Tom Pimental : Web Creative

In my last post (“SEO: A Cautionary Tale“) I pointed out questionable tactics that some “SEO Experts” employ. However, there are some best practices that make your site easier to index and most of them can be done by you, free of charge.

1) Create a Google Webmaster Account: Use Google’s free webmaster tools to optimize your site’s searchability. You can also use this tool to submit a sitemap (a list of all the pages on your site) which ensures search engines have access to all of your content. Don’t forget about Bing’s and Yahoo’s webmaster tools too.

2) Sign up for Google Local Business: If you’re a local business, the major search engines now offer enhanced business listings (often for free) which appear at the top of local search results. Google, Bing and Yahoo all have these types of listings and you should make sure your company is listed with them.

3) Read Google’s SEO Starter Guide: This is an incredible resource, directly from Google, which details the various web design/layout techniques including URL patters, header tags, unique titles and meta descriptions, etc that help Google index your site.

4) Write good content and make your website useful: There’s no substitute for simply making a good, useful website. If you make a website that people enjoy, they will reward you with quality links which will eventually lead to your site being listed where it belongs in Google.

When it comes to your search engine rankings you need to be honest with yourself. Do a search for your most sought after keyword for your business and there are likely millions of results. Now add a state or even a city to that term and there are still probably 10s of thousands of results. Anyone making promises that they can get you to the top of these lists are likely full of it, but the tactics above should at least setup you site so it can be crawled effectively by search engines.

Having spent the better part of my professional career in online media, I’m acutely aware of the seduction of SEO. Countless unsolicited emails have graced my inbox touting higher rankings, mounds of traffic and never-ending revenue. But time after time, the only things that ever seem to work are good content, good layouts and quality external links—all things “SEO experts” cannot deliver.

Google’s own SEO Starter Guide states, “Creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any of the other factors discussed here.” What does this mean? Simply write content for your audience, not search engines, and Google will find you because people will notice your high quality content, products and services and link to them from their Facebook, Twitter and blog pages.

So the next time you receive an unsolicited email from a self-proclaimed “SEO Expert” keep an eye out for these scam warning signs:

1) Promises of increased rankings: No one, except a developer at Google or other search engine, has the power to physically better your search ranking. If someone makes this promise, get it in writing and get a good lawyer.

2) Any references to increasing your external links: External links should be earned, not bought/scammed. Anyone can go out and spam forums and blog comments to artificially increase your external link counts. You’d be better off spending your money on graffiti artists to spray paint your URL on a bridge as Google looks at the quality and context of the link to your page over the volume of them.

3) Keyword optimization: Keyword stuffing is one of the worst things you can do. Don’t force keywords into your meta data and site copy in the hopes of attracting searchers, because if your site is solely optimized for search engines, you’ll leave your users confused and clicking the back button to get to your competitor’s search listing.

4) Your description or keywords meta tag are not “optimized”: “SEO Experts” love to use free tools to “analyze” your site’s “search friendliness” and use those official-looking reports to scare you into doing business with them. Google’s own Matt Cutts has stated that Google does not use the keywords meta tag. Description tags are important, but again they should follow the rule of “write good content” and avoid reusing too many of the same keywords.

5) Quick turnarounds: Changes you make to your site can take 6 months or more to propagate through search results. If anyone is touting a quick fix, they’re probably doing things like keyword stuffing, link baiting, etc, which Google will eventually penalize you for.

6) External links: It’s no secret that external links (links on other sites to your site) play a big role in how well your site ranks. However, these links should be obtained over time by writing good content, providing exceptional service and generally having a useful website. Some firms will plaster your site all over forums and fake directories, but when it comes to links, quality always trumps quantity.

Take it from me, one small business owner to another, SEO can be a silver bullet, but Google owns the gun that fires it.

Despite the fact that I built Pamela Ferdinand’s first site nearly 7 years ago, the design still works, but the functionality was seriously lacking. Pamela wanted to add a blog and promote her upcoming book, “Three Wishes: Our True Story of Good Friends, Crushing Heartbreak, and Astonishing Luck on Our Way to Love and Motherhood“. A static, 7-year old site wasn’t going to cut it.

Heavily leveraging the original design and sprinkling in some WordPress magic worked like a charm. The design stayed consistent for past visitors, but adding WordPress gave Pamela the flexibility to easily manage multiple content types/categories (Blogs and Articles) and the freedom to make updates and additions to her site whenever she feels the need. Add in a simple, yet compelling Flash intro by my friends at Overthink Designs and this site was a perfect match to Pamela’s needs.

Janina used a free site builder service to get her photography online, but realized quickly that the simple templates and limited tools did not give her photographs the treatment they deserved.

She wanted to really showcase her work and make the site’s sole focus be her photography. We settled on a design that we think does that at jordonezphotography.com.

Google Analytics now allows up to 5 custom variables to be set per page. This is a significant improvement and will make Google Analytics a much more attractive option to medium to large web business.

5 is still a bit limiting (Omniture allows up to 50), but overcomes a major blocker to using Google Analytics in the past. Interestingly, Google Analytics allows 3 different types of custom metrics: Page-level, Session-level and Visitor-level Custom Variables.

To test these out, I created a page name custom variable on each page. But more advanced implementations could include tracking by author, site section, logged in status, etc. Google Analytics just changed the game again with custom variables.

My day job as IDG Enterprise’s Director of Product Development can be pretty rewarding at times. Especially when a talented team can put out something as impressive as TechDispenser–a tool that lets you to create custom newsletters from over 700 sources spanning 200 technology topics. Designers, producers, developers, marketers and more all came together to launch a product that pushes the boundaries of IDG’s comfort level and I couldn’t have been more impressed.

It was an honor to work with the talented group behind TechDispenser and I hope that my efforts going forward can help justify all of the amazing work they’ve done.

Bikram Yoga Quincy wanted a refreshed website and a easy-to-manage class schedule. Leveraging a custom design on top of WordPress I was able to deliver exactly what the business needed. The Weekly Schedule WordPress plugin gave me the flexibility to also highlight “Today’s Classes” in a module throughout the site for users looking quickly for what’s going on today. The plugin also allowed me to associate each day’s instructors to their bio.

All in all, Bikram Yoga Quincy is very please with the website and they’re eager to see how their students react to it as well.

The real Fake Steve needed to move his blog and relatively large audience off of Blogger to allow for more flexibility and expansion. A hosted version of WordPress seemed like the best fit and I began the process of converting his template, redirecting his traffic and RSS feeds and customizing WordPress to accommodate his potentially high traffic volumes.

To accomplish this, I integrated WordPress dynamic widgets, added WP Super Cache to help with page load, wrote redirects for all RSS feeds and added a Google site map for safe measure.

At the same time, Fake Steve also wanted to allow select bloggers to contribute to his site in a section called Rabid Fanboy. Leveraging some interesting post page rules I was able to segment these new authors from Fake Steve’s original content and create the experience he was looking for.

While mobile device manufactures haven’t figured out the right way to market their Android-powered phones, Google has taken their own marketing efforts (albeit through agencies) to a new level with some recent viral videos I’ve seen lately.

The first example is their Google Chrome OS introduction which was done by Epipheo Studios:

They’ve also released a set of videos called Search Stories, which gives search a human side (not sure if these are from an agency or internal):

At any rate, I think Google has realized that people (for some reason) still use Hotmail and Ask.com, and in order to reach those people, they need to simplify their message.

The original TechDispenser (blog aggregator and ad network) eventually evolved into the IDG TechNetwork so when the idea came about to create a technology-focused custom newsletter tool, we thought we’d reuse the name. So for the last 2-3 months, I’ve been product managing the significant build to get this rather unique product to market.

It’s not ready yet, but I put together a screencast preview video to show the world what we’ve been working on. Check out the video and let us know what you think.