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SEO

Articles in SEO

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29 published articles

Why Did My Website Traffic Drop Overnight?

No, Google isn’t broken. Algorithm changes occur often without warning. Here’s what happened with the Penguin and Panda updates. Never settle for quick results!

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Increase Your Facebook EdgeRank, Reach and Engagement

What determines how many fans see your posts and which posts they see?  It may seem random or arbitrary, but there is actually a very specific algorithm called EdgeRank that determines where every post shows up.  Much like the Google algorithm determines keyword rank for specific searches, EdgeRank determines where every post is displayed.   For those that want to know how EdgeRank works we explain the details at the end of this blog post, and for those that just want to know how to get your Pag

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Measuring SEO Results, Time to Ditch SERPs, Focus on Results

The most familiar, in fact dominant,  metric for SEO has been keyword ranking; and SERP (Search Engine Rank Position) reports have been a favorite tool for tracking and reporting an SEO campaign results.  SERP results have been a favorite metric because they are easy to understand.  SERP reports show exactly where your website ranks for specific keywords that are being tracked and provide what seems to be a metric you can count on to measure SEO campaign results.  If you rank #1 or even#5 for a

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SEO Scams: Promising Page One Results and Fake Page One Results

A common SEO scam sales pitch is “we will get you on Page One of Google!”.  I used to say that any firm “promising” page one results was clearly a scam or at best a charlatan, but recently I ran across some instances where they were telling the truth, well sort of.  I have seen several large SEO companies promising and delivering what I consider fake, or at best useless, Google page one results to naive clients.  Here’s how they do it… Figures Don’t Lie but Liars Can Figure! During the sales pit

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How Does Your Website Measure Up? Compare Traffic to Competitors with this Handy Tool

Have you ever wondered how your website stacks up against your competitors? Google Analytics provides traffic data for your website, but provides no comparative data for other websites. In fact, without access to Google Analytics for a website it is impossible to get precise traffic metrics or data. While you cannot obtain exact data for websites other than your own, there is a way to get comparative traffic rankings for your website versus competitors or other websites. Alexa and Compete offer

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The Road to Website Recovery – Google Adds Disavow Links Penguin Fixing Tool

Was your Website effected by Google’s Penguin Update? Did you use a SEO Company that spammed the internet with shady links pointing to your site, only to suddenly drop in rankings and traffic overnight? How many hours of sleep have you lost worrying about getting your rankings back? Did you curse and mutter while trying to decide whether to take  dreadfully slow route of  trashing your website and starting over, or trying, painstakingly, to get those links removed?  Worry no longer, today Google

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2012 – The SEO Apocalypse – Shuffling the Deck

Apocalypse – Penguin, Panda, and EMD Missiles In the past week we have seen some major changes to Google Search pushed by Google, an algorithm Update, a EMD algorithm update and a Penguin Update, all within the span of a week. The rate of data refreshes is alarming. The rate signifies a few things though, most importantly that Google is comfortable enough as king of search to start tinkering with the results without having to wait too long to see the results (or complaints). No matter how many B

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SEO Scams! How to Find a Reputable Web Design, SEO and Digital Marketing Company

If I hear one more company owner tell me they flushed away thousands of dollars on a web company that made big promises and did not deliver results, I am going to need to defragment my mental hard drive! Maybe there is an ashram for business people who need to cultivate compassion for crooks and scammers that give any given industry a bad name when thye could be spending time on an app for Amazon FBA reimbursements. But until we find that place to deal with these bad business practices, we have

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Plan Your Rebranding to Avoid De-Branding

Without careful planning and implementation your rebranding campaign can devolve into a de-branding campaign, diminishing your presence on the internet and social media, creating confusion with your customers.   After years of developing a brand sometimes a strategic decision is made to change the brand or create new brand and start a re-branding campaign.  Whatever the reasons for changing the brand, before you choose your new identity and launch your rebranding campaign there are several thing

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How to Edit Yoast Plug-In on Word Press 3 Pages and Posts

Driving more traffic to your Word Press page or post is very important when wanting to successfully promote your content that you have spent so much time on. The best way to do this is by installing the WordPress SEO by Yoast plug in. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which helps Google, as well as other search engines, find your content quicker and easier, giving you a higher chance of getting clicks to your page. By having the Yoast plug in installed, you are able to easily customize

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Panda or Penguin Slapped? Here’s the Cure for an Ugly Slap

 The now infamous Panda and Penguin updates were released by Google in April 2012. Actually this was Panda 3.5 and 3.6 and the first Penguin update and while there have been other Panda updates dating back to 2011, these seem to have had the most dramatic impact on websites. Panda and Penguin are intended to target Spammy websites, low quality content, and link farms and in fact they did just that. These updates also affected a significant number of websites that not really were spammers or link

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Surviving Google Panda and Penguin Updates, 2 Client Success Stories

Google’s Panda 3.5 and 3.6 updates, along with the Penguin update, in April of 2012 had a devastating impact for search rankings on many websites. Many reported traffic drops of as much as 85% and search rankings dropping from page one to to the basement. Esotech and our clients were very fortunate to have been unscathed by Panda and Penguin. All of our clients either held steady or increased through both updates, with just one client having a small rankings drop that is now climbing again. Here

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Defending Your Reputation and Copyright on the Internet

Your brand image is predominantly defined by what is shown on the first page of Google, Bing and Yahoo search results. Under normal circumstances one would expect the first page of search results to be your webpage, blogs, webpages and of course your competitors. What happens if an angry customer or client decides to start posting negative comments about your company or you or worse creates a website dedicated to harming your reputation like www.your-company-name-here-sucks.com and this content

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How to Use Google In Page Analytics to Analyze Website Design and Performance

Google Analytics has powerful tools for analyzing how users interact with and navigate through your website.  Our previous blog explained How to Use Google Analytics Visitor Flow graphs to understand how visitors are flowing through your website.   In this blog we will explain how to use In Page Analytics to understand how users are interacting with your website, what they are clicking on, what is working, and what is not working.  We use both Visitor Flow and In Page Analytics in our SEO Analys

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How to Use Google Analytics Visitor-User Flow to Optimize Website Traffic

The Google Analytics dashboard and traffic graphs of are familiar to many, but few go beyond these very basic tools.  Google Analytics also has great tools for analyzing how visitors (users) interact with your website.  Visitor-User Flow and In Page Analytics are two tools that provide great insight into how your website is performing with respect to converting traffic into visits, and ultimately leads or sales.  We routinely use both Visitor-User Flow graphs and In Page Analytics to see how our

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SEO Tips: Ideas for Creating Great Website and Blog Content

It is said over and over, “Content is King” for achieving top search rankings, but what exactly does that mean and how do you create great content.  Here are some quick SEO tips for developing great content for your website or blog. Don’t Write What YOU Think They Want to Read: Website owners and bloggers often create content based on internal assumptions of what they think their consumers or visitors want to read or should be interested in.  It is vital that your content addresses topics useful

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Adobe mobile Flash Abandoned, Impact on PC Flash and Web Design

What is the impact of Adobe abandoning mobile Flash? Actually abandoning Flash for mobile is not really a big deal in itself, what is a big deal is what this move likely means for the future of Flash on all platforms, PC included. Apple has been a Flash antagonist and Microsoft joined the Flash opposition with IE 10 and Windows 8 declaring it is time for the Web to move on (ouch). With this the demise of the antiquated PC Flash platform can’t be far behind. In fact, Adobe already has the replace

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Social Media Enhances and Complements SEO, like Yin and Yang

The argument that Social Media will ultimately kill SEO is an amusing one. Yes, Social Media will dramatically change SEO, in it fact already has changed  it forever; but Social Media will not replace SEO.  SEO and Social Media have a Yin Yang relationship – opposite forces that complement each other within a greater whole.  I think Social Media is the most exciting thing that has happened to SEO in many years and it will significantly improve the relevance and quality of search results. Social

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Reputation Repair & Management, Learn from the Worst and be the Best

Reputation repair and reputation management is a hot topic today as social media and blogs are exploding in popularity.  Social media is making it increasingly easier for an irate client, customer, or employee to smear your company name and make it very public.  In fact, without a great deal of skill it is fairly easy to create negative content via social media and blogs that will rank in Google or Bing searches such as Company Name Scam or Brand Name Scam.  On twitter the popular hashtags for t

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How Web 2.0 Websites Connect with Social Networks

 How do you design a website or connect your existing website with social networks and social media? This seems easy enough, right? Add a few cute icons on the top right hand side of your website, maybe add a blog, and poof you are in Web 2.0 wonderland! I suppose you can leave it at that and many do just that and proudly proclaim they all over Web 2.0. But there is a lot more to it than adding a couple of cute icons and few links to social networks.   Connecting to Social Networks, Creatin

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SEO Scams, You Need a New Website, is this really a Scam?

One of the most popular SEO scams to blog about is “you need a new website” to rank well.  In general I agree with the principle that a new website is not a requisite for good SEO or good search ranking performance.  However, we have run across many instances where the existing website is simply hopeless and it would be an SEO scam to take the clients money to optimize that website.  Bluntly, those websites just sucked and there was no saving them! So when do you need a new website and how can y

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Googles Caffeine – New Faster Search Engine Indexing

Google’s Caffeine indexing platform was just released yesterday. The web will now be indexed faster in a more “real-time” algorithmic process. Basically all the different qualifications that go into the search indexing formula will be piece-mealed in and compared to the the entire database in real time as opposed to building stack by stack of data over time in order to run the sort query and seeing major changes only pushed out after long periods of time and data analysis.*cough, wheeze, gasp* W

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Destroying SEO – The New Invisible Text

Last month I noticed a website pop up on the first page of “health insurance” search term, hellzyea.com/health…I had never heard of this page and always tracking my competition, I investigated further. How the hell could a website with a name like that get ranked? They are a 1 page landing page website, tens of thousands of backlinks, with a pretty form and links to various competitors in what appears to be an “affiliate” network buy. Looking at Yahoo Site Explorer…they have 93,000 links. I was

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Web Analytics – Looking in the Mirror – Illusions and Maya

In a blog post by Michael Brewer of VitalOne Health, a researcher in the health insurance market, he mentions that ComScore claims that there is a large increase in online searches for Health Insurance. I’d like to pause for a minute on this topic and reflect on something that was brought to my attention recently, purely opinion of course, some would say backed by sound logic and experience with health insurance online market data. The industry is looking in a mirror, and creating numbers out of

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ABC’s of SEO

Articles, blogs and content. These are the essential components of SEO. Without these in the proper combination you will not rank in any search engine. The larger your site the better, organization is key, critical. You must have a plan for growth…it must be robust, and you must follow it day by day. Authority on the internet refers not so much qualiry, but non spam appearing quantity. Make your site make sense. Link it properly. Articles bring in backlinks, house them somewhere, syndicate them,

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SEO In House

In my experience, SEO in house is a must. There are a few critical things you need. PHP/mySQL, HTML/CSS, or equivalent Web Programmer. Someone able to code creative designs to look exactly as their pictures in both static and dynamic environments. Someone who knows open source CMS’s, dynamic data, databases and WC3 Compliance standards. Creative Designer. Someone whose sole job is to come up with creative pictures, and photographic/videographic content. This person works closely with the program

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