Search Engine Friendly Design

A search engine friendly website design is the starting point for any SEO campaign. When considering a new site or redesign, get us involved as early as possible. Often our involvement early in a project will cover a good chunk of the SEO fee we charge by saving you from extra redesign costs and extended development time.

Domain: Your entire primary websites content should be delivered within the domain url structure. Content located anywhere else is NOT considered to be on your website, and no amount of SEO will correct this. This includes content located on off-site blogs, sub-domains of your domain, booking engines, quote engines, MLS data, and reservation systems that reside off-site. There are pros and cons to using sub-domains, and this should be discussed with your SEO company if you are considering going in this direction.

Structure: All design elements and scripts should generally be called from an external file, not inline or embedded into the web page. The exception is high volume websites that need every bit of delivery speed they can squeeze out of the page. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Search Engine Optimization, Web Design Tagged With: Design, Structure, Web

Making Changes? Keep us in the Loop!

By David Leave a Comment

One of the single most important things you can do to help your SEO program is notify us when you make a change to your website. Specifically, changing, moving, or deleting a URL on your website. We have worked very hard to get every page of your website to perform in the search engines. This includes optimization and link building tactics. These pages now perform in the search engines and are indexed.

The SEO friendly way to make these changes is to place a 301 redirect on the old page. This alerts the search engines that the change has been made and forwards them to the new page, or another part of your website. Additionally, this prevents visitors from landing on a dead page of your website.

With the proper implementation of 301 redirects you can change [Read more...]

Filed Under: Search Engine Optimization Tagged With: 301 Redirects, Change Domain, New Website, Search Engine Optimization

Dropped From Google Completely

By David 2 Comments

It is every business owners worst nightmare – you wake up one morning and your website has vanished from Google. This was the plight of one frantic website owner we encountered recently. The site owner was convinced that something his SEO company had done caused his website to receive a Google penalty. His site was gone from Google… completely. You could not find the site by searching for the brand name or url. Any pages that were still indexed were not performing for any keyword search, and the cached versions were old. Diving into the crawl stats confirmed that Google not crawling the website – flat-lined. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Search Engine Optimization Tagged With: Google, Hosting, Server, website, WSO

Google Changes – Is The Sky Really Falling?

By David 1 Comment

…and, What Does it All Mean For My WebSite?

Google has made several high profile changes to their search algorithm in the last few months. This has sparked a flurry of concerned emails from search engine optimization clients wanting to know how this might impact their online marketing. Here are the major changes and how it will impact you and your website:

Google Places, Local Search Update – This is the change that is most likely to impact you directly. We have written on this topic several times – read more here: Google Places SEO

Google Panda Update – Also called the Farmer Update (Panda, named after someone on the Google team.) This was the most recent update that sent “shock waves” around the Internet. Every media outlet and online resource rang the bell that this “was the big one,” and that entire websites would evaporate overnight. Some did, but none of our clients were ever at any risk. Here is a Q & A regarding this Google change: [Read more...]

Filed Under: Search Engine Optimization Tagged With: Google, Local Search, Search Engine Optimization, Updates

Big Changes in Google Search

By David 3 Comments

Google has made a number of aggressive changes to the way search results are displayed when the search term includes a City and/or State. This is going to have a direct impact on your business if you target search terms that include physical locations.

What Has Changed – Google has introduced “Place Search” as a replacement for Local Search. The familiar 7 Pack Map Grouping at the top of the page has been eliminated. The map now resides in the right sidebar. The Local Listings have been integrated into the search results. In many cases this has displaced organic results, pushing top 10 listings on to the second page of the search engine results.

Who This Will Effect: [Read more...]

Filed Under: Local Search, Search Engine Optimization Tagged With: 7 Pack, Business Location, directories, Google Places, Local Search, Maps, Portals