on our website MORE ON SEO>

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