Tag Archive for: SEO

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.

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.

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.