panoptiblog

Good advice from Google, for smaller websites.  In this ten-minute video, Google Developer Programs Tech Lead, Maile Ohye, offers ten basics for good onsite SEO.  If you do nothing else, do these things.

Panoptic’s Melissa Cahill presented at this weekend’s WordCamp New York City 2012.  The topic was “Do it Yourself SEO w/WordPress”  and the session proved to be tremendously popular — standing room only on Saturday and Mel was asked to repeat the presentation on Sunday.  And the room filled up on Sunday, too!

Below are the slides from the presentation.  Video is likely to be posted on the WPNYC.org site sometime this week, so keep an eye out.

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Last week a colleague of mine proposed, only half jokingly, that we  offer to help small businesses recover from the effects of the latest Google changes by removing all the bad links pointing back to their websites.  He was talking about “Penguin,” a recent upgrade to the all-powerful Google search engine algorithm.  In a nutshell, Penguin knocked down the rankings of sites that had spammy link profiles — that is, Google penalized websites that, among other things, tried to “game the system.” One of the biggest factors contributing to your website’s ranking are the number of “backlinks” or “incoming links” — links that points back to a page on your site from somebody else’s site. Search engines assume that the more links that point to your website, the more useful your website must be. Makes sense, right? But in the race to secure those precious top rankings, many folks tried to beg, borrow or pay for as many links as possible, regardless of where they came from. Unfortunately, a lot of SEOs used these same tactics on behalf of their clients, and now find that all those worthless links need to be removed. What a mess! Remember: Google has to ensure that the results returned by a search are going to be relevant and credible, so they are constantly seeking ways to reduce the “web spam.” It’s not that Google wants to ban SEO — only lousy SEO. Here’s what Matt Cutts of Google had to say about it late last year:

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Three times in the last two months I’ve taken on small business clients who find themselves in an identical situations: they’ve spent good money for a high-design website, have generally been delighted with the results (ooh, ah — pretty!) and are perplexed when, a couple of months after launch, they see very low visitor traffic, or poor showings in search results, or both.  Even the least internet savvy business owners know that they need to show up in search results — and most have an intuitive understanding that the Top 10 sites returned in a Google search get the lion’s share of the visitors.

So why does it happen?

Because web designers are not search marketers, and very few of them are familiar with sound SEO practices.

In two of the three cases I mention here, the designers chose WordPress as their platform.  When we were conducting our preliminary research and competitive analysis for these clients, we saw their WordPress-based websites and thought, “Yippie — onsite optimization will be a snap!”

WordPress is great for SEO out of the box; using one of the popular SEO plugins, like Yoast’s WordPress SEO, makes it even easier and more robust. The plugin provides guidance for optimizing meta tags and on-page content, has options for applying basic indexation rules, generates and maintains Google XML sitemaps for you — all the behind the scenes stuff the designer doesn’t know or care anything about.  (Why should she?  She’s a designer!)

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With over 150 million users, LinkedIn is considered to be the largest professional network on the Internet.  A lot of people have been using LinkedIn for networking, job prospecting, and building credibility in their areas of expertise through the Recommendations feature, or by actively taking part in LinkedIn Groups.  But while many business owners understand how to use their professional profiles, only a few are taking advantage of the many benefits that the company page has to offer.

A study conducted by HubSpot in January found that LinkedIn is 277% more effective for lead generation than Twitter and Facebook combined.  So if you haven’t created a LinkedIn company page for your business, or only have a brief description and/or logo there, you are missing an opportunity to give your business a more robust presence.

Here are some of the features that you can take advantage of to make your business stand out from your competitors:

1. Blog RSS Feed and News Mention.  Aside from creating a keyword-rich description, you can add more content in your company page by adding your blog’s RSS feed.  This works well if you regularly post new content in your company blog.

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