YBO Interactive Blog

Using WordPress? If you’re looking for SEO improvements, checkout this excellent WordPress SEO Guide. It has quite a lot of good ideas for optimizing your blog, with the relevant plugins. I would recommend doing most of it.

One of the things they didn’t mention is removing bloginfo(’name’) from header.php so that the blog name will not appear in the title of every single page on site. (If you are asking why, here is the answer)

In case you want to do it, all you need to do is edit header.php

change this code:

<title><?php bloginfo(’name’); ?> <?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> » Blog Archive <?php } ?> <?php wp_title(); ?></title>

into this:

<title><?php
if ( is_single() || is_category() || is_tag())
{
wp_title(”);
}
else
{
bloginfo(’name’); ?> <?php wp_title();
}
?></title>

Warning: If your blog is active for a long time and has thousands of posts, I wouldn’t change the title for all posts. Google doesn’t like ‘big’ changes. In that case, I would change the title only from the current postId, so that next posts will be with no title and old ones stay untouched.

It happened lately a few times that I asked customers to make changes on their website and got the answer “the company that built our website said that it is impossible”.

I heard it even on simple requests like removing the company name from the pages <TITLE>. Not mentioning META tags, ALT tags, nofollow links, 301 redirects, and many others requests that were simply rejected.

So I made this list.

This is what I want from web development companies that are going to work with my customers.

1. Configurable <TITLE> tags: I would like to set the title of every page myself. I don’t want the company name added to the title automatically and I don’t want the title to be the anchor text of the link from the main menu (I may want that, but let me choose). I need full control on title with no exceptions.

2. Configurable Meta <Description> tags: Most companies will let you do that through their CMS, but some that I have seen never heard of it.

3. mod_rewrite: Let me decide how I want the URLS on site to look like. In some cases, instead of having this URL http://www.example.com/product.php?action=7&id=8 I may want this one: http://www.example.com/blue-car-with-sun-roof

4. Nofollow links: I need the option to set links on site to nofollow. This may include links on the main menu or links that appear on every page on site.

5. ALT Attributes: It should be possible to set ALT Attributes to every image on site.

6. H1 H2 H3: Let me add any HTML tag I want on my page. Especially Heading tags.

7. Crawlability: site must be fully crawlable, with no javascript links that block the flow.

8. Javascript: In some cases I will still need the ability to add javascript code. Whether it is Google Analytics, or other e-commerce tracking codes, many CMS systems I saw do not allow javascript. The ones my customers use need it.

9. Editable Footer: I will need to edit the footer for many reasons. Mostly for adding tracking codes that should appear on every page on site, and in some cases adding links or graphics. Don’t show me a fixed footer with sitemap and privacy policy links. Let me change it.

10. Dedicated IP: This is a hosting issue, that in many cases comes in the same package. Dedicated hosting is a big advantage. This means that our site is the only site that has our IP address. I don’t want to get search engine penalties because of adult sites running on my machine.

11. USA hosting: I know that hosting in India is great. I really do. But my market is in the US, and my site should be where my customers are. Both in terms of SEO and network aspects. My site should be rocket fast both to my customers and to Google.

12. LAMP: Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP is my favorite. CMS built on these machines just makes me happier. I can’t explain this one. It’s a matter of belief.

13. Standards: Standard site according to the world wide web consortium is an advantage. I’ll be actually very surprised if anyone will say yes to this one.

14. Firefox: That is the easiest request. I saw web sites that belong to web development companies that can not be viewed with Firefox. How stupid is that?

15. Flash: I don’t like flash websites. Neither does Google.

If you have any additions to this list please comment…

Hitwise Reports that Google has 67% of All US Searches. They also say that Yahoo has 20% and MSN has 7%. Is it a surprise? not to most of the people I know.

I didn’t see the details of the survey made by HitWise, but I guess that if research would be made only with users from Silicon Valley, the Google percentage would be higher, for the simple reason that technology oriented users would rather use Google than any other Search Engine.

So who is using msn and Yahoo?

I think that most of the users using msn are the ones that got their computer with Windows and Internet Explorer, and have no idea how to change the default search engine in their browser. In fact, they don’t even know that it is possible.
Yahoo is a different story. There are still people out there that think that Yahoo is the Internet. They open their browser, go to Yahoo.com and then, they type the address of the domain they want to go to (sometimes IN THE SEARCH BOX). Don’t get me wrong, not all Yahoo users are “computerly challenged”, the thing is that Yahoo was there first (almost), and quite a lot of people know how to use it, like the way it works, they like the content, the channels, the email, and see no reason to go anywhere else.

What can you learn from it? If you’re running a Pay Per Click campaign for a company that sells Enterprise Wireless LAN, Google is your place and all the rest are waste of money. The IT managers looking for your products are in Google. On the other hand, if your page is an Acropolis Audio Tour, You should definitely pay attention to msn and Yahoo. Your customers are waiting there as well.

I was asked by one of my customers to explain why removing the company name from all his pages titles is a good idea. It just didn’t make any sense.

As you can see in this list of Top Factors for Google Search Engine Ranking, the most important ranking factor on a web page is the <TITLE>.

Now, take a look at the keyword “aquamarine gemstones“.

For this keyword, a web page with title “Johnny Depp’s Aquamarine Gemstones Shop” will rank significantly lower then a web page with a title “Aquamarine Gemstones” assuming all the other ranking factors are the same. Had we used the first title, Google might have understood that our site is also about “Johnny Depp”, “Johnny Depp’s shop” , a “Gemstones shop” and maybe also an “Aquamarine shop”. Focus on keywords is very important when optimizing titles.

When working with commercial websites the assumption is that our potential customers are not searching for the brand name, but more likely searching for the product description, therefore a title with a product description is better.
For that reason, on any internal page I would prefer to have a title with the product description without a company name.

And yet, I would still use the company name on a Home Page simply because a Home Page is not like any internal page on site, it has more importance than all the rest especially in terms of branding. The internal pages are there for the content. They can do without it.

The first thing I would do when optimizing a new site is to remove the company name from all titles. It is not always easy to convince your customer that this is the right thing to do, but once they do it, it takes a very little time to show them that it works.

And it works great.

Warning: Search Engines like Google don’t ‘like’ big changes. Changing all titles of a site can cause damage. The advice that appears in this post is very good for new sites, or sites that have very little traffic and want to grow. If your site already has a lot of traffic, it is recommended to change the title of new pages (if it’s a blog, do it above a certain %postid%), and keep the old pages untouched. In any case, the best would be to consult an expert before doing big changes.

Last week was first SphinnCon Evar, how lucky are we to have it here in Israel. Did you see me behind Barry on the 4th picture? I AM FAMOUS

The event was excellent, very VERY interesting people spoke up, and I personally felt that the discussion was more ‘casual’ that usually it is - people felt comfortable to ask interesting questions and answers from panelists were great.

The only problem with the event was the T shirt - the XXL T shirt I got is barely a Medium…

Here are some more pictures taken by Yos from RankAbove and some terrible quality movies I took , on youtube.

Small Business SEM has an excellent post about the SEO Success Pyramid.

“…the best SEOs don’t talk to their clients about rankings; they talk about the process of making great web sites that earn traffic and convert visitors into customers. They talk about the process of creating great content that attracts links like bees to honey…”

I agree with that, it is sometimes hard to make people look at the whole picture, but once they do, they like much better what they see.

This image (from that post) makes it very clear:

Yesterday, I spoke to a marketing communication manager who said, “We are just about to build a new website, so we don’t need SEO at this time…”

I have heard this sentence too many times lately, and I think it’s about time to write an answer.

Anyway, that company has a great website. It has 300 pages, 2,500 unique visitors per month, and it is in the top 20s on Google SERPs. It has PR5, and 35 incoming links from websites in their industry. The only problem they have is that “their website is ugly”. I think they are right. I’m not sure if ugly is the word, but it looks old fashioned and definitely needs a face lift. So they have decided to put it down and build a new one.

How clever is that? Putting it down and building a new site is a huge mistake. HUGE.

It is very simple. The day they kill the old website and Google web crawler gets error code 404 (Page Not Found) on their 300 pages site, all their ranking will go kaput. The 2500 unique visitors they have today will go down to 0, and the keywords they managed to bring to top20, will disappear.

And now, they have a new website to start everything from the beginning… How cool is that?

There is a right way to do it, rebuilding websites is a legitimate marketing need and can be done easily without loosing traffic, or ranking.

The first thing to do is research. We need to find which pages perform the best and which keywords have good ranking on our old site. Finding these keywords and pages is the key to make the transition smooth.

Now, for every page in the old site, we’ll find it’s equivalent in the new site, and we’ll add a permanent redirect (301) to that page so that the search engines understand which page in the old site is replaced by a new page.

The new pages should have a similar content to the content of the old page to maintain the same traffic. It doesn’t have to look the same. The colors or graphics are meaningless. The text, images, titles, url and other factors are important, but not the graphics.

Now that our main traffic sources are forwarded to the new site, we need to take care of all the other pages. The only easy way to handle a large amount of redirects is htaccess. Here are a few htaccess examples , but as usually happens with examples, it is very likely that the one you need isn’t there… htaccess should be used only if you really know how to do it, because if you don’t, your whole site might stop working.

Only when we see that the search engines have updated the 301 redirections to the new pages and the traffic is going directly to the new site, can old pages be removed.

In fact, sometimes it is recommended to keep the old pages in place, since other sites may link to internal pages or people may bookmark pages and look for them sometime in the future.

At the end of the process, every URL on the old site should lead to a URL on the new site. You should monitor your logs and verify that there is no 404 errors. If there are 404 errors on some URLs, rebuild those URLs or add a 301 permanent redirect to htaccess.

There are many more issues that should be take care of when rebuilding your website and the most important one is the structure of the new site, URLs, titles and links. But this is a topic for a new thread.

Matt Cutts made a nice video explaining the importance of ALT attributes to IMAGE tags.

It’s always nice to hear the official Google opinion about things you already know…

Here is a great article about link value factors with lots of issues regarding link value discussed in depth. As expected, anchor text is the most important factor. Read the article for the complete list.

Al Gore’s website was hacked by spammers that added outbound links from his site to other sites they wanted to promote.

apparently, the new type of hackers, the SEO hackers constantly look for high ranking sites, (Al Gore’s site has PR7) just for adding outbound links. It is clear that this is happening a lot, and Al Gore’s site is just one of many sites that were hacked.

It seems like a vulnerability in WordPress has left many bloggers open to attack by the same method.

This is a new era of hacking. They didn’t come for money, credit card numbers, nor user passwords. They came for Link Juice!

How exciting is that!

Wouldn’t that be funny if this page also has hidden links to some extremely disrespected sites?

Long time ago, I have started working on a tool that will scan a given website for all outbound links, will check the PR of every outbound link domain, and will compare the results to the previous scan.

The original purpose was finding outbound links to bad neighborhoods, like sites that lost their ranking due to illegal activity. This tool will easily detect seo hacking on our customers websites.

Stay tuned!