San Diego DreamWeavers SEO/IT News, tips, information and other fun stuff

I’m going be posting these from time to time as I see things in my day to day business.

One of the first things I’m going to write about is SEO Law #1 based on something I read today on a forum.

SEO LAW #1 - Never ever, ever use a 3rd Party Shopping Cart as the home page of your site if you can avoid it.

The reasons are this:

1) With 99.9 % of the Shopping cart code, you are stuck with whatever the cart software generates for HTML (or whatever spits out to your browser).

2) SEO options are limited if they exist at all.  More often than not, if SEO options exist for a 3rd Party Shopping cart they are designed to be a universal setting.

3) Shopping carts are written by coders/web designers.  This means that they they don’t take SEO into consideration when creating the shopping cart software.  It’s not the Coders or the Web Designers faults, their jobs are only to get a working product that is free of defects and bugs.  I’m not knocking them either, they do their jobs and the come up with great products.

4) If you make changes to the static SEO code/keywords on a shopping cart, again if it exists in the given cart software, the SEO changes will hurt your rankings.

5) The cart may spit out a beautiful site in your browser but 99% of the time the Cart web pages won’t ever be 100% valid HTML code.

What can we do about this?

Well we can do the following (off the top of my head):

1) We can create static HTML pages that lead into the cart software.  This can give you great SEO benefits.

2) If you do decide to stick with the 3rd party cart software as the front page we can use a blog!

3) We can dance if we want to. We can leave your friends behind. ‘Cause your friends don’t dance and if they don’t dance, Well they’re no friends of mine. I say, we can go where we want to, a place where they will never find, And we can act like we come from out of this world Leave the real one far behind. And we can dance.

4) We can take the source of the front page of the cart software, save it as a HTML file, clean the code up, fill it with SEO goodness, and then use that as your new front page.  Granted, this may not work with all Cart software but it’s worth a shot.

5) We can create a new domain and use it as our all-static HTML (php etc) main site and use the shopping cart as a separate site on a separate domain.  This way your primary domain will get all the love from the search engines and your customers will be happy buying your products.

6) In the Case of an ASP cart, we can create a static HTML Site map, with the proper keywords, for the site.  That will help the search engines find all the products on your ASP shopping cart.

Until next time!

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I wanted to post this Top 10 list (the first of many to come) not only for people to know what the things to look out for in a bad SEO company or person but also to help people find an SEO expert.  The goal of course would be so they can have their own success story.  I’ll probably follow this up down the road with more stuff to stay away from (like SEO Software - There isn’t any such thing).

1 ) MYTH: I (as a SEO customer) should expect immediate results from the SEO work.

REALITY: This is totally untrue.  Depending on the current state of your site before the SEO guru comes on board it may take up to six months to a year before seeing solid, ethical, honest work results.

2 ) MYTH: SEO’s don’t need to talk with you (as a potential customer to the SEO expert) before they begin their work.

REALITY: This is untrue.  Any good SEO-type person will sit down with you to get to know your business and what your goals are.  They are going to be an extension of you and your business and you need to have someone in your corner helping you to become successful.

3 ) MYTH: There is a universal ‘Fix All’/Cookie cutter approach for SEO’s to use when working on sites

REALITY:  This couldn’t be farther from the truth.  There is no single ‘cookie cutter’ approach to SEO.  Anyone who says otherwise doesn’t have a clue what they are doing.  Every one of my customers has different needs and different customer bases so each of them need a completely different solution.

4 ) MYTH: Sites Built in Flash can help you immensely in the Search Engine Rankings.

REALITY: Flash sites are the enemy of SEO experts.  All good SEO people will stay away from sites that are entirely flash based and treat these sites like they were nuclear waste.  If you have a Flash site, you should consider either 1) getting rid of the Flash site completely or 2) Create an HTML version of the site in addition to your flash site.

5 ) MYTH: Press Releases can’t help me in my search engine or my Online Marketing rankings.

REALITY:  This is completely false.  Most of the online Press Release companies like PRWeb have packages that not only submit them to the publications (Newspaper, Radio, Magazines, Television, etc) but, depending on the package you purchase, Press Releases can be listed in online repositories like Google News that can give you a high PageRank inbound link from multiple sources.  Furthermore, Press Releases, depending on the Keyword competition, can help in Search Engine Rankings.  This is all in addition to the targeted media that will receive the Press Release.

6 ) MYTH: <Name of SEO Company/Expert> says that submitting your site to thousands of search engines will help boost your rankings.

REALITY: This is the worst thing someone can do to your site.  There are only a small handful of good sites to submit your site to…and they don’t include Yahoo! or Google as they will pick up your site automatically (if done correctly).

7 ) MYTH: <Name of SEO Company/Expert> says that link trading is the best way to get inbound links

REALITY: This was a good thing to do….well over five years ago.  Google has since de-emphasized link exchanges or link farms and will penalize you for using link exchanges.

8 ) MYTH: <Name of SEO Company/Expert> says they know how the Google Algorithm works.

REALITY: No one knows exactly how it works.  Not even the public faces at Google (Like Matt Cutts) knows how it completely works.

9 ) MYTH: The Google Toolbar Page Rank Tool is a 100% accurate and should be used as a direct representation of the success of our Marketing efforts

REALITY:  The Google Toolbar Page Rank Tool is just a toy meant for entertainment purposes.  This is straight from Google.  There are many, many other factors involved in the success or failure of a site.

10 )  MYTH: <Name of SEO Company/Expert> can 100% Guarantee their results!

REALITY: No SEO or online marketing agency can 100% guarantee their results.  SEO is not an exact science.  Anyone who says they can guarantee their results are either scamming you for their money or are going to risk your business by using illegal means of SEO.   Illegal means that will harm your search engine rankings as well as the lost money paid to them.

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One of the more popular questions I’ve been reading about is how to tell if your website or pages in your website are in the Google Supplemental Index. Let’s do a Google search for…..rice cakes. Here’s the Search link in Google:

http://www.google.com/search?q=rice+cakes&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

This is the first page of the results (listed by 100). Using this example with other searches, your search results should show up in the first set of pages.

Now lets scroll down to the bottom of the page and click page ‘10′, scroll down to the bottom of page ‘10′ and you’ll see this:

The Phrase:

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 926 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.

Means that you have reached the end of the main search results that Google thinks you would be interested in.  Any webpage or web site listed after this point are in the supplemental index. This means that if you don’t see your page in the regular Google index before the phrase above, your pages or site need work.

When you click the ‘repeat the search with the omitted results included.’  Google will now show both their main search results along with the Google supplemental results.

Now, one thing to note for everyone is that if you find your site in the Google Supplemental index it doesn’t mean that your site has been banned by Google it means that Google has deemed your site not worthy of being in their main search results for some reason.

Google has given the Death Penalty out to people in the past, most Notably Auto maker BMW’s German website. They did some really underhanded SEO work that Google didn’t like and the dropped their Page Rank to zero and making sure that it does not appear at the top.

Here’s more information about the BMW Death Penalty incident from two years ago from the BBC’s website:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4685750.stm

Google has since abandoned this practice and now will drop your site down in rankings instead of handing out death penalties.

How do you get your site out of Google’s supplemental results?  That’s another story for another day.

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301 Redirects are probably one of the most asked about questions in Web Design and with SEO/Online Marketing work today.

Redirecting your site from yoursite.com to www.yoursite.com is one of the main requirements from Google’s Webmaster tools as they consider yoursite.com and www.yoursite.com to be two different URL’s

Most people who have a Linux/Unix Server can easily modify their .htaccess file and make the change with a few lines of ‘code’.  If people don’t know how to modify their .htaccess file they can easily Search Google, find the answer and implement it very quickly.

So how the $&@# do I do this on a Microsoft IIS server you ask?  My IIS hosting doesn’t have the functionality of a .htaccess file at all.

Simple.

I know people at this point would just blindly say ‘Use ‘nix ya n00b’ but not every application or website can leverage a Unix server.  ASP shopping carts or .NET driven sites are usually the biggest groups of users that can’t leverage a Unix server for their sites.

Anyways, the answer to doing 301 URL re-directs is ISAPI_Rewrite from Helicon Tech.  This is a very powerful tool that is the closest equivalent to a .htaccess file in the IIS/Microsoft world.

One thing to note, before you run out with your credit card in hand, make sure that your hosting company will install this program for you.  If they do not, then it’s time to start shopping for a new hosting company.

Once you have this installed, I’ll run through how to re-direct your site from yoursite.com to www.yoursite.com:

Once you have ISAPI_rewrite installed and running, create a file in the root of your web server (if on shared hosting) called httpd.ini.  In the file put the following:

[ISAPI_Rewrite]
# redirect to www
RewriteCond Host: (?:yoursite)\.(?:com)
RewriteRule (.*) http\://www.yoursite.com$1 [I,RP]

Save it and upload it to your server.

That’s it.  You can do lots more than just re-direction with ISAPI_rewrite like ban IP addresses, dynamic URLS, 301 Redirects…but I already said 301 redirects.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

San Diego DreamWeavers become the first company to launch SEO and Marketing services for Adobe Flash websites in Southern California and Arizona

SCOTTSDALE, AZ and SAN DIEGO, CA – July 3, 2008 – San Diego DreamWeavers today announced the offering of Online SEO and Online Marketing Services for Adobe Flash websites in Southern California and Arizona.  This announcement follows the news of Google, Yahoo!, and Adobe working together on changing the Google/Yahoo! Search algorithms. This change will allow Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Flash websites and internet rich applications to be properly crawled by the Google search engines for the first time ever.

Before today’s announcement, Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Flash website and Flash application owners were unable to have their sites be properly searched due to limitations of the Google/Yahoo!/MSN search engines.  Today’s announcement will allow hundreds of thousand if not millions of Flash based Web sites and Web Applications around the world the ability to compete with non-Flash based web sites for the first time ever in the history of the web.

“For many years SEO businesses would not work with people or companies that had Flash websites because Google, Yahoo!, and MSN could not properly crawl the Flash file format (SWF) and return relevant search results” said Aaron Wood Owner of San Diego DreamWeavers.  “Adobe’s announcement that they are working with Yahoo! and Google will give Flash web site/application owners the ability to even the playing field in the search engine results.”  Mr. Wood continues, “Our main web site is 100% Flash based and we have already seen a tremendous boost in our Google Rankings as a result of this groundbreaking announcement.”

San Diego DreamWeavers owner Aaron Wood lists some of the most important benefits of the Google/Yahoo!/Adobe announcement on the:

Customers will now be on an even playing field with non-flash sites – Before this announcement, properly optimized non-Flash based sites were able to stand at the top of the search engine results across multiple keywords.  Flash websites and flash based applications were unable to have their sites show in relevant search results unless they were multi-national corporations (Movie Studios and Perfume Manufacturers are two prime examples of this).  Flash site owners can now leverage the text in their sites as an additional dimension in their online marketing strategies and give normal websites a run for their money.This additional dimension added to marketing strategies for Flash sites is absolutely the biggest benefit of this historic announcement.

More traffic can be driven to Flash sites – With properly optimized Flash site text, sites across the internet now have the potential attract large amounts of search-engine related traffic for the first time ever.

Developers can now generate Flash sites without any search engine optimization related constraints – Previously, the inability of search engines being able to access Flash-based websites played a major role in the architecture and development of Flash sites in small to mid-sized companies.  With this announcement by Google/Yahoo!/Adobe, companies and individuals will be able leverage flash based sites and applications for their online marketing strategies.

No additional modifications to any current flash code will be needed – Other than optimizing the text within flash files for the search engines, no other updates or modifications will be needed to current flash sites around the internet.  All the changes that are to be made will done on Google’s servers.  Flash site developers and owners will not have to download any patches or make any modifications to the code that runs their Flash sites and Flash applications.

Flash sites can be used to break into previously untapped markets – Previously, Flash Sites never have played a role in online Marketing strategies for small to mid-sized businesses. Flash web sites were just used as a go-to point for customers and visitors.  With this new announcement, Flash sites can not only be leveraged for online marketing strategies, but they can also be optimized for countless search engine keywords.  Flash Developers and Flash website owners now have the power to be able to target whatever markets they desire, just like a normal website.

San Diego DreamWeavers have been assisting their customers in the online business world in developing successful Web and Online Marketing solutions since 2005.

The Southern California and Arizona based customers that make up San Diego DreamWeavers portfolio are among the best in their professions and strive to keep their customers at the top.

Contact:

Aaron Wood
San Diego DreamWeavers
(619) 994-4866
http://www.sddreamweavers.com

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