The Good News

Google started to improve it’s ability to index Flash content a couple of years ago. Now it can see content within Flash files so it can index that content. And it can follow links within Flash content as well. So Google can now tell what lies within an all-flash website.

The Bad News

This will still not allow all-Flash websites to compete well with HTML web pages. Why? For one thing, Flash is too slow loading, especially for smart phones, tablets and dial-up users. This is especially disadvantageous considering Google’s emphasis on page download speed as an important ranking factor.

With a Flash website there’s still  a lack of unique URLs which means no one can link to an internal page in an all-Flash site. Instead everyone has to go through your home page and follow any necessary navigation to get to the content they’re interested in. That conflicts with Google’s current emphasis on user experience as a ranking factor. You also lose many rankings factors associated with individual page titles, link anchor text, site maps and more.

So, What to Do?

• Use Flash, but only as individual flash elements on your pages.
• Don’t embed navigation to other flash content within your Flash content.
• Construct your site with individual HTML pages.
• Be sure to take advantage of all the HTML ranking factors available to your HTML pages.

Have questions? Need professional advice? Ask us about Flash and your website’s SEO.

When the challenging economy strikes your business, you may need to revisit your marketing and ramp up your efforts to gain new customers. SEO has about the best ROI of any marketing strategy, but it can’t work miracles … especially not instantly.

SEO needs time to percolate in order to produce results. Here’s why:

On-Page Factors

You can’t just spend some money and find your self perfectly optimized. Keyword research needs to be done so you can choose the important keyword phrases to optimize for. On-page SEO needs to happen next. That involves sometimes extensive copywriting, website architecture and navigation changes, page download speed improvements, writing of page title and description tags, implementation of proper internal linking, and more.

Off-Page Factors – Link Popularity

Those on-page improvements to your website aren’t enough. You need to ensure competitive link popularity, and that means an ongoing link building program has to happen. Any scheme to get you hundreds of inbound links in a hurry is likely to hurt you more than help. You need an ongoing link building program that brings in new links on a steady basis, month after month. That helps your rankings to grow, but it’s a slow process.

Off-Page Factors – Social Media Exposure

You need to generate some buzz as a result of information posted at places like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and so forth. Real-time links from social media are getting increased attention by the search engines.

Slow and Steady Wins the Race

Your rankings and traffic will typically increase slowly but steadily as your link popularity matures and your on-page optimization takes hold.

At Rank Magic, we include a year of link building on a steady monthly basis as part of a typical SEO project. Depending on the competitiveness of a client’s market niche they may require more intensive link building or a more protracted link building process of an additional year or more.

Beyond that, you need to be prepared to monitor your links, rankings and traffic on an ongoing basis. Changes in the search engine world, changes in your competitive landscape, changes in the focus of your business, and website changes and redesign all have the potential to take a toll on your rankings, and you need to spot that quickly so corrective action can be taken promptly.

When employing SEO it’s important to approach it with the understanding that it’s not sprint, but a marathon. If you expect to win the prize of a rapid increase in customers within a couple of weeks or months you will be disappointed.

Need help? Ask for our free Overview & Pricing Guide.

Almost every time we speak with a new potential client we find they’ve been told something about SEO that’s either an exaggeration or downright false. In a recent issue of .Net Magazine, Mark Buckingham, owner of an SEO company in south-west London called NetSeek, wrote about his top ten favorite SEO myths. Have you heard any of these? Let us know in comments, below.

1. Satisfaction guaranteed

There is no such thing as guaranteed organic rankings. Distrust anyone who promises otherwise. There are about 200 factors in the Google ranking algorithm, and no one can control all of them. Most people who “guarantee” top rankings only do so for long-tail searches that get very little search traffic — phrases like “podiatry malpractice lawyer on Main Street in Chatham”.

2. High Google PageRank = high rankings

Google PageRank is one of the 200 or so ranking factors in Google. It’s at best a fair indicator of a page’s link popularity, and it may be weighted more heavily than many of the other factors, but it’s not uncommon for a web page with a lower PageRank to rank higher in search results than a page with a higher PageRank. It’s a visible indicator of what Google thinks of your page, but again it’s only one of many ranking factors.

3. Endorsed by Google

Any company that says they’re “endorsed”, “approved” or “certified” by Google is probably a fraud. Google has a certification for Google Analytics and Google AdWords (the PPC ads), but Google has no stamp of approval for any SEO company .

4. The meta keyword tag matters

I heard this one as recently as last week. Mark quotes Google’s Matt Cutts to totally debunk that one. Google considers the meta keyword tag to be a waste of time. We typically use it, only because it may be used by some smaller search engines, and because it’s so quick and easy to do. But we never agonize over what to put in there — as Matt says, that’s just a waste of time.

5. You can cheat your way to the top

This reminds me of an old database client of mine who once asked if I would help him send out spam. (It should go without saying that I strongly declined.) Cheating (considered “black hat SEO”) is always a bad idea. Even if it works once in awhile, as soon as the search engines find you out (or when a competitor rats you out) you risk being banned from the search engine results with disastrous bottom line results. This happened to JC Penney recently and to both Ricoh and BMW before that.

6. Cram those keywords in

There’s no magic number of keywords needed to get a high ranking. You need to use the keywords, of course, but using them too often creates what we call “overredundancy”. Forcing your keywords into a web page almost always destroys the page’s power to influence the person reading it and encourage them to want to buy what you’re selling. Pay attention to your keywords, and use them on the page, but make sure you’re always writing for your visitor, not for the search engines.

7. Spending on Google AdWords boosts your rankings

Google has repeatedly denied any connection  between participating in AdWords and organic rankings. SEO experts agree. There is some research showing that if you show up in both the PPC ads and in the organic results, that boosts the likelihood of the searcher clicking on one of your listings. The organic listing super-validates your PPC ad, increasing the likelihood of a click on one or the other. But having a PPC ad has no impact on where you rank in the organic results.

8. Landing pages

The concept of a “landing page” is relevant only to PPC. Almost any page on your website can show up in the organic listings. Don’t assume that people will always enter your site through the front door, for example. In SEO, any page on your site can be a “landing page”.

9. Set it and forget it

It’s true that once your pages are well-optimized there’s little or no need to constantly tweak, change, or “freshen” them up. However you can’t just forget your SEO as soon as you get great rankings. An ongoing stream of inbound links may be important to maintain your rankings, and if those links aren’t happening by themselves it may require some level of continued effort. A blog is a great way to add new content on a regular basis. But you also need to monitor your rankings. There’s no guarantee your great rankings will be permanent, especially if your website undergoes even a minor redesign or your competitors become more aggressive in their social presence and link building. At least keep an eye on your rankings so you can respond if they begin to fall.

10. Rankings are your goal

Rankings aren’t everything. High rankings are great, but you’re not in business to get high rankings. The bottom line needs to be your bottom line. Do those rankings result in visitors? Do those visitors convert into paying customers? SEO can get more people to your website, but it’s the job of your website to convince them they want to do business with you and with no one else. You need great content that’s effective in closing the sale. All the rankings in the world can’t make up for a poor user experience on your website.

Need help with your web site’s rankings? Rank Magic can help.

Is SEO just another form of spam?

Sadly, we have heard prospective clients express the concern that all SEO is unethical, akin to spam. Those folks have heard that sentiment from others they trust, and that may be a hard opinion to displace.

Yes, Virginia, there IS ethical SEO

But the truth is that there definitely is ethical SEO, and that’s all the SEO we practice here at Rank Magic. We even have an entire page on our website devoted to it. Catherine Kozar at Affiliate Marketers College recently wrote about the subject and included a video from Matt Cutts, The Google Guy. that bears on the subject.

Catherine talks about the temptations to cut corners, to employ black hat SEO techniques, to write misleading titles and descriptions, to use hard sell hype pages that offers no real content, and so forth. All that is counterproductive in the long run, and Google expects those practices to become far less prevalent within the next five years as Matt Cutts explains that Google (and others) will filter them out of organic search results.

Check out Catherine’s post here.

Great reviews at places like Google Local and Yelp can help your search engine rankings and encourage shoppers to buy your products or services. Is it any wonder, then, that some businesses have succumbed to the temptation of soliciting fake rave reviews? Of course not. And a mini-industry has appeared to satisfy that temptation.

5-Star Reviews

The more fake 5-star reviews that are handed out, the more you need to rise above the competition. It’s like an arms race in counterfeit superlatives.

The New York Times recently wrote about an attempt to deal with this.

Determining the number of fake reviews on the Web is difficult. But it is enough of a problem to attract a team of Cornell researchers, who recently published a paper about creating a computer algorithm for detecting fake reviewers. They were instantly approached by a dozen companies, including Amazon, Hilton, TripAdvisor and several specialist travel sites, all of which have a strong interest in limiting the spread of bogus reviews.

Google?

I’m sure Google is working on this as well. In my opinion, trafficking in mendacious online reviews will come to bite you in the butt. Google is very unlikely to stop at disregarding the fake reviews it finds — more likely it will penalize the site employing such tactics. Back in 2006 we wrote about Ricoh and BMW cheating for higher rankings and getting completely banned from Google for more than six months.

We don’t know if Google has fake review detection in place, or how effective it is, but you can rest assured that they will develop a very effective system for it in the future. And when they do, a lot of websites will suffer for employing those dishonest tactics.

Your website can’t afford a serious Google slap-down.

Some may be tempted to create fake reviews to dampen the effect of a negative review that appears about their company online. Don’t. There are better ways to deal with negative reviews, though, some of which we discussed in this blog last year. If you feel you really need some good reviews to counter the bad press, ask your most delighted customers to give you a review — but make sure they do it in their own words.

One of our clients who has a medical practice in Windsor, CT has received a solicitation from one of those bogus SEO companies. They sent me information about that company’s “review” of my client’s SEO, and I couldn’t help but comment frankly. Here’s the story:

I did this website SEO overview for $10 with another company just to see things from a different perspective.  I have no intention of using them beyond the report attached.  It seems that my home page is lacking a bit.  I know that you made recommendations regarding my home page.  They ran the report just on my home page so that was what we focused on.  These are my questions that came up as a result:
1.  They said that the title tag was weak and that it should be a description of what I do rather than my business name and town.
[My reply] We’re optimizing that page for just your business name and town on purpose. If someone recommends you to a friend or relative, we want you to show up when they search for your business name. “What you do” covers too many things (and too many keywords) to cover on your home page; that’s why we optimized other pages for those keywords.
2.  They mentioned optimization maintenance of meta tags, which is I think what they were selling.  Not sure what was wrong regarding that.
[My reply] Meta tags are almost worthless for rankings, particularly the keywords meta tag. And the last thing they need is maintenance. You should only change well-written meta tags if the nature of your business changes and your keywords along with it. See this recent article about this sort of thing: … and this.
3.  They suggested that I had bad links or links that were draining energy from my resources page, although she could not give me an example of a broken link.
[My reply] Links do not drain energy from your pages. They share your linking page’s PageRank with the targets of those links, so if you have lots of outbound links each one you link to gets less value from the link than if you had fewer links on the page. But outbound links don’t hurt your “energy” one iota.
4.  Should I be doing some updating of either the content or meta tags as part of a regular maintenance?
[My reply] NO! That’s a scam perpetrated by sleazy SEO practitioners. You should update content on your site when it deserves to be updated — when you incorporate new techniques into your practice; when you react to new medical research, when you expand to treating other conditions … never just for the search engines. Please do this: go to Google and do a search for tutoring in New Jersey — see what comes up at the top of the organic results. Do you find A+ Home Tutoring? That’s my wife’s website, and it’s the first one I ever optimized. Back in 2000. Other than adding a single page for a new learning game she patented, this website hasn’t been touched in 11 years.

Sorry, I am sure that you roll your eyes about these companies just like I do when people go and get mall health screenings.  Thanks for your input.

[My reply] PS — I can’t believe they thought people would look for you by searching for the keyword “Windsor”. What are they? Stoopid? (Windsor is the town this client has an office in.)

And they make a big deal of your Keyword Efficiency Index? We abandoned using the KEI years ago.

Sorry to be so nasty about these guys, but these are the folks that give SEO a bad name and cause people to think it’s an unethical racket. They really push my buttons.

A few months ago Google released a major algorithm update called the Farmer update or, more officially, the Panda update. (It’s named for it’s major contributor at Google, Navneet Panda.) Our clients have fared very well, but lots of websites have suffered dramatic rankings losses. We wrote about some approaches to deal with that back in May.

Recently Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz released a video on how the Panda Up-date has changed SEO practices “forever”. While that may be overstating it, the video can be very helpful. Here’s a excerpt that we found particularly interesting.

Let’s talk about a few of the specific things that we can be doing as SEOs to help with this new sort of SEO, this broader web content/web strategy portion of SEO.

First off, design and user experience. I know, good SEOs have been preaching design user experience for years because it tends to generate more links, people contribute more content to it, it gets more social signal shares and tweets and all this other sort of good second order effect.

And don’t forget, Google has actually said publicly that even if you have a great site, if you have a bunch of pages that are low quality on that site, they can drag down the rankings of the rest of the site.

Content quality matters a lot. So a lot of time, in the SEO world, people will say, “Well, you have to have good, unique, useful content.” Not enough. Sorry. It’s just not enough. … If you say, “Oh, I have 50,000 pages about 50,000 different motorcycle parts and I am just going to go to Mechanical Turk or I am going to go outsource, and I want a 100 word, two paragraphs about each one of them, just describe what this part is.” You think to yourself, “Hey, I have good unique content.” No, you have content that is going to be penalized by Panda. That is exactly what Panda is designed to do. It is designed to say this is content that someone wrote for SEO purposes just to have good unique content on the page, not content that makes everyone who sees it want to share it and say wow. Right?

If I get to a page about a motorcycle part and I’m like, “God, not only is this well written, it’s kind of funny. It’s humorous. It includes some anecdotes. It’s got some history of this part. It has great photos. Man, I don’t care at all about motorcycle parts, and yet, this is just a darn good page. What a great page. If I were interested, I’d be tweeting about this, I’d share it. I’d send it to my uncle who buys motorcycles. I would love this page.”

That’s what you have to optimize for. It is a totally different thing than optimizing for did I use the keyword at least three times? Did I put it in the title tag? Is it included in there? Is the rest of the content relevant to the keywords? Panda changes this. Changes it quite a bit.

Jill Whalen of High Rankings® is an internationally recognized search engine optimization consultant and host of the free weekly High Rankings® Advisor search engine marketing newsletter.

In her recent newsletter, she went on a bit of a rant over the nonsense people are hearing about SEO. She called it Spreading Silly SEO Stupidity. Here are a few of the stupid (and untrue) things people are spreading about Search Engine Optimization:

• Google only indexes the first 100 words on a page.
• The only way to rank is by using Google AdWords.
• Putting keywords in meta tags helps your rankings.
• If you click on your own Google listing, you’ll get a higher ranking.
• You need to update your blogs at least daily.
• SEO isn’t worth the bother anymore. (from a guy selling ads on the AT&T ad network)
• Some company can get you 2,000 backlinks for $49 a month.
• Reciprocal links will hurt your rankings.
• And the best of the bunch was a seminar where the speaker told attendees they should submit their websites to search engines on a monthly basis. He then proceeded to provide them with the name of a tool that would do that for only $99 per month. (Tip: It’s not worth a dime.)

Jill went on to postulate why these stupidities seem to persist in spite of all evidence to the contrary. Here’s her list of reason, but you should read her article for the explanation of each. It’s worth the read, if only to picture Jill getting all red in the face with exasperation over the people who propagate these myths.

• It’s easy to implement. (So what if it doesn’t work — it’s easy.)
• Old articles get recirculated.
• Designers and developers know just enough SEO to be dangerous.
• Forum newbies parrot whatever they’re heard..
• Believing what you read or hear instead of figuring it out for yourself.
• Mixing up cause and effect.
• They’re set in their ways.

Dealing With Varying Rankings

In our recent post about rankings disappearing, we listed several reasons your rankings may vary substantially between checks. One factor was that searches by different people may show different results, and searches from different locations may do the same. The keyword ranking reporting Rank Magic does for our clients is done consistently so that trend comparisons should be pretty accurate even though the rankings we find may differ slightly from what you may find doing your own search.

A better measure may be the traffic on your site.

If a keyword phrase disappears from the rankings one month but your traffic remains steady for it, you can discount the ranking report as an aberration.

Another reason traffic reporting is helpful has to do with keyword selection. Some SEOs have been known to optimize and track rankings for keywords that are easy to rank highly for because no one searches for them. They may report great rankings that bear no relationship to whether your website is actually getting visitors as a result.

For that reason, we’re adding something new to our SEO Monitoring services. If you have Google Analytics on your website, we’ll report to you on that monthkly along with our ranking reports.

Ask us about adding this to your SEO Monitoring services.

Not monitoring your site’s performance? You really should — either manually yourself or with help from a professional Here’s what we include in our services:

• Monthly Broken Link Report so you’ll know if you’ve got dead links on your site that you need to clean up.
• Monthly Link Popularity Report showing how many inbound links are reported for you by Google, Yahoo and Bing. This also shows how many links are reported for about a half dozen of your most important competitors.
• Comprehensive online Keyword Status Reports updated for you monthly. If you’ve been a client of ours recently, you’ve probably seen them and know how thorough and how valuable they are. We typically run the first one for you as soon as you identify your keywords (as a baseline report) and then monthly thereafter.
• Review of your Traffic Reports monthly if you have Google Analytics installed on your website and give us access to review it.

If Rank Magic isn’t helping you monitor your search engine health, ask us how easy and inexpensive it is.

Some Keyword Rankings Gone?

Every once in awhile you may notice that some keywords suddenly seem to drop out of rankings and then pop right back a month later. We see that on occasion. What’s that all about?

Well, perhaps we  should explain a bit about ranking reporting.

1. If you check a keyword’s ranking from computers at two different physical locations, you’re likely to get slightly different results due to your results coming from different data centers. Google has dozens of data centers around the country, and they’re not all precisely synchronized. So this is one reason you might get different rankings.
2. Search engine tweak their ranking algorithms frequently. They often try a change, evaluate it for a few days, and then undo it if it didn’t work as hoped. This is a common cause of rankings that seem to disappear and then reappear.
3. Search engines are beginning to personalize results. If Google figures out that you’re a wine connoisseur or you own a restaurant, when you search for glasses they may send you more results about glassware than about eyeglasses.

All of these create variable results that are not always replicable from one query to the next, or even from one browser to the next.

Rankings that disappear are no cause for panic unless they’re still missing for two-three months. If that happens, ask us to investigate the problem for you.