JBCR Virtual Solutions Blog

Archive for July, 2007

On a daily basis I am bon­barded by sales pitches. A good por­tion are not prod­ucts, like ebooks or audios, they are ‘sys­tems’ or ‘soft­ware’ that say they can have your site indexed in hours, in the top 10 of page 1 of the list in search engines (and so much more).

Some of these ‘pro­mos’ I receive I have opted in to receive (usu­ally a newslet­ter) and some not — more not. I know this is not unusual. Most of the time I just delete off these ‘pitches’ after read­ing a few lines because:

1. It must be an affil­i­ate link since I have read the same line in numer­ous emails already.
2. I have to click a script to read it and will not do that.
3. The first few lines imme­di­ately tell me that this per­son may be sell­ing some­thing worth­while but has no idea what the ramaifi­ca­tions are.
etc.…

My point in this blog post is that if you receive some­thing that make claims that you find hard to believe chances are you should not believe it.

Espe­cially when it comes to do with any­thing related to SEO / SEM. Do a bit of read­ing that will save you money and pain in the long run. At least read Googles Web­mas­ter Guidelines:

Google Web­mas­ter Guidelines

Even this bit of knowl­edge will help.

Qual­ity guide­lines — spe­cific guidelines

- Avoid hid­den text or hid­den links.
- Don’t use cloak­ing or sneaky redi­rects.
- Don’t send auto­mated queries to Google.
- Don’t load pages with irrel­e­vant key­words.
- Don’t cre­ate mul­ti­ple pages, sub­do­mains, or domains with sub­stan­tially dupli­cate con­tent.
- Don’t cre­ate pages that install viruses, tro­jans, or other bad­ware.
- Avoid “door­way” pages cre­ated just for search engines, or other “cookie cut­ter” approaches such as affil­i­ate pro­grams with lit­tle or no orig­i­nal con­tent.
- If your site par­tic­i­pates in an affil­i­ate pro­gram, make sure that your site adds value. Pro­vide unique and rel­e­vant con­tent that gives users a rea­son to visit your site first.

A bit more read­ing would be even better.

I under­stand as busy busi­ness owner you may not man­age your own web site, or do your own SEO or mar­ket­ing, but if you are tempted to pur­chase prod­ucts out there that are related to this — in any way — take time or make sure your or your web mas­ter / mar­keter / SEO team has at least read them.

It will save you money and what could be a very big headache.

Read more arti­cles here: http://www.jbcr-virtualsolutions.com/tips-and-articles.html

Jan

In our pre­vi­ous seg­ments of this report, we dis­cussed how you can real­ize a higher ROI by sav­ing money on web­site update by using CSS, Cas­cad­ing Style Sheets.

Sav­ing money is mak­ing money, but in addi­tion to sav­ing you money, a web site that uses the min­i­mum amount of code required to “make it all hap­pen” gives addi­tional money mak­ing advan­tages too!

MONEY MAKING ADVANTAGE

KEEP THOSE GOOGLEBOTS HAPPY (AND OTHER SEARCH BOTS TOO!)

Search engines send out auto­mated soft­ware called “crawlers” or “spi­ders” to look through web­sites for con­tent to list. Those crawlers have a lot of Inter­net to cover. It gets big­ger every day and as it gets big­ger the crawlers get less patient about the amount of code they have to wade through to extract what they came for, which is your con­tent. Help the bots help your client/customer find you. Keep the code used to dis­play the con­tent as min­i­mal as pos­si­ble. This way they “crawl” more rel­e­vant, index­able con­tent, and less code before they move on.

Cur­rently crawlers are set to check the first 250 lines of code on a page and then move on to index another page. They index from the code view, not the text view you see. This is impor­tant to remember!

Read more of this arti­cle here: http://www.jbcr-virtualsolutions.com/tips-and-articles.html#3

was read­ing an arti­cle the other day that stated that web design com­pa­nies lack SEO knowl­edge and ‘their com­pany’ not only builds sites but also makes them search engine friendly.

This is not new and this is not news.

My opin­ion is in this day and age any­one who hires a web design com­pany must ensure that the com­pany designs with SEO in mind. Long gone are the days on web design alone. As an exam­ple, and this is a very basic one, a CSS should be cre­ated with any new web site. You may ask what a Cas­cad­ing Style sheet has to do with SEO since it really is a design issue — well, basi­cally, too much un-necessary cod­ing is not SEO friendly. A CSS should be cre­ated in an exter­nal file and linked in the page. Let me show you an example.

Here is an image a site with no unique CSS:

Here is an image of a site with a unique CSS:

Lots of dif­fer­ence in code — right!

JavaScripts should be in an exter­nal file as well.

So, yes, ensure that your web designer is con­sid­er­ing SEO when design­ing. It is a must now!

Jan

The July issue of JBCR Vir­tual Solu­tions newslet­ter is now avail­able. In this issue we cover:

1. New Google Tag
2. Google Algo­rithm Update
3. Slic­ing & Dic­ing
4. Sec­ond Life Snip­pets
5. A Spe­cial Video!

If you do not receive our newslet­ter you can sign up on the form at the right or click here:
http://www.jbcr-virtualsolutions.com/index.html#Virtualoso

Enjoy!

Jan