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Empro Tech Blog

The side effects of a recent website makeover by Empro make evidently clear how important it is to keep your website up to date, and how important it is now to keep doing that all the time. If you depend on your website for business, you know how important it is to keep your site ranked well so that you can be found. If you are like the typical client of ours, you know you should pay attention to this, but probably don't do it as often as you should.

A few months ago, Google rolled out its Caffeine SE model ranking websites. This new model placed much more importance on the currency of content as part of the SEO evaluation. Newer content meant much more than ever before, and frequent content updates also became important. This was in response to the plethora of new and popular social media outlets, as well as the proliferation of blogs, forums and tweets as sources of new content. Google saw that being up-to-date was becoming far more important, so their algorithms now reflect that belief.

Okay, maybe that's a little extreme. But not much. If you look at the criteria that most of the better search engines look at when evaluating content, way up on the list is "content uniqueness".

What they, meaning Google, is looking for is content that is both compelling and real. One way they evaluate the realness of a document is by who unique the content is. Are there copies of it elsewhere on the web? Does it look vastly similar to other documents? Or is there even a pattern to the documents on your own site? Are you yourself repeating this document with only one or a few words changed?

One of the purposes of the world wide web was to help people to search and share information. Since its inception, the Web is being used for numerous purposes like social networking, sharing data, pictures, videos, etc. World wide web accessibility is crucial since it is about making the web available for everyone people including those with visual or auditory impairments. 

Creating CMS Websites for Marketing Success on the Web

In 1993, I had my first opportunity to work with HTML. It was something I had been vaguely aware of for a while. Some sort of technology some college student had come up with based on something Apple had been doing. Something about linking documents, except that it worked on the Internet. My exposure came as a result of a quickly apparent uses for those capabilities. Hello??? No Web yet???

Now I am not going to get political here, but Al Gore did NOT invent the Internet. Al Gore helped create the World Wide Web. He championed legislation that literally transformed the Internet into the commercial entity it is today. The World Wide Web runs on the Internet. We do not say the Henry Ford invented the car or transportation. But like Henry's impact on us all, Mr. Gore is to be thanked for his vision, the ability to hear and understand what was being said to him the brains in Silicon Valley at the time, and for seeing the potential impact on our country and the world of having us all interconnected.

It seems like every few months we have to cover, once again, the same old topics and rumors about search engine optimization. And like before, the answers are going to be the same. There are no secrets. There are no special tricks that aren't widely known and utilized in every category already. And nobody has an inside track to Google. Not even Google people have an inside track to Google.

If you run one or more websites, you are probably inundated with email offers to get your sites in the Top Ten results on major search engines. The offers promise great results and promote their integrity with phrases like "we use only whitehat methods to get the best results" or some other B.S. like that. Why do we call it B.S. you ask? Because the term "whitehat" is not a recognized term and has no specific meaning. It means what you think it means. Good guys wear white hats, right? This must be the good guys then? Better watch out Butch Cassidy!

The problem with most of these "whitehat" methods is that they conceal the truth of what is actually happening. Instead of providing you with the services you need to have a well-optimized website that consistently performs, they simply charge a fee to point a bunch of links at your site long enough to get you in the top results, and then drop you when you don't continue your subscription. Your website then plummets in the rankings because it was never really set up well to begin with. I.E., you didn't get the services you really needed.

If there is one area of misunderstanding on the subject of good SEO practices, it is that of linking. Getting links to your website is not difficult. But getting the right links to accomplish your goals is what really matters. After all, what good are links if they aren't actually going to do what you expect them to? With a few considerations in mind, you can accomplish your goals fairly easily and achieve the results you expect.

Search Engine Optimization is a very broad term. Generally it is accepted to mean, optimized for the best possible rank on a given search engine for a particular keyword or phrase. So when we talk about linking, we are not only talking about the links, we are also considering how relevant those links are to our own keywords or phrases.

 

SEO rank via linking

Inbound Links Versus Outbound Links

An inbound link is one that points TO your website from another website or location. An outbound link is one that points FROM your website to another website or location. Inbound links send "relevance" to your website. Outbound links send "relevance" to another website from yours. For good ranking, you want to be the recipient of more relevance than you give. Getting relevance then is what it's all about. The best way to do this is to create as many inbound links to your website as possible and to create as few links from your website as possible. Nuff said?

I'm guessing that most web developers have experienced clients who want their website to be the end-all be-all website by creating one just like Facebook's website, or whatever is hot today. The idea is to take users from Facebook by building the world's greatest website for whatever your customer sells and then adding all the things that Facebook does. After all these years, it still amazes me the clients think this way. Do them a huge favor, don't let them! Educate your client on what matters and you will both be happy.

Ask your client, which social network is more popular, Facebook's or McDonald's? They will probably answer "I didn't know that McDonald's offered social networking", and make the point for you. You simply don't go to the hardware store for oranges. Therefore, it is best to concentrate on building a compelling website for whatever it is your client specializes in. Adding features from popular sites won't help, but communicating well and creating real value for visitors will.

Social Media and Real-Time News Releases Take Effort

For the last several months, chatter among web developers and those who specialize in SEO has been all about the effects of Google's implementation of the Caffeine search models. Now that Google has implemented Caffeine, it is clear that the effects are all about being real time and popular "in the moment" and "in the news". What does this mean? It means that in order for us to keep our websites in the top results, we are going to need to pay attention to many outside factors.

With the introduction of the Caffeine model, webmasters, bloggers, and especially companies and corporations, are going to need to pay attention to keeping themselves talked about by others. This means a regular stream of publishing, in various forms, as well as building a strong base of followers who will read and repeat that body of published works.

Now that we've successfully scared the hell out of you, let's take a look at what all that publishing really means.

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