So who is still developing sites for IE6?

The majority of design firms have left IE6 to the way side and moved on to IE8 and Firefox 3 as the main browsers to support. Many firms even state in the contracts that they do not support IE6 and will not check compatibility.

Looking at some data i find that almost 75% of traffic visiting sites I work with comes from users still using Windows XP. This seems pretty accurate considering I just switched over to Vista and miss my XP for Many reasons. I will get into that later!

So with 75% using XP, we know that by default XP users have IE6 installed. Now digging into the data a little further, a little over 56% of overall traffic is using Internet Explorer. Out of that 56%, 12% are using IE6. So doing the math, about 6.6% of traffic is coming from IE6.

Now to some people 6.6% of traffic is not that much, and they hate IE6 and would like to laugh at the users not willing to move on. Personally, I want to provide that 6.6% of traffic the best site I can and would be willing to have the extra work put in for backwards compatibility.

Until I see an extremely low percent of traffic using that browser I will continue to push for backwards browser compatibility.

What are your thoughts?

Recently I experienced a situation where a long time search engine optimization client had a website re-designed with a PR/traditional marketing agency.

I am not disappointed that we did not do the re-design as we work with many clients specifically for SEO and SEO only. The reason I was dissappointed in this specific situation is because it brought light and confirmed my views on the differences between most traditional marketing firms and an internet marketing firm.

Don’t get me wrong, traditional marketing firms understand a lot about marketing, PR and that Branding that most all companies need. But they tend to lack on the SEO side of the house, especially with website re-design.

Here are a few things that was needed and was not provided:
- content, content and more content!!!
(the as little as possible approach to a website can definitely increase branding but it kills the ranking ability without something extra.)
- very minimal navigation flow
(you know what I mean, one 10 point navigation a-crossed the bottom with beautiful flash rollover effects, OUCH)
- The smalled regard for old url structure. I am pointing more towards: “what are 301 redirects, I can’t even think of what those pagenames were!”

This is to name some of the most important things overlooked. Of course we will do damage control and resolve everything that has been implemented.

The reason behind this post was to inform people, especially internet marketers that no matter what type of communication you can have with another marketing agency you must always monitor the process. Remember that you are the SEO analyst for a reason and most traditional Marketing/PR firms do not understand the ins and outs of SEO and what we do.

I don’t know about you, but whenever I need to find something local (which seems to be at least 3 - 4 times a day) I use Google Local. Yes, some may use YellowPages or Yahoo Local, but the bottom line is you used some form of local directory or search to find what you need.

This coupled with the way search engines are displaying this data tends to make this very important.
- I have caught wind that Google Local is starting to display local results without a city name keyed in. They are basing your search off your physical IP address.
- I also talked to a contact over at superpages. He filled me in on the bid for placement results mixed in with local results.

This landscape has become quite competitive, and for a good reason. Never overlook the small things that can make the local search a very powerful tool!

A few tips that will help increase local listings
1.) claim & complete your business in all the local players (msn, google and yahoo)

2.) your address is important, make it known

3.) If your listing is valued you should have some reviews. Right?

4.) Link building is still important with a local twist. Local business will help validate your value as a local company.

These are a handful of pointers which can help your local listing succeed.

I am definitely seeing changes in the last few weeks with Google’s ranking methods. A lot of fluctuation has occured with some of my stuff and some of our clients. There is also a lot of buzz about this in the forums. There has also been a lot of talk about Google trying to limit spam sites as much as possible.

A few things I have noticed:

- PR has dropped in some form. Not a huge impact but I have noticed some PR 5’s moving down to 4’s and so forth. This could be an adjustment of value throughout.

- I have also noticed that some subpages have gone to gray PR yet rank and display fine in results. Again another adjustment, not quite sure yet.

- Last, I have noticed fluctuation with many sites. Some good, some bad.

Based on everything I have seen so far it looks like Google is trying to re-value links. This could definitely impact the spam sector but also put some kinks into normal site results.

It is time to dig back in :).

This post originated from WebmasterWorld. It is the best post I have come a crossed in a long time and is based on comparing to SEO strategies. The results are very interesting and say a lot for Traditional SEO efforts:
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Site 1: Bought a brand new domain name that was brandable e.g. “widgets4you.co.uk” (the 4u and RUs thing is very popular in the UK!).
- We built around 70 doorway pages i.e. pages on topics related to the widget being sold and wrote keyword full (not stuffed) articles.
- We bought paid links from directories (e.g Yahoo) and other high PR sites.
- We built a reciprocal (not three way) link directory on site offering link exchanges to anyone in any industry.
- We hired 2 people and had them work full time finding reciprocal link exchanges on other people’s sites that were mostly related to us … though sometimes the connection was tenuous!
- We wrote 10 articles and submitted them to article sites.
- Anchor text was therefore controlled and total links as of last month was 7,151.

Site 2: Bought a 3-year aged domain name on Sedo. The domain was a keyphrase i.e. bluemetalwidgets.co.uk
- We started off adding around 3 pages of unique and informative content a day aimed at our market, any keywords in there were all naturally occurring, not aimed for. After the first 6 months we reduced this to 1-2 pages per day. Again, each article was on current affairs, tips etc. for the industry, totally unique and between 400-800 words.
- We developed press releases and submitted a total of 16 over the last 6 months through PRWeb, PRNewswire and BusinessWire.
- We developed a blog.
- We developed a video news channel now showing 22 videos.
- We started a twitter service of main headlines.
- We started an RSS/email subscription service to our articles.
- We had no link building work, we relied on natural link occurrance (4,374 links as of yesterday) and natural anchor text.

The idea being that one would use regular SEO techniques (reciprocal link building, doorway pages etc.) whilst the other would use actual business methods (press releases, informative user-oriented content etc.) to see which did best.

Site 1: after just 3 months it was skyrocketing past some pretty hefty competition with traffic increasing well each month. The site was making £10,000+ a month for the last six months we had it and just sold for a rather nice figure.

Site 2: has struggled to rank anywhere, even for it’s own name, and traffic has been stagnant since the outset - it made a loss for the first 8 months and made just under £3000 in it’s best month which was last month.
I don’t really want to state conclusions but I hope the information alone is though-provoking … not least because the reciprocal and paid-link site was ranked in the top 3 consistently by Google (even above the 10 year old and government websites!) whilst the natural linked site never even got off the ground.

webmasterworld article: click here

Google notified analytics users that if you are importing cost data into analytics from adwords that you need to set some settings before March 4th.  Here was the email for reference:

Dear Google Analytics User,

On March 4th, we will be updating how Google Analytics imports AdWords data to improve security and provide greater control and convenience. This update will require that your AdWords and Analytics accounts are linked and that you have “Apply Cost Data” selected. We are proactively notifying Administrators of Analytics accounts that will be affected by this change (you either have auto-tagging enabled and/or have a linked account without cost data applied to some or all of your profiles).

If you are receiving AdWords traffic (e.g. Visits), but the AdWords reports in Google Analytics do not contain impression or click data (e.g. CPC, Impressions, ROI), then it is likely that AdWords and Analytics are not linked or the cost data option is turned off for that profile. The cost data import option is selected by default when linking your accounts; however, new profiles created after the linking process may not have cost data implemented.

You may need to apply one of the following changes to your Google Analytics account(s) 1547693 by March 3rd, 2009 to continue collecting AdWords data:

Link your accounts and apply cost data (if you have enabled auto-tagging, but you have not linked your AdWords account to Analytics)

1. Sign in to AdWords and click the Analytics tab.
2. If you don’t see your Analytics account, then your accounts are not linked. Follow the on-screen instructions to link your accounts. (Learn how or watch the video)
3. When linking your accounts, keep the default “Apply Cost Data” box checked. AdWords cost data will now be applied to all of your current profiles.

Implement cost data (if your AdWords and Analytics accounts are already linked)

1. Sign in to AdWords and click the Analytics tab.
2. From the Overview page, select an Analytics account to display all the profiles for that account.
3. Select desired profile and click “Edit”.
4. View the Main Website Profile Information box to see if cost data is already applied.
5. If cost data is not applied, click ‘Edit’ from the upper right hand corner of the Main Website Profile Information box.
6. In the Edit Profile Information page, select the checkbox that says ‘Apply Cost Data’.
7. Repeat these steps for each profile you wish to continue receiving AdWords cost data.
8. Click ‘Save’ to finish.

Please remember that you can only link one AdWords account to one Analytics account. If the Analytics account you wish to link to is not available, it is possible this Analytics account is already linked to another AdWords account. (If this is the case you can always unlink them and then link the desired ones.) Currently, due to auto-tagging, your Analytics account may be receiving data from more than one AdWords account although they are not linked. With the March 4th change, if you need to receive data from multiple AdWords cost sources these must all be applied to your profiles. If this is necessary, please read this FAQ. With cost data applied, please note that you will receive full AdWords cost data (visits, impressions, CPC, ROI, etc.) in your Analytics report.

We recommend that you make the changes outlined in this email to your Google Analytics account by March 3rd, 2009 to ensure your Analytics reports continue to receive AdWords data.

Sincerely,

The Google Analytics Team

The big 3 search engines have come together to support a new meta tag.

It is very rare that the Big 3 join up on the same thing. It must be something good, right??

The new meta tag deals with the canonicalization issue deals with multiple url paths that reference the same content.

An example of this would be:

http://www.domain.com/johny5.aspx?id=45
http://www.domain.com/johny5.aspx?id=45&this=true

If these urls actually display the same exact content, to keep search engines from indexing both you can use the new tag as follows:

Here is more information on Google Blog on this

How important is local search? Very Important!

Local search is becoming more important by the day, especially in Google because of how the local results are displayed in organic search. Doing a local search in Google like “Dentists in Charlotte” will yield a list of results with local results at the top. What is interesting is that it shows 10 results, not 1 or 3, but 10. Not only does it show the company name, but it also displays the company phone number. This makes the user more apt to call a possible company before even looking at the organic results below.

I have been doing a lot of digging to find out what is need to rank high in Google local. Here are a few of my findings:

-you must have a local.google.com listing created. Within this listing you should have as much information as possible. (description, link to your website, product listings, etc.)

-you also need to have a listing in SuperPages. Google uses some of SuperPages local results, and helping boost an already present listing.

-It seems like sites with more content, pages and incoming links rank better in the Google local search. I do not think this is a make it or break it thing, but definitely helps.

-Insiderpages.com could potentially leverage local rankings.

I am definitely open to feedback from everyone. If you would like to contact me with more information on local search please do so.