WordPress, out of the box, unfortunately is not that SEO friendly. With the help of some plugins and proper configuration, you can make it probably the most SEO-friendly “CMS” out there. So we wanted to point out a couple very common issues in WordPress that could wreck your prospects of SEO domination.
Would you like to try our free website analysis tool and get an instant report on your website in 30 seconds? No signup, no email to give, nothing to install.
Here’s the next post in the ‘Small Business Series’, on how a small business can better leverage its strengths. This week we are talking to none other than David Heinemeier Hansson, partner at 37 Signals, creator of Ruby on Rails and coauthor (with Jason Fried) of the bestselling book ‘Rework’. Signal Vs Noise is one of my favorite startup blogs and we are huge fans of 37 Signals. In this interview I do three quick questions with him: 
Romy Misra (Pear Analytics):First David, thanks so much for taking out the time to do this. For a small business seeking to be extraordinary, what are some tactics you would recommend to an SMB that could enhance Internet searchability and SEO?
David Heinemeier Hansson (37 Signals): Our primary technique at 37 Signals is to be interesting. You can try all sorts of tricks or hacks to try to game the search engines, but the most basic is simply to be undeniably good and interesting. Share tips, tricks, and lessons that others want to read and they’ll link to you. Nothing will keep you high in the Google rankings over the long term than having tons of people link to you.
David Heinemeier Hansson (37 Signals):First, avoid interruptions. Nothing will blow up your working day faster than having meetings and phone calls sprinkled all over it. Second, cut out 90% of all planning. Planning is mostly guessing and worrying about what your business is going to look like 5 years from now is a useless exercise when you should be worrying about how to grow your business next week.
David Heinemeier Hansson (37 Signals):
Do less: We try to underdo the competition and I personally try to restate all our hard problems into easy problems.
Don’t grow: Managing people is hard, managing many people is much harder. We’ve tried to keep our headcount unnaturally low for a company of our revenues. It’s really paid off.
This is our fifth post in the ‘Small Business Series’ which features where we feature industry leaders on how small businesses can better leverage their strengths. This week we are talking to Matt McGee, a contributor for Search Engine Land, specializing in local search. Search Engine Land is one of my favorite SEO websites, which I read to keep myself up to date with SEO news.. Matt’s interest in local was fueled just by the fact that all of his early clients were small, local businesses that wanted to connect with people in his hometown. In the following interview I have focused on businesses who have a local clientele and how they can maximize the value of local search.
Romy Misra (Pear Analytics): First Matt, thanks so much for taking out the time to do this.Let’s start with the most important question for anyone with a small business. Why is it important for small businesses to focus on local search?
Matt McGee: It’s not important for ALL small businesses — but it’s a must for those who offer products or services to local customers. The answer to ‘why’ is that search engines are becoming the default way consumers find local information. Stats show that yellow page usage is on the decline and search engines are on the rise for finding local information. This is particularly true for a site like Google Maps, which has grown to surpass Mapquest as the number one site in the Travel/Maps category that Hitwise tracks.
That said, there are plenty of small businesses that offer products or services nationally, or even globally — if they’re not interested in finding local customers, they don’t really need to focus much on local search.
This is our fourth post in the ‘Small Business Series‘ which features where we feature industry leaders on how small businesses can better leverage their strengths. This week we are interviewing Hiten Shah, the founder of three successful s
tartups (Survey.io, Crazy Egg and Kissmetrics) on understanding metrics that a small business should focus on. I have been using Crazy Egg for a while now and its a great tool to understand click patterns, and just yesterday tried out KissInsights (a new product as part of Kissmetrics). KissInsights is one of the best feedback tools I have seen, I am not a fan of the pop-up technique of inviting people to participate in surveys and love the widget you have to install.
Romy Misra (Pear Analytics): First Hiten, thanks so much for taking out the time to do this. Why is it important to develop metrics for success for small businesses? How does one develop these metrics?
Hiten Shah: I believe that the metrics for success are important in any business, because they can be used to help the whole organization focus on a single goal. If you pick the right metrics for success, you will be able to significantly improve the focus of the whole team and thus improve your business. Developing these metrics should be done first by making hypothesis about your business and validating / invalidating these hypothesis. From there you will have a good base understanding that will allow you to determine what metrics to focus on and how to define success for your business.
This is the second post in our “Small Business Series” where we are interviewing a few industry experts on how small businesses can better leverage their strengths. Today we are interviewing Ken Hilburn, from Juice Analytics, one of my personal favorite data visualization companies, on how to create awesome surveys. Surveys are traditionally one of the best ways to understand your customers, but at the same time getting your customers to participate and engage in surveys is a huge challenge. I thought of interviewing Ken when I took a survey Juice Analytics sent to me by email, and it was the most engaging survey I had taken in months.
Note: As a bonus, Ken has generously shared that survey with us.
Romy Misra (Pear Analytics) : First Ken, thanks so much for taking the time to do this. The importance of surveying your customers has been repeatedly talked about. Why do you think it is important to survey your online customers/visitors?
Ken Hilburn: I have to start off by saying that Juice Analytics has an awesome community and we love talking, listening and working with them. But even with such a strong group, it’s critical to talk less and listen more.
It used to be, for the most part, that customers were at the mercy of vendors when it came to communication – it was pretty much a one-way street. However, that’s changing now. With the pervasive use of social media sites, there has been a tremendous shift toward “power to the people.” It’s certainly in a company’s best interest at this point to make sure they’re in touch with their customers and how well their customer’s needs are being met. We get to choose: we can either do that proactively, or we can wait to see it on the twitter “Popular Topics” list and hope it’s positive.
As of right now, it’s still not a great idea to mix Flash and SEO unless you really know what you’re doing. If you’re trying to rank higher on search engines, it’s probably a good idea to not overload your site with Flash. While there have been strides by the search engines to parse Flash files and grab the readable text, unless you set this up properly, chances are the Flash will end up hurting your rankings.
When to use Flash
Flash is a great tool if you have a complicated product that needs more explanation or if you need entertainment value on the website. Secondly, with the increase in mobile internet use, Flash is still not visible on the latest iPhone and Blackberry, so it’s likely those visitors will be bouncing. At Pear, we’re getting about 20% of our visitors from mobile devices, so you could be losing out on those visitors with a Flash landing page.
Alternative solutions to Flash
But now we can use AJAX and other javascript techniques, like sliders and expanders, to uniquely display content without bombarding the visitor with content, and yet it’s all still readable by the search engine. Check out how ServerBeach, a dedicated hosting company, uses javascript sliders instead of Flash to nicely organize lots of information.
Setting up proper use of Flash
If you or your developer still insist on using Flash, there are some ways that you can set up your code to optimize it for SEO, and it has to do with accessibility programming. This blog post by Jonathan Hochman is a great overview of the multiple ways you can set this up using SWFObject 2.0, or even SIFR in some cases, although I understand SIFR is more used for typography enhancements, where you would like to use a non-standard web font, but get credit for the text in an H1 tag for example.
The SWFObject method provides a way to include alternate HTML content on the page which is visible in your source code, and all it uses is a tiny javascript file. This stems from the Web Accessibility Initiative which says all multimedia content should have an alternative way of accessing the content.
On Tuesday, Google released their SEO Report Card where they did an extensive evaluation of themselves in terms of search engine optimization. The result? Well, not so good. Even Business Insider agrees that Google fails to eat their own dog food by noting that only 10% of their own product pages conform to the proper title tag protocol. Even if you type in “search engine” into Google, they come up as the 5th result, and it’s not even google.com, but a different beta product. I wonder if that’s on purpose.
So if Google sucks at SEO, why do their other products rank #1 for so many search terms? Is Google using their own algorithm on their products, or are they overriding it when it’s convenient?
Search for “apps.” Google Apps is the top listing, not Apple.
Search for “documents.” Google Docs is the top listing, beating out several government related sites.
Search for “video.” The number one position? Google Video. Who the hell uses that anymore? And where is the Google-owned YouTube? Maybe again, this is on purpose.
The answer is probably “yes.” The search marketing business is already incredibly large and growing fast, and because of how lucrative it is, it’s attracting all types of “snake oil” salespeople. According to a Forrester Research study done in July 2009, the search marketing industry is expected to grow to a $31 billion dollar industry by 2014, with 21% of that total on advertisement spending like Google AdWords. This most certainly is related to the fact that over 85% of all products purchased started with an online search.
It’s also amazing how such a large industry is still very much in its infancy. Google launched their first version of a search engine in 1998, so the industry is really only 12 years old; yet what’s fascinating is that what you knew back then almost certainly doesn’t apply now. For instance, in the early days you used to have to “submit” your site to Google in order to let them know you existed. Today all of that is done automatically through “crawling.”
The other fascinating thing, at least in the SEO world, is how disparate the expert opinions can get. One says keyword density is a myth, the other says it’s important. One says the h1 tag matter the most, the other one says it’s the title tag. It’s enough to make a skeptic out of anyone. Who should you believe? And why do they charge so vastly different for their services? One SEO consultant will charge $400 per month, and another one won’t take you unless you spend $5,000 per month. How are you supposed to evaluate the differences between costs and expertise to make sure you get a “bang for your buck?”
Let’s look at a few basics that you should understand from your SEO:
New data is out to show that visitors want sites to load in 2 seconds or less, and Google says fast sites may get slight preference in rankings.
A new study by Akamai confirms that Internet users are as fickle as ever. Their new study released in September this year shows that 47% of consumers expect an e-commerce website to load in 2 seconds or less. While the study focuses on e-commerce, I can’t imagine the behavior is much different on a non-e-commerce website.
You might remember the study we did several months ago where we took the Akamai study from 2006 and developed a visitor loss curve from 0 to 30 seconds using some fancy math. We use this data in our SiteJuice product to tell site owners how much potential visitors they could be losing based on how long their page is taking to load. If you’re not using SiteJuice, sign up for free. Our curve is based on a visitor patience of up to 4 seconds.
How this affects your Google rankings
Google search engineer, Matt Cutts, has mentioned twice now that Google may be giving a slight advantage to pages that load quickly, while slow loaders won’t receive a penalty on their rankings. Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz writes about in their blog post yesterday, where “web page load times can positively influence rankings.“
The Pear Analytics Website Analyzer tool has analyzed nearly 5,000 unique websites since we launched it in March this year. We’ve helped many website owners make changes themselves with our “Fisher-Price” instructions to get their site more search engine friendly.
Now we’ve kicked it up a notch. Now we’re offering to fix parts of the site for you – and for cheap. A good portion of your searchability issues are going to be related to the technical side of your website – a place where many avoid due to the complexity and fear of breaking something.
There are 2 options for you too – we will fix the problem and you install the changes, or for a bit more, we will fix and install the changes for you. If you want us to install it, we will simply send you an invitation to allow us to briefly access your computer while we work our magic.
Give it a shot and start the process by analyzing your website.
I’d love to know what you think.
