The Risks of Offshore Outsourcing your SEO Projects

Many offshore companies will try and get your SEO business. We receive 5 to 10 emails everyday asking us to outsource our SEO work to an offshore company and they proceed to tell us why it will be beneficial to us. We are old school, and by that we believe that if you want something done right then you need to do it yourself. Having offshore companies tell us how much money we can save by using their offshore services in not what is important to us. What is important to us is our clients, and the quality of work that they receive from us. That's not to say that offshore companies are not capable of doing the work, but in our eyes we again believe that if you want something done right then you should do it yourself.

SEO is a rules based process and one must be engaged in following the rules in order to maximize their results. So because of this it is easy to get lost in someone else's work and miss important rules that should not have been used. We take no greater pride in doing all of our own work, leaving us without having to deal with the pitfalls of offshore outsourcing.

June 2010 Google PR (PageRank) Update

Webmasters around the web are reporting drops in their PR value after Google did an update to their PageRank algorithm. Since a webmaster can easily look at the PR of their website through Google Toolbar it's an easy look at the popularity of your website via their 1 to 10 ranking scale. Gogle came out and said that webmasters should not focus on PR since it's one of 200 things their algorithm looks at.

Google PageRank is named after Larry Page, a co-founder of Google.  PageRank deals with backlinks and doesn't have anything to do with the content or structure that a web site has.

Google has said: "PageRank is an easy metric to focus on, but just because it's easy doesn't mean it's useful for you as a site owner."

Use PageRank as a quick peek at the value of a site based on links but by no means should you put much substantive value on it.

• Processes thousands of pages in parallel.
• Caffeine adds hundreds of thousands of gigabytes of data per day.
• Each second Caffeine processes thousands of pages in parallel to give you fresher information.
• With Caffeine, Google can analyze the web in small portions and update the search index on a continuous basis

For more see Google's Blog

What Will Google Top Positioning Get You Traffic Wise?

Current research has been able to break down the traffic differences between the different positions on Google’s results pages (SERP's - search engine results pages). Amazingly the difference between the #1 and #2 positions is double the traffic! So if you ever thought that SEO didn’t make a difference here is one very good reason to rethink that.

Google Result	Impressions	Percentage
1	2,834,806	34.35%
2	1,399,502	16.96%
3	942,706	11.42%
4	638,106	7.73%
5	510,721	6.19%
6	416,887	5.05%
7	331,500	4.02%
8	286,118	3.47%
9	235,197	2.85%
10	223,320	2.71%
11	91,978	1.11%
12	69,778	0.85%
13	57,952	0.70%
14	46,822	0.57%
15	39,635	0.48%
16	32,168	0.39%
17	26,933	0.33%
18	23,131	0.28%
19	22,027	0.27%
20	23,953	0.29%

Research results were provided by: Chitika Research

May Day Update, Why Now and not Before?

In order to get a good idea of what we are discussing here make sure to read May Day, May Day, May Day – Google’s Long Tail Rankings Change. The question has been asked why did Google wait to change the rules on how long tail results are shown? The short answer is processing power. Think about it if you want to get results from a query that includes 3 to 7 keywords then what has to occur for that to happen? The scripts need to access the database looking for a combination of the keywords in question. Google gets roughly 34000 searches per second (2 million per minute; 121 million per hour; 3 billion per day; 88 billion per month, figures rounded). That equates to a lot of computer processing usage power that is needed.

Now that computers have a great deal more processing power Google has been able to update their data centers to be able to handle the additional processing power required for long tail queries. So along with better processing power I'm sure they have also streamlined their code with a write less, do more mentality.

In essence I think that Google's long tail algorithm now matches the algorithm that they had for smaller queries. Instead of having different sets of rules for one search over another they now can handle their queries with greater consistency.

Keep in mind these are our opinions and may not be necessarily what has occurred, but all in all it makes sense.

May Day, May Day, May Day – Google’s Long Tail Rankings Change

When it comes to long tail queries you want your web site to be of high quality! Google has once again tweaked their algorithm, this time it’s about long tail keywords. Matt Cutts at Google had this to say about this new change: ”this is an algorithmic change in Google, looking for higher quality sites to surface for long tail queries. It went through vigorous testing and isn’t going to be rolled back.” With this new change sites with lower quality pages are most likely to see a difference.

Sites with many pages without many inbound links have seen the greatest difference with this new “May Day” update. I had an ecommerce site call me this week saying that they had noticed a substantial drop off in their SERP’s, and after doing some groundwork I can only assume that this was definitely a result of the “May Day” update. Being an ecommerce site they fit the profile of those pages not having a lot if any inbound links. The quality of their page design was very poor both in structure and overall seo design. Their product mix is also in a very competitive industry, so that makes their seo structure and strategy that much more important.

So if you are a web site that has been affected by the “May Day” update your goal is to be a “higher quality” web site, and to be that you need to ensure that you have “higher quality” pages.  The way to do this is to visit those pages and go back to SEO basics to get back to where your SERPS’s should be.

It's Time to Build and Optimize Mobile Web Sites

With the introduction of the smartphones in the past few years the technology has come a long way. More and more when you type in a website you are redirected to a mobile web site when browsing with a mobile device. With (WAP - Wireless Access Protocol) a mobile website can be built that can be viewed with any mobile phone. You can check if your website is mobile ready by going to: http://ready.mobi/.

When building your mobile website it is important to optimize it for the search engines. In order to do this it is important to understand that mobile optimization is different from conventional website optimization. The main difference is when people search on their mobile phones there is normally an immediate need. So they may be looking for shopping, ringtones, tickets, music, movies, jokes, and sporting events to name a few. One think to keep in mind that is comparable to traditional search is mobile users are as or less patient when making their searches. So if they don't see what they are looking for in the first page or two they will refine their search. The last thing to know in regards to seo for mobile devices is that search queries are short, so don't optimize for long tail keywords. Searches are one or two words.

Another thing that you can use on your mobile site is a Metatxt file. With a Metatxt file you create a small text file that will help the search engines know what your site is about. This Metatxt file can be read by humans and computers. One way to create your Metatxt file is to go to: http://www.gomobileseo.com/ and insert the URL of your traditional website. If you like what this generator comes up with you can place it in your website's root directory where it will be available to any web tool. You can also make and changes or additions to the file that you would like.

Update 6/3/2010 - Mobile Shopping Doubles in 2010

To help you get additional incentive to do more with mobile design and optimization it was reported today that m-commerce sales have doubled so far in 2010. Along with the doubling of sales there has also been a doubling of Smartphone shopping usage according to PriceGrabber.com.