By Les Kollegian
Jacob Tyler Creative Group

Jacob Tyler and our sister company SEO Town handle Search Engine Optimization for a broad base of clients. The thing about SEO is that it’s not only a process that is 100% iterative, it’s also always a 100% learning experience. Keeping up with the brilliant minds at Google is not always an easy task even though they offer to help through support documents, forums, and more. For those of you out there who are saying “what about Bing and Yahoo?”… they have their place but they don’t hold a search “candle” to that of Google. This isn’t just because of their market share, but mostly because of the quality of their search algorithms. Thus, as a creative marketing agency, we put most of our emphasis on creating leads for our clients from Google and now even YouTube, the world’s second most searched search engine.

So now we get to a question we have been asking recently. Why are search results sometimes different on different systems and how can we accurately track where we rank organically in the eyes of our customers? Great question! Not so easy answer.

The good and bad:
Google does an amazing job of making searches for users relevant to their preferences by automatically personalizing the results. While this can be GREAT for the typical Web browser, it makes finding “true” search results a little more difficult. Here’s why.

In the past, the only way to receive better or “preferred/personal” results was to sign up for personalized search. Now, you can get customized results whenever you use Google. Depending upon whether or not you’re signed in to a Google Account when you search, the information they use for customizing your experience will be different:

Signed-in personalization: When you’re signed in, Google personalizes your search experience based on your Web History. If you don’t want to receive personalized results while you’re signed in, you can turn off Web History and remove it from your Google Account. You can also view and remove individual items from your Web History. At Jacob Tyler, we recommend our clients disable personalization on their own systems to get the most accurate search results. Otherwise, Google may place YOUR link toward the top of your results pages based on your previous search and clicks. See the image below on how to delete your Web history/personalization.

Signed-out customization: When you’re not signed in, Google customizes your search experience based on past search information linked to your browser, using a cookie. Google stores up to 180 days of signed-out search activity linked to your browser’s cookie, including queries and results you click.

Because many people might search from a single computer, the browser cookie may be associated with more than one person’s search activity. For this reason, Google doesn’t provide a method for viewing this signed-out search activity. If you don’t want to receive customized results while you are signed out, you can turn off these search customizations. See the image below to turn off cookies for signed out searches.

Of course, deleting cookies effects a LOT on your system including personal site preferences related to browsing, passwords, purchases, and more so you may or may not want to do this depending on “easy” you want your browsing experiences to be. For more information on how to control cookies, please visit http://www.aboutcookies.org

Here’s an illustration of the information Google uses in each case:

At this point, most of the internet browsing population is using Internet Explorer or Firefox for their day-to-day surfing and information. While it may make sense to turn off cookies and web history for those interested in the most “neutral” and true results, it’s also a pain and erases information that each user wants stored for future use. I recommend downloading another browser to use for your specific searches to determine organic ranking. For example, download Google Chrome and set up the browser to run in “incognito mode“. Once this is set up, customization and personalization features are turned off and you can just stick to this browser for your rank checking curiosity.

If you’d rather stick to your current Firefox and IE browsers, there is also a plug-in you can download from Yoast that makes it simple to disable personalization.

For any business, it is extremely important to stay on top of your current search engine rankings. To do so, you must avoid personalized search as you may end up seeing different rankings on different computers. While this is a great search feature, it will not provide useful insight for your SEO marketing campaigns.

I was reading an article today on Search Marketing Standard, by Chris Stiner regarding web design site restructure, who gives some very relevant information on the steps to take to proper optimization when re-designing or structuring a Web site. In fact, we often try to explain this process to our clients but frankly, I think Chris says it best here so I might as well save my breath. Thanks Chris!

The challenges of restructuring a site that has been optimized for SEO are major. If you are going to make fundamental changes to the look, flow, and — most importantly — content of your site, here are three important steps you should follow if you want to maintain your positive rankings in the SERP s.

1. Create a one-to-one 301 redirect map of pages from the old site to the new site. Make sure the pages are as close to an exact match as possible.
2. Make sure that any old site pages that do not have an exact corresponding new site page are redirected at a category level.
3. Any old site pages left that still do not have a home should be redirected to the new site home page.

The reasons for doing this are plenty. Your website is full of assets that you need to protect. Here are the top three things you want to maintain during and after a restructure of your site.

1. External links to your website. People who follow these links need to land on relevant pages. If you lose the relevancy of an inbound link by redirecting it to a generic page, you lose most of its value. More importantly, you want the search engines to map the links correctly.
2. Deep link pages of your site in the SERPs. When users click on them, you will want the correct pages to show up. This mirrors point #1, but from the user’s perspective via the search engine.
3. Bookmarks of your site. When a user attempts to go to a bookmark, you want to make sure they get the information they are looking for. Again, relevancy is king.

If you have a large site (over 100 pages or so) here are three techniques to help you prioritize your pages to ensure you are taking care of the most important content first.

1. Identify which pages are receiving the most traffic. Your analytics software will help you here.
2. Use Google Webmaster Tools to identify your external links and what pages they are landing on.
3. Use Yahoo Site Explorer to locate the top pages listed by your external links. Yahoo lists this in order of importance most of the time.

By taking a serious look at your site structure and not skimping on the upfront work of site mapping and 301 redirects, you can eliminate most of the headaches that can come as a result of a poorly planned SEO restructuring.

by Les Kollegian

Recently I’ve been hearing the same question come up in many conversations with clients: “When will I see results from our SEO (Search Engine Optimization) plan”? My response is the same to every client, regardless of the situation. “It depends. It could take a couple weeks or a couple of months. You have to be patient.” Jacob Tyler’s SEO process is very intricate and time consuming. That being said- it works. Below is an explanation of why SEO campaigns take some time to get off the ground, and why our SEO is more ‘process’ than ‘result’.
Receiving Links Back from High Page-rank Sites is the First Step.

First things first, securing inbound links is never a speedy process. One aspect of a typical search marketing campaign will involve writing to other web directories and websites, inviting them to link to your own, which takes time. However, without this crucial step, links from other websites take MUCH longer to develop. I usually tell my clients to think of an SEO campaign as a process that speeds up what would occur naturally.

Webmaster response can also take a considerable amount of time. Even if you or your SEO consultant completed 150 requests in a day, the webmasters of those 150 other sites may not get back to you immediately. In extreme cases, it has been 10 – 12 months before I have heard back from some webmasters. So you’ll get some links quickly, and other links will take much longer.

The importance of receiving these links is that search engines count inbound links as a “vote”. Sites that have more “votes” are perceived as being stronger, in addition to having higher rankings.

Getting your Inbound Links to be Indexed

So let’s say that a few weeks have passed and you’ve secured 50 valuable inbound links from 50 great websites. Even though you’ve requested 150, you will never get every link you ask for, it just doesn’t happen. Some webmasters will never answer your request, and some simply will not link back.
So you have some links pointing to your site, now what?

Now the long and detailed process moves on to Google and Yahoo and they don’t get around to indexing those 50 pages for days or weeks. Google will generally index most sites within 3 – 4 weeks, whereas Yahoo takes longer and MSN takes much longer. As second-tier search engines like MSN improve their technology, you can expect the indexing speed to catch up. Additionally, until the search engines update their indexes of the pages that link to your site, it’s as if the link doesn’t exist.

Search engines are picky and they don’t index pages just because webmasters index them. So, if Google comes upon a web page with a link to your site, it may index that page immediately, or it may return a few times before the page is indexed. In that case, some links may take months to be indexed.

The Sites that Link to You have to wait for their Links as well

You also can’t forget that the sites that link to you are “living” websites too. The strength of their web presence is based on the links they receive – and that landscape is constantly changing. When your site is new, the sites that are willing to link to you are going to usually be new as well. As such, the inbound linking power of the sites that link to you will tend to be weaker than websites that have been around for a longer period of time. However, those sites will grow into stronger sites as they age, and then the inbound links that you have from other sites will grow as well.

The Sandbox Effect

And then, on top of everything else, there is the Sandbox Effect. The Sandbox Effect refers to the phenomenon of a temporary ranking penalty applied to newer websites that undergo rapid expansion in either inbound links or size. The Sandbox Effect is heavily debated and never conclusively proven either way.

Google spokesperson, Matt Cutts, has publicly stated, “There are some things in the algorithm that may be perceived as a sandbox that doesn’t apply to all industries.” Mr. Cutts’ statements are very well prepared, extremely rare and he is widely regarded as a knowledgeable, reliable source.
And so, the Sandbox Effect may serve to temporarily slow down the effects of any promotional campaign you undertake.

All of these factors combine to form the long and often frustrating process of a typical SEO campaign. Depending on your website, it can be a quick and pain-free experience, or it can be a slow and testing process. It depends. You have to be patient.

by Jonathan Marshall

Tom Krazit from CNET wrote a great article about how large Internet companies spend millions on technology and outside consulting in an effort to get their Google rank as high as possible. However, if you are not an enormous company, unfortunately, you have to rely on the link exchange, or as Krazit calls it, “poor man’s search-engine optimization.”

The end of the article points out that even though link exchanges can be effective, they only work to initially get a company’s name out into the open: the real push necessary to make a Web site successful is when real people start discussing and linking to a service on blogs, message forums, and social-networking sites. Krazit goes on to explain link exchange, and SEO in his article below.

If you’ve ever hung up your own shingle on the Web, you’ve probably gotten an e-mail to this effect at some point: “Dear So-and-so, I believe your site and mine could benefit from exchanging links.”

We probably get eight to 10 a week in the CNET News general mailbox, mostly from technology-related companies but occasionally from auto-parts suppliers and watch retailers who either have no idea what we do or few moral qualms about spam.

The idea is that if you can coax a link out of a large site like CNET, Google and other search engines will record that link as a vote of confidence in your site’s worthiness and improve your ranking in searches for certain topics, thereby boosting traffic to your site. The technique is quite old, dating back even before Google and its PageRank system emerged as the Web’s dominant search engine.

But does it still work? And at what point do two or three sites struggling to get off the ground veer off the road from mutual assistance to a full-blown spam operation designed to game the system?

Evan Duffield, for one, thinks it still works. He contacted us trying to get CNET to exchange links with WarpedAI.com, a site he has launched to promote stock-trading tools for day traders, and says he has been able to slowly build up the PageRank of another site he owns using techniques that don’t run afoul of Google’s Webmaster guidelines.

“It’s kind of a vicious circle,” he said. “To start a new business you need PageRank, but to get PageRank you need links to your service. You have to get the ball rolling.”

PageRank is the currency of the Web. Google’s novel approach to site indexing way back when was to evaluate the worthiness of a site based on how many other sites were linking to it, also taking into account the worthiness of the sites passing along the links.

This meant, and still does mean, that a link from a site with a high PageRank counts for way more than a link from a site with low PageRank.

But how do you get a link from one of those sites? Google’s official advice: “The best way to get other sites to create relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community.” That, of course, sounds like something your mother would say.

In a Web as vast as this one, getting attention for a new site, even one with superb content, is a very difficult undertaking. Bloggers can discuss each other’s work and help each other build up a following, but if you’re selling a product or service it can be much more difficult to climb the ranks of search results for things like “day-trading software” when you’re starting from scratch.

So Webmasters like Duffield turn to solicitations for links. Danny Sullivan, who writes about Search Engine Optimization for Search Engine Land, says “if you’re a new site, absolutely you want to be doing link building. But you need to be doing that in a smart fashion.”

Duffield says he’s very careful to only solicit links from sites that are related to his product: his pitch for exchanging links that somehow wound up at our doorstep was addressed to computer-go@computer-go.org, a mailing list for hobbyists trying to tackle the difficult chore of building a computer AI system for the ancient game of go.

That was a mistake, he said; the result of prematurely hitting send on an e-mail template. Duffield compiles his targets by searching for sites that are related to finance and stock trading, and attempts to contact a general e-mail address to pass along his site’s information and offer a link exchange.

“It’s not about the actual links so much as it is optimizing search queries,” Duffield said. “When I figure out a query I want from Google, I can see the top three positions have this much page rank and this many positions, and try to beat that out.”

As long as people like Duffield are exchanging links without offering payment, or crossing obvious lines such as breaking captchas and posting spam links in guestbooks or comment forums, they’re following the spirit of Google’s Webmaster guidelines.

“Where it tends to get into tricky issues is where people are doing it primarily for payment,” Sullivan said. “Search engines would see links as votes. Google does not like that people would simply be buying links to do better.

While paid links are clearly off-limits, Google appears to ban link exchanges in general, saying it does not allow “excessive link exchanging” but failing to define exactly what constitutes “excessive.”

Other practices that are verboten include links to “bad neighborhoods” on the Web and complicated networks of several Web sites with little content but pages and pages of links amongst themselves that Google can usually identify.

For the most part, however, the practice is rampant enough that only the most egregious violations get snagged. “If you start thinking too much about not getting caught, you’re probably doing things you shouldn’t be doing,” Sullivan said.

In an era where Search Engine Marketing is a budding industry unto itself, link exchanges are perhaps the most basic approach. Far below the realm of those dithering over Google’s search index are those like Duffield trying to make something out of literally nothing.

While he needs to build PageRank equity to get started, Duffield acknowledges that at a certain point that Google is right: a site will live or die on its content. Link exchanges only work to get one’s name out there: the real boost needed to turn a Web site into a business comes when real people start discussing and linking to a service on blogs, message forums, and social-networking sites.

That’s when your search ranking (and therefore traffic) really starts to grow, he said. “If you can make Google see that something is being talked about all over the Internet, what choice do they have?”