LeeseIT Blogs » SEO

SEO – Bridging the gaps

Leroy Leese — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 22:25:50 +0000

I haven’t talked about SEO in a while – but it is getting more and more complex. Not so much in the common sense side of things – from that perspective it is all good. But there is alot of different technologies involved in creating a full-scope SEO round of updates.

Content – Affects CMS, plugins, server capabilities

Geolocation – everyone uses GPSs (almost) but who spends the time analyzing
lats/lons and geocoding? Only the techies.

Page Load times – this affects everyone on the technology side and
has little, to nothing, to do with the writers and content makers. If you use WordPress
- you are relying on other people. albeit they are highly qualified and highly skilled, but we
have to recognize that we are not in complete control (unless you hire your own programmer to
cut out the parts you don’t need from that system)

PPC – getting a good ROI takes experience and skills that the average
business/website owner might not have. Or will spend a fortune learning.

The list could go on. There are so many technologies to learn about that it can be overwhelming. Even for us proclaimed SEO guys and gals.

Recent updates

Leroy Leese — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 12:53:28 +0000

There have been so many websites that we have been working on lately that it seems we haven’t had any time to write or update our own. Here are some client websites we have had the privilege to help out recently:

It has been a great summer – thanks to all who have helped support these efforts.

Google Indexing

Leroy Leese — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 14:03:37 +0000

Love this blog entry:

googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/improved-flash-indexing.html

It sort of feels like, “finally”. I have had to justify to clients why Flash is not going to get them the sort of search results they want, even though it will have aesthetics for those that are already there. And now, we can have both worlds. I still think text is going to work out better for menus and links because of its minimal bandwidth and accessibility options -but for those things that just serve us better as flash – its nice to know that they will be visible to the engines too. At least, one engine.

Updated Blog Links for SEO

Leroy Leese — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 12:11:48 +0000

Just to let everyone know, if you are having difficulty finding a post on our website, we are moving to a new format that includes our post name in the title. So this means two changes, one is in how the posts are referenced and two is in the names. We are going to select titles that more accurately reflect the content in the post so that search engines are able to figure out what is the most important information in our posts. This is a valuable tip for everyone looking for some easy, cheap seo. Make sure your url has a search term or two that relates to the actual content of the page.

Google using Microformats

Leroy Leese — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 12:26:42 +0000

I recently discovered that microformats are being used on Google Maps. Even though I am a few months behind on this discovery, I think that it will really broaden the use and start a trend of incorporating them websites. We have incorporated them into this blog for about a year now, and we really enjoyed enhancing the Niceville Chamber of Commerce website with them and their events. So it will be interesting to see if/how microformats build momentum.

Explanation of SEO to clients

Michael — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 15:43:56 +0000

[editor: this post is a condensed version of an email written by Michael Provencher of Sators.com for a client and outlines SEO so well, we decided to post it so that we can direct future clients to it for reading]

[Here] are some things I know as far as SEO. The PAID route, means looking into Google Adwords, Yahoo! ads, etc, etc. Paying for search engine placement. That could be a direction they go, which will mean a little bit of research and communication with them to determine what they are looking to spend, etc.

The “unpaid” route, which still means they pay us, is what we can organically do for them:

update and include proper meta data
optimize tags (title tags, standard html tags, etc.)
optimize image tags (alt tags, etc)
create an XML sitemap for submitting to search engines directly
optimize content (which requires doing research on who their customers are, what keywords they are using, if any, who [client]’s target market is, what keywords they are used to using when they search, determining what they typically search for, and then re-writing the contents of the site to incorporate those keywords effectively)

that’s about the extent of what i know what we can do. the crappy part of that is that SEO is never guaranteed. any company that guarantees SEO is lying and promising something they can’t deliver on. since SEO is based on so many factors, such as hit count, cross-linking from other sites, proper indexing in the search engines (which relates to the keywords, content and meta data), etc., from experience I know that customers with a site typically don’t understand that SEO can take between 6 months and a year to show good improvement. so I’m a LITTLE hesitant to say we can do this for them, just because they can pay us hundreds of dollars for SEO and not see a difference in the first couple of weeks and “what did we pay you for?” comments start rolling in.

As long as they understand that…

… a preliminary, base-line SEO, [includes] adding meta keywords (between 15 and 30 words/phrases), meta description, updating title tags, image alt tags, and placing proper HTML mark-up tags (such as H1, etc.) …

A second level of SEO could be content-driven optimization, where, we could do more research into who their competition is, what keywords they are using, then combine and develop a better list of keywords/phrases, do the above-mentiond preliminary process, as well as incorporate those keywords into the contents of the site, cross-linking wherever possible. realistically, in comparision, that could take like 12-20 hours, because it would depend on how much research we did. also, i don’t have any software at home that can run web analytics on keywords and stuff like that [edit: see adlab.microsoft.com for content categorization and comparison tools]

Sorry for the novel. Let me know what you think… Like I said, the biggest issue I have is the mis-conception that clients have that SEO is an instant gratification thing. They will pay us, but realistically will not see results for possibly 6 months or more. If they understand that, I’d say we can do the preliminary level of SEO …

Sitemaps and the urls used to process them

Leroy Leese — Sun, 13 May 2007 15:37:27 +0000

There is evidence that even though they are a pain the in neck, sitemaps are a valuable tool. In fact, I just used the sitemap on moreover.com to find out the url for submitting a sitemap.

And in order that this blog be used as a reference for both myself and others, here is a list of locations for submitting sitemaps to Yahoo!, Google, MoreOver.com and Ask.com:

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=
http://api.moreover.com/ping?u=
https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/mysites
http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/
http://webmaster.live.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=