We covered a lot of areas, but one thing stood out to me above all things and it had little to do with on-site optimizations, link building, or any other area one could consider “online marketing”. At the same time, I feel it is of vital importance to any site owner; especially in this day and age of short attention spans and sensationalism.

It is Karma.

***Above image can be found at Facebooking from the Edge***

And just like Mr. Beaver found out, Karma is a bitch.

As I was speaking to the owner of the dance studio we got to taking about some of her competition in town. One in particular seemed to be giving her problems; doing things like badmouthing the studio on Facebook, spreading rumors outside of the Interwebs and BUYING A DOMAIN WITH A SIMILAR NAME (seriously) just to spite the owner.

She could have sued the other studio since they had the name registered (which I totally would have done), but decided it would be a good time to change their name and expand what they offer. She also took the high road and refused to get caught up with the social media banter.

And just like in real life, after a time all of the bad energy from the other studio caught up with them. Currently people are coming to the “good” studio and even stating the other studio’s bad vibes as a reason.

Even on the Interwebs, being nice pays off.

Bottom line: Believe in Karma. Even on Facebook.

This may not be big news for many people, being that the option was pretty elusive and most people didn’t even know about  it, but it does leave me wondering why?

Instead of nixing the whole thing, I think a better option would be to actually improve the feature and add the stipulation that data would only be available for people who were actually logged in and provided the information.

The search giant has claimed they will be looking for ways to allow demographic bidding in the future, but with the changes they have made to organic information via analytics lately I wouldn’t get my hopes up.

Any thoughts as to why Google decided to pull the plug?

If you would like to discuss search marketing for your website, please fill out the contact form and I will get back to you as soon as I return.

Thanks!

Jeff

This got me thinking about how bloggers were effected by the Panda Updates (they could have picked a better name, the Google Panda isn’t nearly as nice as its fuzzy counterpart) and how they can best avoid being slapped by the update moving forward (or even correct some of the issues that may have been caused by Panda).

The biggest effect of Panda hit sites with light or crappy content, as well it should have, and a lot of site owners quickly realized that spinning articles they wrote for other websites – or worse, completely stealing another websites content and changing it slightly (if you did/do this you are a bastard!) – simply didn’t have the effect it did previously.

So…it’s been a year and you’re still feeling the shock from the Panda Slap? You are planning on starting a blog and want to avoid getting on Google’s radar for poor content? Here’s a few things bloggers can do to not only avoid the big, bad Panda, but improve their website in the process:

1. Create Quality Content Readers Will Enjoy & Share. One of the most important things we have learned from the Panda updates is that Google cares a LOT about the quality of the content you put on your website. Don’t just put up content for the sake of content or to get high rankings; put up content because you care about your readers and want to provide them with the best information possible.
2. Edit or remove weak content from your blog. If you notice that some of your pages aren’t getting indexed by Google or are not getting ranked well at all it may be due to the content being considered light or poor in the eyes of Google. unfortunately, with the Panda updates having a bunch of poor content pages can have negative effects for the entire website. if you are finding pages on your site are not getting indexed do your blog a favor and take the time to improve them and make them more unique or remove them completely.
3. Keep Important Content “Above the Fold”. “Above the fold” is a phrase that means above the place where content can no longer be seen without scrolling down. It comes from the newspaper era where newspapers would place the most important and enticing information where people could see it without working too hard. Your blog should be no different. Use nice, relevant images and videos towards the top of the content page to keep people from leaving right away (aka bouncing).
4. Remember that Content is More than Words on a Page. Many people get this part confused. Do you post videos on your website? Do you use images to make your blog posts more enticing? All these things are considered content by the search engines (Google) and need to be unique and optimized. And if you are using someone else’s content on your site make sure it is properly cited (like the above infographic from Search Engine Land) and points back to the original source.
5. Take it Easy with the Ads on your Blog. I understand. We all want to monetize our websites in one way or another. And truth is, placing affiliate ads or adSense on our blogs is still a great way to make a little extra scratch. Unfortunately, that silly Panda does not like ads as much as we may and feel that it draws attention away from what is important on the page…the content. This does not mean you should not use ads at all, just limit the amount of adverts you place on your site to only the ones that perform the best for you and are highly relevant to your content.

But what about links? Aren’t they important? Of course they are. And if you follow this advice and create the kind of content people want to read and share the links will come naturally…just the way Google wants it to.

Blogging should be fun. I have never understood the “blogging for money” thing in the first place. Even if you want to make money from blogging, write what interests you and the money will likely follow. And if you take these things to heart while writing your blog you should never have an issue with the Panda or any other Google updates in the future.

For many bloggers (and website owners in general), web hosting isn’t even a consideration. They simply figure they will get some free hosting or just let WordPress or Blogger do all the work. Unfortunately, with web hosting – like many other areas – you get what you pay for (to an extent) and free hosting is usually a bad decision.

But where to begin?

In this post I will provide a few questions you should be asking when researching different web hosting companies and hopefully make your search for the right web host a little bit easier. These are in no particular order. 

1. Is the web host company blog friendly? As a blogger this should definitely be the first question you should be asking. Many web hosts now offer one-click installation for WordPress and other popular blog platforms and offer the necessary extensions (such as PHP & MySQL) that will allow the blog to run properly.
2. Does the host offer unlimited space? I’m not going to lie to you and act like unlimited space is the most important feature you should be considering, but it is touted by most major hosting companies so it is good to mention. Chances are, you will never come close to testing a company’s bandwidth but choosing a host with crazy-low bandwidth could cause issues as your site grows so play it safe and go unlimited.
3. How good is the company’s customer service? What happens when your blog goes down at 2 am? How good are you at explaining your issue via email or over a chat box? Next to actually having the ability to host a blog platform, customer service is probably the most important feature you should be considering when choosing a hosting company. Find a company that is available 24 hours a day/7 days a week and offers phone support at all hours and save yourself any hassle.
4. What kind of programming services does the hosting company offer? At the very least, as a blogger you are going to need PHP & MySQL. A good hosting company will also offer such things as Perl, Python and even (shudders) Flash…please, don’t use Flash. The more languages the host company offers the easier your life will be when developing your blog down the road.
5. Can you purchase a unique I.P. address? I’m a true believer in purchasing a unique I.P. address for your blog. While Google doesn’t discount blogs for being on a shared I.P., there have been cases where Google has banned a group of websites when there have been a large number of “bad neighborhood” sites located there…so is it really worth the risk?
6. How user-friendly is the control panel. Let’s face the facts, most of us are not web developers and having an easy way to manipulate our sites backend is a definite plus. When researching a web hosting company check out what their control panel is like and make sure it is easy to navigate and use.
7. What is the hosting company’s uptime? Most web hosts have very good uptime (over 99%). If the number does not start with 99 you should bounce and find another provider. The more nines that follow the decimal the better (i.e. 99.99% is better than 99.9%).
8. How much are the monthly hosting fees? Price should definitely not be the most important thing on your list, but it should by no means be the last either. Find a hosting company that offers an affordable rate without skimping on the features, and never….never, ever, EVER pay more than ten bucks per month.

If your web host can provide good answers to these questions go with them. Over the years I have tried several web hosts and have had different levels of success. Currently I use HostMonster for this website and every other website I help set up, but I am not here to make your decision for you. Changing hosting companies down the road can be a pain, so do your research and find a company that feels right.

None of these may be as important as the Meta Title of your page. The Meta title of your page is a line of code located in the head section of your document that is chock-full of important information for the search engines, including links to your style sheets and suggestions by you on how the search engines should crawl and index your site.

Why are Meta Titles Important?

Your Meta Title, also known as your Title tag, serves a number of purposes. When you’re on a web page, the Meta Title of the page is the line of text located at the upper left of the page (see screenshot 1: left).  Your Title tag is also The first thing people notice when they do a search for key phrases related to your content and are the blue highlighted part of the listing in the search results (see screenshot 1: right). Finally, and probably most importantly, your Meta Title is the very first thing the search engine spiders read when they come to your page and if they are not optimized, it could make it difficult for the spiders to know what your page is about.

Optimizing Title Tags – SEO Best Practices

 We have established the visibility and importance of your Meta Title tag. So, how does one optimize the tag so it will appeal to both search engines and users performing searches related to your web page? The answer to this question is relevance.

You have already done your research for the page and have probably written the content – or are well on your way – so you should have a pretty good idea what keywords are most important. To write a good Title tag you really just want to make sure the most important key phrase is include and the tag gives a really good idea of what the page is about. For example:

If I were writing a Meta Title for this blog post (which I will) I will want it to be as short as possible (search engines stop reading at about 70 characters), informative and highly relevant to what I am talking about (Optimizing Meta Titles in WordPress Using SEO Ultimate).

Now, that would be fine, except for that pesky word “in”, which is what is known as a “Stop Word”, or a word that is ignored by Google and other search engines. By removing this word and rearranging our Title tag a bit we can make it even more search engine-friendly:

Optimizing WordPress Meta Titles Using SEO Ultimate

There; perfect! And since we have gotten to this point in creating our Meta Title tag, why don’t we go ahead and use SEO Ultimate to add it to our blog post (Awesome segue!)

SEO Ultimate is quite possibly the best and most powerful SEO plugin available for WordPress and was created by SEO Design Solutions. To install the tool you can either go to their website, which I linked to from the tool name, or do a search within WordPress and install it from there.

Once installed, SEO Ultimate offers every tool you will need to make your blog a search-friendly powerhouse, and while we will get to those over time we are going to focus on Title tags in today’s post.

Are you ready to optimize a Meta Title? Simply go to an existing page, post or create a new one and scroll down the page under where you add the main body of the page. There will be a section titled SEO Settings that allows you to optimize Meta elements, like Titles and Descriptions, and add “no follow” and “no index” robot tags (DON’T DO THIS RIGHT NOW!!! – there is a time and a place which we will discuss later).

The very top section of the SEO Settings area is entitled “Title Tag”. Enter the optimized Meta Title you created into the box and then hit the update button on the right side of your screen.

It really is THAT EASY!!

Well, hopefully you have a better understanding of Title Tags, why they are important to SEO, and how to optimize your Titles for your posts and pages in WordPress.

Our next post will discuss Meta Descriptions and why they are still important to SEO no matter what other search engine optimizers may say.

One of the biggest issues people have with the Google platform is the inability to export more than 500 rows of data at a time. Fortunately, there is a pretty easy workaround that will allow you to append the number of rows and download all of your data at one time.

1. Go to the report containing the data you need to download.
2. At the bottom of the report you will need to change the “Show Rows” from 10 to any other number (on this report I changed it to 25 rows). 
3. This will add a “rowcount” variable to the URL. Change the 25 (or whatever number you chose) to the desired number of rows you need. The variable will look like this in the URL bar: 
4. Hit the Enter key.

And that’s it.

Simple.

You are now ready to export your data to Excel and manipulating it to get the most out of your analytics data.

**Note: Currently there is supposed to be a 50,000 row limit with this hack. In the older version of Analytics Google changed the max number from 50,000 to 20,000 when too many people began using it and there is a good chance they will do this again.***

There has been a lot of complaining over the past few months about Google and the constant state of change they seem to be in.  From search marketers griping about the Panda updates and how it has made life more difficult for SEO practitioners to Twitter freaking out over Google’s social integration it would seem as if the world of search is in a complete downward spiral.

And like every other time there is a major change to the algorithm, people are again screaming about how “SEO is Dead”.

The truth is, SEO is not dead.

SEO is not even writhing in pain.

The issue as I see it is not with the Google changes (as irritating and self-serving as they can be), but with the marketers themselves. SEOs love to tell everyone they meet about how they love the “ever changing landscape of search”…that is until the landscape of search actually changes.

SEO is not “web page optimization”. It is “search engine optimization”. From what I have seen lately, this is where a lot of self-described SEOs get it wrong. Yes, there was a time when SEO was stuffing a page full of key terms,  manipulation of meta data and link building (and if you say there wasn’t a time when this was true, you are lying to yourself), but those days are LONG gone. And while the development of quality content and link building are, and will remain, an integral aspect of search optimization, SEO is evolving rapidly – like it always has.

So what if social metrics become a bigger part of search?

If social signals affect search results then they now fall under the umbrella of SEO.

Times change. People change. Search engines change.

Deal with it.