Search Engine Optimization
Based in the Ottawa area, we help our clients with their computer and Internet needs. Our specialty is modifying our client's website content to ensure that search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing give it a high ranking. In addition, we offer assistance in the design of web stores to simplify the shopping experience and enhance revenue.
While search engine optimization (SEO) is our specialty our clients often have other computer related needs. Our expertise allows us to help our clients in a variety of ways. We also offer webmaster services, computer network services, data recovery and other computer services.
Monday, September 28, 2009
Things Google does not do
I was talking with a friend this weekend who told me that he had received a call from Google and that they had offered to build a website for him and charge him a monthly fee. My friend is an accountant and he has been considering getting a website. Thus, he was considering the offer.
My first reaction was that Google does not do that and who ever spoke to my friend was misleading him. Google does many things, many things I probably don't know about. I've never heard of them offering to build websites for people. If Google were to offer a service like that would it be optimized to rank well in their search engine? If the answer is "yes" then this is a clear conflict of interest. If the answer is "no" then why would you want them to build a site for you.
Google does offer tools for building websites. This blog is made with Blogger which Google owns. Google also offers free hosting and domains however pages that are hosted on their servers rarely rank well.
Anyway, if someone tells you that Google will build you a website and charge you monthly for it do yourself a favour and hang up.
Labels: Google Services
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Duplicate Content: Is there a penalty?
Since the algorithms the search engines use are not public it is hard to provide a good answer. Generally, my advice is to avoid duplicate content. Specifically, if you are quoting a source then it is proper etiquette to quote only what you need and provide a link as a reference to the content being quoted.
While there is no "penalty" associated with duplicated content there are issues associated with relevance. Here are a few simple rules to keep in mind.
Alternatively, there are a variety of perfectly legitimate situations in which you may have duplicated your own content and provided it to different URLs. Fortunately, Google provides guidelines regarding how their search engine works along with a few suggestions for how to structure duplicate content.
While there is no "penalty" associated with duplicated content there are issues associated with relevance. Here are a few simple rules to keep in mind.
#1. There is no penalty to your site for duplicate content. That said, if Google detects duplicate content on a set of pages it will try to provide only one result relevant to that content. The rational being that Google wants to provide variety in the results.
#2. The webrobot used by Google to read your pages avoids pages with duplicate content. If the page with duplicate content does not receive regular updates it may take a very long time for Google to read the page. Using rel="canonical", a webmaster can tell the Google webrobot that the relevance for the page's content and links should be directed to another URL.
All that said, if you don't need to have duplicate content the simple solution is to avoid it.
Monday, September 14, 2009
Link Farming
Recently one of my clients asked for help boosting their ranking. I have worked with the client and the webmaster to provide really good quality content for the site. Since the site is rarely updated the changes took roughly three weeks.
Unfortunately the results were not as strong as I would have liked. I took a closer look at the websites of our competitors and it was clear to me that their content was weak and poorly optimized. I then checked their links and the situation was suddenly very clear. Our competition had very strong links. In one particular case the site that was providing a variety of high page rank links was in dutch while the sites being linked to were in english.
Google provides a lot of weight to links. Although they do not support link farming (ie paying for links to your website) it is apparent that the practice is alive and well. I suspect it will remain strong until Google finds an effective way of getting rid of it.
I'm not a fan of link farming for a couple of reasons. First, the search engines will find a way of overcoming it and penalizing sites that use it. Second, other than the fact that you have managed to fool a search engine it accomplishes very little. I would rather have a few people come to a site and like the content enough to continue using the site than have a bunch of people come to the site and leave immediately.
Unfortunately the results were not as strong as I would have liked. I took a closer look at the websites of our competitors and it was clear to me that their content was weak and poorly optimized. I then checked their links and the situation was suddenly very clear. Our competition had very strong links. In one particular case the site that was providing a variety of high page rank links was in dutch while the sites being linked to were in english.
Google provides a lot of weight to links. Although they do not support link farming (ie paying for links to your website) it is apparent that the practice is alive and well. I suspect it will remain strong until Google finds an effective way of getting rid of it.
I'm not a fan of link farming for a couple of reasons. First, the search engines will find a way of overcoming it and penalizing sites that use it. Second, other than the fact that you have managed to fool a search engine it accomplishes very little. I would rather have a few people come to a site and like the content enough to continue using the site than have a bunch of people come to the site and leave immediately.
Labels: Black Hat?
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
The importance of Capital Letters
Long ago, Kepler determined that the planets followed elliptical paths. He did not know why he just made very careful observations and reported his findings. Working in SEO can be like that. I don't know how Google ranks webpages but I do notice things and make a note to myself when I find something unexpected. I use this blog as a record of some of those little discoveries.
The discovery I made recently came as quite a surprise. I was doing some research for a company and I typed some information into Google and found the company listed at #19. I use an SEO software package to simplify much of my data collection but sometimes I just plug keywords into Google. When I plugged the same keywords into it, it ranked the website at #9. I checked my spelling but that was not it. As a programmer I know that computers give very consistent results so I looked very carefully for any difference and I found it.
When I enter a project into my SEO software it looks better when the first letters of the key words are capitalized. When I did the search in Google one of the terms was not capitalized. That was the difference.
->As I don't yet have the client I will not provide enough information to duplicate the exact result but you can try it for yourself and see the difference.
The discovery I made recently came as quite a surprise. I was doing some research for a company and I typed some information into Google and found the company listed at #19. I use an SEO software package to simplify much of my data collection but sometimes I just plug keywords into Google. When I plugged the same keywords into it, it ranked the website at #9. I checked my spelling but that was not it. As a programmer I know that computers give very consistent results so I looked very carefully for any difference and I found it.
When I enter a project into my SEO software it looks better when the first letters of the key words are capitalized. When I did the search in Google one of the terms was not capitalized. That was the difference.
->As I don't yet have the client I will not provide enough information to duplicate the exact result but you can try it for yourself and see the difference.