SEO Power Tip: Don’t Park Your Extra Domains

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SEO Power Tip: Don’t Park Your Extra Domains

If you are like most people either in business on the web or in business generally, you may have accumulated some extra domain names. And, like most people, you might tend to leave those domain names in a dormant or parked status. GoDaddy is a perfect example: they offer free domain parking for domains purchased through their service.

Domain Parking: Almost a Scam

If you use domain parking services, it really isn’t a service at all– the parking service places ads on your domain and does not share of the ad revenue with you–I wonder how much revenue GoDaddy earns in the aggregate from the 100s of thousands, or millions, of domain names parked there. Also, parked domains in most cases will not be indexed by search engines. So, in the eyes of a search engine, a parked domain doesn’t exist.

Best Approach for Parked Domains

The better approach is to “park” your domain by yourself. Set up a very simple page, or better a few pages with some text that is original and contextually relevant to the domain name itself. You can even place some Google Adsense Advertisements on the site to earn a few dollars a month. Meanwhile, the search engines will crawl and index your site because of the original content they find there. Then, when you finally go live with your domain, you’ll have an indexing history—old sites with some age and history always outrank brand-new sites.

An extra tip: always leave your contact information easily findable on a parked domain– you never know when someone will want to offer money for it.

Pubcon Austin 2013

Google Secure Search: Enhanced Privacy Tool That Che Guevara Would Love

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Today, Google offered a new feature to enhance its already-robust search capabilities: Secure Search. Google is the first major search engine to offer search in a secure setting.
Pictured below, the secure search works and looks just like traditional search, but operates on SSL (secure socket layer), and can be found here: https://www.google.com. The “https” references a secure internet browsing location, unlike traditional “http” locations:

What Does it Do?

Google’s secure search protects the transmission of data between a user’s computer and Google’s server. So, a user searching for “ways to pass a drug screening” would enjoy enhanced security for that search: the user’s search query could not be intercepted in transit by persons snooping on internet traffic–which in an unsecured environment, is largely open to viewing by anyone. It’s the same technology that protects the transmission of credit card numbers.

However, it has limitations: the user’s browser settings may retain the search query, making it visible to coworkers, spouses, or anyone with access to the physical computer on which the search was made.

No Change in Search Results

But will this new feature change search results, the order in which search results appear? No. TastyPlacement tested a variety of phrases in both environments, and the search results are unchanged.

Who Won’t Like It?

That’s easy: the Chinese Government and the North Korean Government. These governments snoop on their citizens by intercepting all sorts of internet traffic–including search queries. The secure connection means that a dissident in China can search for information without having his or her search queries read by China’s ubiquitous internet police. Of course, once a person clicks on a link–the visit to the destination website will be visible to snoopers. And, of course, the Chinese government can simply attempt to block access to all of Google’s servers.

SEO Power Tool: Test Your Website’s Load Time

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If you haven’t tested your website’s load time–do it now, because Google is going to test it for you.

Google has confirmed long ago that webpage load times will be used as a factor in the calculation of its AdWords Quality Score index–meaning that a faster load time can save you money on your AdWords budget.

You can use the tool for free at Pingdom. Here’s a screenshot of what you’ll see.

What’s a good load time? You want the last item on the page (the bottom of the list) to load in under 5 seconds.

How to Insert Images into WordPress Posts and Pages

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How to Insert Images into WordPress Posts and Pages

Inserting images into WordPress posts and pages can usually trip up new users–we get asked about this a lot. Once you do it a few times succesfully, though, you’ll feel like a master. What follows is a quick and dirty overview of how to do it.

1. Open a New Post or Page, or Edit and Existing Post or Page

The first thing you need to do is to open a document to work on. In WordPress you can choose from posts or pages, and they both work the same way. Go to your WordPress dashboard and click on the left navigation for either posts or pages. When that navigation button expands either select “edit” or “add new’.

2. Upload Your Image

Next, you want to upload your image. When you have the Post/Page edit window open, place the cursor where you want your image to appear in the document. Then click the icon that appears at the top of the edit window, indicated by a red circle in the following image (it looks like a grey rectangle with a thin grey border around it):

Next, you will see that once you click the graphic icon for image uploads indicated in the picture above, the “add an image” dialogue box pops up, as shown in the picture below. You’ll note that in this picture the “from computer” tab is highlighted– but you can also upload from a URL. Today we will learn how to upload from computer. Keep in mind that once images are uploaded, resizing them or editing them is difficult or impossible, so you want to make sure your images are sized right before you upload.

Hit the “choose file” button and browse to where the picture is on your computer– just like you do with e-mail. Once you have the file selected, hit the “upload” button. Don’t close this window yet–you will enter parameters in the next step.

3. Choose Your Parameters

Once you have hit the “upload” button your image will upload (your image is now stored on your web server/web hosting), the “add an image” dialog window changes dynamically to show you a range of parameters. You can see a picture of the dialog window below:

I have highlighted the common parameters that are most important when uploading an image.

Link URL

First is the “Link URL”–this selection box fills automatically with the link location of the image file. If this box contains a URL (as shown in the picture, it is filled with a long URL), then the image will be a clickable link in your post. If this box is empty (you can empty it by clicking the “none” button just under the box) then your image will not be a clickable link. In most cases, you do not want your images to be clickable links, so I almost always hit that “none” button to empty that box.

Alignment: Left, Right, Center

The next parameter is “alignment”– you simply select the radio button for left, center, or right. Left and Right alignment will make your text wrap around the image; “none” means that your text will not wrap around the image.

Size

The last parameter is “size”– here you simply select the size, in pixels, for which you want the image to appear. As you can see in this example, I have selected a full-size image that is 560 pixels wide, and 492 pixels high.

Insert Into Post

The last step, once your parameters are set, is simply to hit the “insert into post” button–your image will be inserted into the post in the position where your cursor was when you upload your image.

If you have made a mistake, simply highlight the image, hit the delete key on your keyboard to remove it and start over.

4. Making Changes Later

Of course, this tutorial would not be complete if we did not at least brush on how to make changes later– and WordPress is pretty well set up to make edits to the way your image displays. See the screenshot below:

When you wave your cursor over the image in the document edit window, you will see two small icons appear–the icon of an image will bring up the edit window from step three–from there you can change parameters, like size and orientation left, center, or right. The second icon is the familiar “do not enter” symbol– clicking this will remove the image.

Good Luck!

Find Duplicate Content Using Free Tools

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A very essential part of keeping up a website is to make sure it is free from duplicate content. The quality and uniqueness of the content in a particular website can play a big role in its popularity. At present, there are many tools available on the Internet that anyone can use for free to check for duplicate content.

One of the popular sites used by many is Copyscape. It is a free tool that allows you to post your text content on a box and in return, the tool would check for other websites with similar texts.

Another free tool that can be used is the Xenu Link Sleuth. This is a tool that can be downloaded to check for broken links. This tool often yields title tags, formats, sizes and URLs that can be exported to excel files and these can be sorted to check for duplicates. A similar tool works this way and it is called Yahoo Explorer. The only difference is Yahoo Explorer does not detect broken links.

Google also offers tools to check for duplicate content. The Google Webmaster Tools can be accessed through the main Google page (google.com/webmasters). One has to go to the Diagnostics page and choose HTML suggestions. Click on duplicate title tag to proceed to the download link for the table. Apart from these free tools, there are also a lot of reliable paid duplicate checking tools available online.

There are many types of duplicate contents that one needs to be aware of. Various elements of a website need to be considered as there are millions of websites in the World Wide Web.

Here are some of the elements that need to be checked for duplication:

1. Title Tags. Many websites out there tend to use the title tag over and over again throughout the entire website. This is a form of duplication and needs to be avoided. Plus, with the millions of websites published on the web, title tags often get duplicated.

2. Dynamic URLs. Since the content of dynamic pages changes depending on the data base driving the results of the site, the possibilities of duplicate contents are greater.

3. Meta descriptions. Subjects of the content of a website need meta descriptions, the summary of the content of the page. Oftentimes, because the topics discussed in a website have many similarities with other web pages, meta descriptions also tend to get duplicated.

4. Product descriptions. Websites of product resellers often get their product descriptions from the original manufacturer of the goods. Since there could be many resellers for the same products online, the descriptions are often duplicated.

For any SEO professionals, making sure that the websites they are marketing is unique and free from duplicates help a lot. The popularity and ranking of the site is often at stake. Of course, there are also the copyright infringement issues that are pretty common in the World Wide Web at the moment.  Make sure that you check your contents for any duplication.

Web Tour: Early Websites of Internet Giants

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I like to play around with Way Back Machine – the site that archives screen shots of websites in years past.  We’ve put together a little tour of early versions of now-ubiquitous websites. We think you’ll enjoy this little web tour. So, put on some Pearl Jam (they were hot in 1998) and set your browsers to 640 by 480 and relax:

Google in 1998:

google

This incarnation of Google was still hosted at Stanford University and featured an index of 25 million pages, but was “soon to be much bigger”.

Yahoo.com in 1996:

yahoo

Apple.com in 1997:

apple

We love this early Apple design, only about 400 pixels wide. This site would fit on most cell-phone browsers.

Tiger Direct in 1996:

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An early version of online retail giant Tiger Direct.

WhiteHouse.gov in 1998:

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A fine-looking site from 1998, from President Clinton and the man who invented the internet.

Infoseek in 1997:

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A pre-Google version of Infoseek…

Compaq.com in 1996:

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NBC.com in 1996:

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Pubcon Austin 2013

Why SEO Campaigns Take Time

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A common question I hear from customers is “when will I see strong rankings from my SEO work?” That’s a good question, and there are several reasons why SEO is more “process” than “event”. Let’s take it step-by-step and break down why SEO campaigns take a little time to develop their full power.

Getting Links Takes Time

First of all, securing inbound links takes time. A typical white hat SEO campaign will involve writing to other websites and web directories and inviting those other websites to link to our own. Without an SEO campaign, links from other websites take years to develop naturally. One way of looking at an SEO campaign is a process that accelerates what would occur naturally. And, as we all know, inbound links are counted by all great search engines as a “vote”–sites with inbound links are deemed stronger, and hence are ranked better.

This process of writing to other websites takes time. Even if you or your SEO consultant completed say, 100 requests in a day, the webmasters of those 100 other sites may not get around to answering immediately. I have received messages back from other websites over a year after I have made the link request. So, you’ll get some links quickly, and some links will take much longer. The good news is that when you do undertake link requests, you can reasonably expect that your requests will bear fruit down the road, and it’s good to know that you’ve got some links that will be coming in months down the road. It’s like saving for a rainy day.

Once You Get an Inbound Link, It Takes Time for That Link to Be Indexed

Now, let’s assume that a few weeks have passed, and you have secured 50 valuable inbound links from 50 great websites all pointing to yours; remember, you requested 100 and you will never get every link you ask for so this example might even be very rosy. Some webmasters will never answer your request, and some will not link back for whatever reason.

But, so far so good, you have some links pointing into your site.

But wait–Google and Yahoo may not get around to indexing those 50 pages for days or weeks. Google will generally index most sites in 3 to 4 weeks; Yahoo takes quite a bit longer, and MSN longer still (as these 2nd tier search engines improve their technology, look for their indexing speed to catch up; they are slow to index and they know it). And, until the search engines update their indexes of the pages that link to your site, it’s as if the link doesn’t exist.

And if that wasn’t complicated enough, search engines are not slaves to webmasters–search engines do not index every page they find. So, even if Google comes upon a web page with a link to your site, it may index that page immediately, it may return a few times before the page is indexed. In that case, some links may take months to be indexed.

Only after your link is indexed do you enjoy the inbound linking power that that site gives you.

The Sites that Link to You Have to Wait for Their Links Too

And, don’t forget that the sites that link to you are “living” websites too. The strength of their web presence is based upon the links that they receive–and that landscape is constantly changing. When your site is new, the sites willing to link to you are going to tend to be new as well. As such, the inbound linking power of the sites that link to you will tend to be on the lite side. However, those sites will grow into stronger sites as they age, and then the inbound links that you enjoy from other sites will rise with that tide.

The Sandbox Effect

And then, of course, 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 size or inbound links. The effect is fiercely debated and never conclusively proven either for or against.

Google’s informal mouthpiece, Google employee Matt Cutts, has publicly stated: “[t]here are some things in the algorithm that may be perceived as a sandbox that doesn’t apply to all industries.” Mr. Cutts’ statements are carefully crafted, frustratingly rare, and are widely regarded as extremely reliable.

And so, the sandbox effect may serve to temporarily dampen the effects of any promotional campaign that you undertake.

The lesson? Patience.