Category Archives: SEO

Pinterest.Com Is The Next Big Thing!

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It’s Facebook!  It’s Stumbleupon!  It’s Flickr!  It’s WHAT IS HOT!

Two months ago I had not even heard about Pinterest.  Today I can’t turn-around without reading more about it and according to Alexa, (a decent barometer of website traffic) Pinterest is going through the roof!

The Pinterest terms don’t allow outright spamming and I doubt the spammers would be successful anyway because nobody would follow them – but if done properly Pinterest can be a good way to increase your brand recognition especially if your brand/product/website is visual in nature.

Don’t miss out on the next big thing, jump in before it’s too late!

 

Google Killed The SEO Pro

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(Read to the tune of Video Killed The Radio Star)
I can remember, a long time ago, way back in my early days of webmastering and SEOing circa 2006, many blogging and SEO ‘experts’ were predicting that the end of SEO as we knew it would soon be upon us. They pointed to many of the changes that Google was beginning to make for determining search-ranking results such as personal web-browsing habits, bounce-rate, time spent on-page, etc – metrics that were not easily controlled or gamed by webmasters.

Fast-forward to 2011: Google now has Chrome, Google+, Android, near-full saturation of websites using Analytics, and a variety of services, websites, and systems all with the ability to do one very important thing: Collect user data and browsing habits.

It now looks like with Google’s Panda updates beginning earlier this year, the search engine giant is beginning to leverage all of that data to rank websites more on this new data than on the traditional metrics such as inbound links and keyword saturation that spammers “SEO Experts” have been using to game Google search results for years.

ZDNET’s Tom Foremski wrote an article this week underscoring the apparent fact that effectively, Google has killed SEO. In the article, he points out a few items about our new non-SEO reality:

- If you are negatively affected by Google’s new search rankings, no matter what you do (based on ‘old style’ SEO), you probably will not be able to regain your previous search engine ranking

- The seemingly random elements of Google’s recent updates could be a way to prevent webmasters from putting their heads together to reverse-engineer the changes (Google is smarter than we are)

- Blogger.com (owned by Google) has been unaffected by the recent changes. Perhaps Google is protecting their own interest – or, maybe they are saving the spammer-haven for last.

What does all this mean to you?

Hopefully it means that as the owner of a quality, original, content-rich website, you will now be able to reap the rewards of all the new traffic coming your way and will no longer have to worry about “SEO”.

Or..

If you are the owner of shitty, copycat, spammy, worthless websites, it’s time to quit being a lazy slacker and go start your new career at McDonald’s.

Improve Your Google Webmaster Tools Performance Rating

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Since Google announced last year that website performance will be one (of the many) factors in determining search-rankings many of us have been paying close(r) attention to how fast our site is and even closer attention to the Site Performance graph in the Labs section of Google Webmaster Tools.

It can be quite a shock to find your site drifting into the “slow” range on the Webmaster Tools Site Performance Graph – luckily, this is usually very easy to correct, while at the same time proving that Google still needs to do some work on how this whole site performance overview works.

According to Google, it collects your website performance rating data that it uses for the Webmaster Tools Site Performance Overview/Graph from the Google toolbar:

Page load time is the total time from the moment the user clicks on a link to your page until the time the entire page is loaded and displayed in a browser. It is collected directly from users who have installed the Google Toolbar and have enabled the optional PageRank feature.

Note that Google only gathers the performance data from web-browsers with the toolbar installed AND with the Page Rank feature enabled. Since the number of internet users that has the PageRank bar enabled is probably very low, it is a trivial task to improve your webmaster tool site performance rating simply by installing the toolbar yourself, activating the PageRank bar and browsing your site (a lot) – something you probably do anyway. Of course, you DO want to optimize your site and make sure it is running as fast as possible, but you can improve your Webmaster tools performance rating even more by making sure your internet connection is fast, increase your ‘network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server‘ to 10 or 12 (if you use Firefox) and disabling your Google Toolbar before running any scripts on your site that take long to run such as your cron.php or “available updates” update (for Drupal sites). Basically, do everything you can to make sure your website pages load as fast as possible on your PC, and disable the Google Toolbar before you do anything on your website that you know will take a long time to load. You can monitor the actual load times by using Firebug and even get hints about how to improve performance by using the PageSpeed plugin with Firebug.

To prove that I’m not just talking out of the back of my neck, I actually did an experiment. In November I un-installed my Google Toolbar, then after a few weeks I re-installed it. I monitored all of my sites in Webmaster tools, and they all showed virtually the same result:
Webmaster Tools Site Performance Graph

Remember, your website-speed is one of, if not the smallest factors that Google uses to determine search-result rankings so don’t think you can “game” Google this way, but it is a good idea to keep your site running as fast as you can, and to provide that feedback to Google by enabling your Google Toolbar and Page Rank bar.

Get Good Google Results In 30 Days

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I came across a multi-page article/tutorial at SEOWAT.COM that takes you through some step-by-step instructions on getting top Google results in 30 days.   Many of the techniques described match exactly what I did when I first started GrownUpGeek.com (and, those worked).  There are also some newer techniques in the tutorial and plenty of  hand-holding & how-to’s for each item.

If you are new to this whole webmastering thing, it’s definitely worth your time to give these techniques a try.  You can read the article here:  www.seowat.com.

If you follow the tutorial (or already have), please post some feedback/results here.