When is a link worthless from a search engine perspective? I was recently working on checking how many backlinks one of my clients had, and we found some surprising results. He’s a therapist in Seattle, and thought he had backlinks from several major online therapy directories that would contribute to his search engine ranking. What we found surprised him and just might surprise you.

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Every once in a while, a prospective client asks me if I’d create a bunch of domains that are in essense, fake, and have them direct traffic to their real domain. I always say no, because this is in direct violation of Google’s quality guidelines. If you’re thinking about doing this, or if you’ve found a competitor who does this and want to know what to do, please read on.

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You may have read my previous article published in January 5, 2009 about Google Map Spam – Multiple Listings By The Same Company. I noticed that in my fabulous traffic tracking tool (Web-Stat) that I had several visits to this particular blog article from Google in Mountain View California. I hoped that maybe, just maybe, Google was reading my blog article and would fix this particular issue. I thought, no, I was just having delusions of grandeur.  I just checked my listing, and it’s now moved up to #1 for “website design seattle” and the two duplicate listing are gone!

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Recently my beloved website traffic tracking company, Web-Stat, announced a new feature: Geo-Targeting. This nifty feature enables your website to automatically detect a visitor’s location and do neat things like showing a particular banner ad or other location-specific content. It also  allows website owners to block all kinds of traffic to their websites by country, state, zipcode…and many other things. I thought, hmmm, why would someone want to block traffic? The answer: Spam Prevention!

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Google Map Spam? What in the world could I be talking about? I’m sharing this with you because in doing some SEO work for a client I discovered this shameful practice of cheating Google Local / Google Maps listings. Very shameful and unethical. If you find a company that’s spamming Google Maps, use this private form to report it.

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I wanted to share with you another SEO (search engine optimization) and link building spam email one of my clients received and forwarded to me. If you remember my previous article about how to tell whether a company that sends you unsolicited email is virtuous, you should be able to decipher this one yourselves:

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When new websites are “born”, it make take a while for them to start getting search engine traffic. And you can’t get search traffic from a search engine until they have visited your website and “crawled” over it’s pages.  It’s important for new website owners to know how to tell if and when search engines, like Google, the most important search engine, has come and crawled around their website. But how do you tell when Google has visited your website?

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I receive link exchange requests often, and will share the most ridiculous ones I receive with you for two reasons. First, I want you to know when to decline these. Secondly, I don’t want you to actually hire a company that has people send out these awful, illogical, useless requests.

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I often receive requests from people I don’t know asking me to exchange links. Exchange means that they’ll put a link on their website to me if I put a link on my website to them. Then we’d become one big happy link family. And the more links to your website, the better, right?

Well, it depends.

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If you’ve ever used the Google keyword selection tool, you’ve seen those little green bars that represent how many other folks are searching for specific terms. And maybe like me, you’ve wondered, what the heck do these bars represent in terms of the number of searches? Till now, it was anyone’s guess. But now you can see exactly real numbers!

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I had a client recently forward unsolicited emails she had recently received that claimed to offer SEO (Search Engine Optimization) services. I wanted to share these emails with you and to give you my comments on their legitimacy, or lack thereof. Read the rest of this entry »

Many of my website clients, after watching their website traffic statistics, are dismayed to see many people coming to their website leaving after only visiting one page (this is called the “bounce rate“).

They also often see visitors who may look around at several pages and then decide to leave without purchasing anything.

They even see people who were very close to a purchase. Visitors who after adding items to a shopping cart and starting the check out process, left before completing the purchase ( this is called “shopping cart abandonment“). While all of these visitor activities are normal and expected, what’s often surprising to my client is how often they happen.

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I recently had a good friend ask me to figure out why her friend’s website was not coming up in Google. After a quick review, the answer was obvious: the site had no text content, it was 100% flash. It also had zero backlinks. There was no reason why Google would rank this site, in fact, it wasn’t even in the Google index at all. It had a splash page, and played the same music on all pages. Which leads me to a familiar theme that keeps running in my head: who should you select to design your website: an Artist or an Engineer?

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My partner runs a dog training forum to provide a community space for her clients and others to share information about dog training. This morning, someone posted a fake item that I thought I’d share with you as an example of how NOT to build backlinks to your website and trust in your business.

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I’m a client of Aldebaran Web Design and Jill kindly invited me to post in her blog about my YellowPages.com pay-per-click advertising experience. This story is for you, the small business owner with a website, who might be contemplating hiring a company to do pay-per-click advertising for you. Please don’t do it! Please repeat after me: “I promise I will use Google AdWords exclusively, and consult Jill at Aldebaran Web Design for guidance if needed.�

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This video tutorial takes you through the basics looking at your website statistics using Web-Stat, my favorite website traffic tracking service. If you want to sign up for Web-Stat, click here, they have a 30 day free trial. Enjoy the video!

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Bounce Rate has become my very favorite metric to watch when looking at website traffic statistics. This article explains what bounce rate is, how it’s measured, what bounce rate statistics look like, and what the bounce rate is trying to tell you to do.
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I client recently asked me what is “social bookmarking”. You may have seen those little icons at the bottom of my blog posts and wondered what they heck they are for. Those are “social bookmarking” icons, and they make it easier for people who are members of social bookmarking services to bookmark my blog articles. I found this wonderful video that explains social bookmarking, in particular, “del.icio.us”, but it applies to many other services as well. Enjoy!

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I often encourage my small business clients to add WordPress blogs to their websites. WordPress blogs are a wonderful way to add relevant content that attracts visitors. Before visitors can find your WordPress blog article though, the search engines, like Google, need to crawl over your blog article and index it. How long does it take for search engines to become aware of a blog article, crawl it and index it? Read on…
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Perhaps you’ve heard about the latest craze on the internet: social bookmarking. I keep reading about how people are using one social bookmarking site called Stumbleupon.com to drive traffic to their websites, so I decided to run my own experiment on December 11, 2007. Amazing things happened.

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