Search Engine Optimisation

As was previously discussed, AK Designs is growing up & developing.

As part of this & due to various recent issues with our current server hosting supplier we will be moving to a new server & host.

We are moving from EasySpace to UKHost4u.

As part of our move we will be able to offer various hosting packages to everyone, and will continue our FREE hosting to our clients.

Unfortunately such a move means inevitable downtime. We know thats not what many people will want to hear or even think about but don’t worry too much. We will be moving over site by site, and we will be very careful to makesure nothing is lost or corrupted in transit. During transition and removal from our current hosts your e-mails will be unaffected (& clients will recieve an email explaining how to get to your email system without your site being online). Website moves will take place when your site is shown to be least busy.

As we are sure you can appreciate this is going to take a week or two’s full planning & research, during this time the “home” websites (andykinsey.com, seoandy.com etc) may have no service. This is so we can practice the server move without the need to close client websites for more than the necessary time.

We apologise for todays outages on some client websites, we are working our hardest to ensure the last few remaining client sites are back online as soon as is possible.

[UPDATE 30/08/09 - Our New Servers are safely working and currently being tested over several domains. We are (starting tomorrow) to start slowly moving over client domains to the new server. Larger domains will be moved later this week (all domain owners will be notified when they will be moved. ]

If you have any questions please contact us.

Keeping It Simple is something that as a site grows and develops becomes harder and harder. A great example is this very website.

No doubt if you have visited for more than a month you will have noticed I on a regular basis change my theme (though previous to this theme I had a theme for 4 months just changing the colours not the theme). The current theme has been my most successful theme and so from next week will be available for download (we are just adding a few more SEO features).

Another change some poeple have noted is a change in tone of my articles, it is less blunt and more flowery… now this is done with some good reasons including; it is easier to read, easier to remember and the content to some extent is easier to understand. But this doesn’t mean that it is good for SEO. Indeed pretty much far from it! If you have flowery content you are showing search engines a level of complexity, as you are if your theme is full of code and your content is hidden amongst it!

There are pro’s and con’s of your theme and copy, add to this no 2 websites are the same in respects to what works best and you will understand you will have to do a little experimenting of your own to find the best results. To help you along the way I have put together my KISS ME list of do’s and don’ts.

KISS is the normal, Keep It Simple Stupid … ME is my own addition My Experiments

Meta Tags

Title Tag – Should be unique on each and every page. It should include a keyword or two & if possible your company/brand name. You should consider this your primary pull from a search engine results… a brillinat call to action may help.

Description Tag – Must be unqiue on each page. It should explain in a short blurb what this specific page is about. It is part of your search engine pitch to visitors … get it right and you make money…get it wrong and you will be ignored.

Keywords Tag – Should really be unique though a few over-lapping keywords/phrases may help enforce your company or brand name. You should consider having an ideal number of keywords between 7 and 10.

The Copy (The Content)

Heading Tags – H1 is used by Google to define the main “keyword focus” of a web page … without it you may struggle… using more than one and you will struggle even more. You should used H2, H3 etc to clearly define sections of your content … Google is known to use Heading Tags to define keyword focus areas.

The Script – Must be unique, informative & useful in meeting the needs of your users/readers.

Links – Both internal and external links should be absolute.

Breadcrumbs – Are of use if you have multiple directories of content.

Other Things

URLs – Should be non-dynamic and easy to read / remember format.

SiteMaps – Both user readable and machine readable are important.

Robots.txt – Files are very important, use them to point to sitemap(s) and tell search engines where they can and can’t go!

Redirects – if a page disappears (for any reason) use a 301-redirect to point to the next relevant page (or the new page) … also use the 301 to force users and search engines to either www. or non-www.

Clean Code – Don’t waste your own time or the search engines time…if you can’t understand your code the chances of a search engine understanding it and getting to the content are none!

Analytics – getting metric data for your site is important, if you don’t have your own server stats (or even if you do) you may want to consider using Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics.

Experiement! – Play around and have fun with your sites code and content and how it looks… get all 3 right and you will be onto a winner… get it wrong and you will suffer… nothing is 100% perfect but you can get damn close if you experiement.

It’s one of the puzzles that each and every company considering Search Engine Optimisation (from an extenal compnay) faces. Basically the question is:

How do I know which SEO to choose?

To be honest there is no set answer, each company needs to consider things from its own level… but one of the most important things and it covers many factors you will want to consider is… Trust.

Trust is a strange issue to consider, not least because its based on a persons emotional being. The fact that you are a company looking to hire means that you need to have a company trust … or a sole person in charge of the decision. Trust is based on past experience in life, if you have had a “bad” childhood maybe you don’t trust many people but sometimes things just click and you do, other people may have had a great childhood and trust every person until they break that trust… everyone is different.  In SEO the issue of trust is much larger than in other parts of the internet sector… primarily because SEO is not a one-size fits all solution, each company requires something different, and each SEO will offer that something different from another.

So consider a scenario (and this is what most companies face when hiring an seo).

You are (or your company is) wanting to hire and SEO, so you approach 4 or 5 companies asking them to tender. Each one says they will tender and submits various documents you ahve asked for. But each is different in what it says. So you ask to meet them (as you always should before hiring), and you see each company says different things, approaches a solution in a seperate manner, and ultimately they come up with different solutions to the same problem.

So now which do you choose? Who do you trust and why? Which SEO is good for you and your company? and which is bad? and most of all who should your company run away from?

To help understand who you should choose, i’ve identified 5 factors you should be considering when hiring an SEO for your company.

1. An Open Book – will the SEO tell you what they are doing, tactics on how to approach your solution. Also do they tell you why they are doing itt, and if not do you blindly trust them? If they won’t tell you what they intend to do this is a huge red flag you need to consider… ok SEO’s will look to keep some things secret (myself included at times) but ultimately your are the client and if you want to know everything you are entitled to it! … if an SEO says something you don’t understand, and they wont explain… ask me.
2. Proven Record – check references from clients (remember not all SEOs will publish exacting details of results)… but talking to other clients is often much mroe reliable.
3. Site Improvement – sounds a bit mad but some SEOs will want to just focus on Search Engines and they shouldn’t be… SEO isnt just about being found on a search engine. SEO is actually about imrpoving conversions from the point of access as well as encouraging people to visit your site through these points of access. SEO is not a hidden trade, any SEO who wants to “work behind the scenes” only isn’t worth a penny as user experience is a key part of SEO.
4. Great Expectations – from your first meeting you should talk about “realistic” expectations, remember if an SEO says in the first month there will be a million hits extra from 1 hit a month …they are lieing… SEO is a journet and results generally don’t filter through during the first month or two… its sometimes even 4 or 5 months before results are seen… AK Designs has always lived by the mantra of Under-Promise and Over-Deliver.
5. Automation –  if your SEO is automating processes generally you should be worried, unless they can prove a good reason behind it … automating processes on a website is fine and helps user experience … automating website submission to search engines can sometimes see your website being punished. Not all automation is bad but a lot is!

Search Engine Optimisation is very much a science and art. Science because if we aren’t accurate with our numbers and coding then it will all fail and we are rubbish at SEO. Art because an SEO needs to be creative, search engines constantly move the goal posts as they strive to improve, so an SEO will have a whole bundle of ideas through which you should hopefully get to the top of the search rankings.

Trusting an SEO is like trust a friend, doctor, dentist or a member of your family. Determining whom to trust is a matter of gut instinct, recommendation and of course time. Get to know your SEO before you make any decision.

Getting to know an SEO is very important. You should ask lots of questions, both of the SEO and clients. Talk to them in an informal place (like a pub) get the SEO’s defence down and find them as a person and not the tool of a company. From questioning and getting to know them over a pint your gut instinct will be pretty much there… but there is one other thing you should consider. Honesty! An SEO will never be afraid to share the truth with you, and if they aren’t honest or trustworthy remember – theres always more SEO fish in the sea.

This article has been republished at boagworld.com

We at AK Designs (soon to be Design4Eva) would like to apologise for some recent issues we have had with our services.

During the past few months we have overcome various issues based around issues of scale. This basically means we haven’t managed to deal with demand. We have failed on two fronts mainly:

• High Visitor Numbers – This may not sound like an issue, and generally it isn’t. But as we have grown so have visitor numbers, and due to some server issues (see below) our site has sometimes crashed, and rarely some of our client sites also have. In general our uptime is 99% due to our SLA with our providers.
• Server Issues – We love being upto date, but sometimes our innovation stings us in the tail. Recently we have began running some new scripts within various websites, and as always we have teething issues with one or two of them… indeed we have no shame in admittance of a few run away scripts that have caused limited server crashing (aka some types of script stopped working for an hour). These scripts have also meant a few websites we are developing are behind schedule and for this we can’t apologise enough to our clients.

So what are we doing about our problems?

• Clouding Up – we have started integration into “the cloud” … well our cloud really… we now operate across multiple servers, if one fails the others will take up the slack. Also this means we have much more capacity to deal with high demand of visitor numbers and various script resources.
• We have began working on a change in code base – this means we are innovating and moving forward. This code base will be fully tested by the web community before we launch it to ANY client sites … it will not effect any current clients until much later this year.
• We are expanding … AK Designs are evolving into Design4Eva … we are taking on staff in quite large numbers and centralising efforts to keep our clients as happy as possible.
• We’re also doing some other secret stuff to ensure we have no problems in the future.

Once again I would like to apologise for the issues mentioned above and a few other slightly less important issues. If you have any questions or comments please do leave them below or contact us.

This week saw the launch (to developers & now you via the link below) of the latest Google Search update … only this isn’t some small little upgrade this is a full information architecture renewal for Google. Now this sounds like you will loose some data or ground but you won’t, my inside sources tell me that the transition will be smooth and no data will be lost due to some very very complicated coding.

Google list the following as vital parts of this update:

• Increasing Speed (double the speed seems to be average in benchmark testing).
• Increased Relevancy (a whole new algo amongst a whole new set of tools – details below).
• Comprehensiveness (meaning they want to index the web more and other files).

At this stage developers are only being asked for “feedback” … on rather technical stuff & some of the features.

Now if you have poked your way around Google enough, and found labs, trends and news….amongst other updates already live you probably won’t see too much improvement other than speed and accuracy (which to be honest is amazingly improved! also developer will note some other updates). Ok so i’ve just told you some of the new features, add to this real-time news updates and you will soon see this is a huge huge improvement to the “pulic” search engine that is Google … i say public because alot has floated in labs for months and months for developers to play around.

Now all of this comes not long after Microsoft launched Bing (and acquired yahoo’s search), but compared to that this is a gentle release. With around 87% of search traffic in the UK directed to google in 2008, the huge multi-million pound launch of Bing was something of a splash in an ocean … latest results are showing less than a 1% increase in Bing’s search within the UK.

Earlier this week Facebook sealed a deal to buy FriendFeed (something 90% of you will never have heard of), but this now gives them the power (as they have claimed) to supply “real-time” news and “people powered search” … oh and twitter have always claimed the later too. Add to this twitter has a new homepage that looks just like a search engine and mahalo also gaining ground in the uk… is this realease a reaction to these pieces of news and movements of the search engine world???

Well to answer this was given to developers when we were asked to test the system:

For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google‘s web search.

So want to go and play with this secret search engine?

Ok heres your link.

http://www2.sandbox.google.com/

Have fun and let me know what you think of the updates

[Update 2300 11/08/09 - Google Caffeine appears to have taken a little break... ok they are "updating" the system. Its claiming a few hours until it opens its doors again, though i'd think maybe a day or two since Google will want to test any improvements themselves first. ]

Almost everybody is using it (or think they are), others believe they can manipulate it… but no body really understands very much about it. It is Google PageRank. It is probably one of the most important algorithms created for the web, and it continues to evolve even today Larry Page first invented it in 1995. Before we really start with the details let me just clear up a little misconception many website owners and web users seem to have. PageRank is not the Google Search Ranking (used when you search Google), yes its a part of it but its one of many thousands of other attributes to the Search Ranking system. So lets get into this… how does Google PageRank work? and What do we really know about it?

This post is the culmination of my experience and my last 3 months worth of research into the effects of PageRank, how it works and various other theories around PageRank (so much i know i feel like writing a book). This post has been written to cut through the rubbish and jargon, though i do apologise for its complicated nature at times. Further more in the article I will only state what I know to be facts, I will save my theories on Google PageRank for another day.

What is PageRank?

• “PageRank” (or PR) started of and continues to this day as only a rough estimation of the quality of any given website and the topical relevance of said website.
• “PageRank” is one of many factors used by Google to determine a Search Ranking.
• “PageRank evaluates two things: how many links there are to a web page from other pages, and the quality of the linking sites. With PageRank, five or six high-quality links from websites such as www.cnn.com and www.nytimes.com would be valued much more highly than twice as many links from less reputable or established sites.” – Google Lib. Central

How Google PageRank Works

• No body knows for sure exactly how PageRank works, however the below is what is generally accepted as being correct – Please remeber however that Google PR changes on a daily basis it appears.
• The Equation:
  PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + … + PR(tn)/C(tn))
• “In the equation ‘t1 – tn’ are pages linking to page A, ‘C’ is the number of outbound links that a page has and ‘d’ is a damping factor, usually set to 0.85 …
• Lets make it easier to understand then …
• “a page’s PageRank = 0.15 + 0.85 * (a “share” of the PageRank of every page that links to it). “share” = the linking page’s PageRank divided by the number of outbound links on the page. A page “votes” an amount of PageRank onto each page that it links to. The amount of PageRank that it has to vote with is a little less than its own PageRank value (its own value * 0.85). This value is shared equally between all the pages that it links to.” – WebWorkshop
• PageRank is seen as a “voting” system, so a link from X to Z is a vote for Z from X … but Google isn’t just looking for volume. Google will analyse the site giving the vote, it will look at the relevance of the link, quality and importance of the site” – Read more about this from Google Technology
• From the above we can deduce that not all links are the same, some will be more important than others… so if your site has a page rank of 7 and links to 1 site this “vote” will give more value than that if you have 1000 links from the same site… in effect the more links given the more your quality of vote is diluted.
• Google PageRank uses what appears to be a logirithmic scale, meaning getting from one stage to the next is twice as hard as previously … so getting from 0 to 1 is fairly easy … but getting from 9 to 10 is ten times harder. – Read SEO Chats article on moving up the scale.
• PageRank is not a value for the whole site, but rather an individual page within the site (this is often something over looked by website owners and SEO Companies). It is has been known that a page within a site can have a PR of 7 or 8 and other pages have 0 or 1 as PageRanks … it is not a given that each page will gain ranking from the other pages of a site.
• In general the public will see a PageRank update each month (only once), though in reality the PageRank algo is updated on a daily basis but the updates are only released to Google EXTERNAL servers at the end of an agreed period, this period is why Updates dont take place on the same date each month.
• The “public” see page rank as an integer (aka 0 to 10, not 0.11) if you have been paying attention, you can probably understand this is a rounded figure (due to the algo). ““It’s more accurate to think of it as a floating-point number. Certainly our internal PageRank computations have many more degrees of resolution than the 0-10 values shown in the toolbar.” – Matt Cutts of Google
• Links do NOT give away PageRank – this is a myth, nor do they leak it – PageRank of a web page is fixed by Google based on its algo (i say fixed this is to say nothing can suckle on it).  A Link is simply a Vote!
• “It often takes two full monthly updates for all of your incoming links to be discovered, counted, calculated and displayed as backlinks.” – FAQs from SEO Chat

Dismissing the Myths of PageRank

• There are a number of myths surrounding PageRank so its time to get them busted.
• Updating or Adding content does NOT automatically mean you well get more PageRank automatically – dont forget there needs to be links for the algo to work!
• Also add to this “Content is not taken into account when PageRank is calculated. Content is taken into account when you actually perform a search for specific search terms” – SitePoint Article
• “High PageRank does NOT guarantee a high search ranking for any particular term. If it did, then PR10 sites like Adobe would always show up for any search you do. They don’t.” – Search Engine Land on PageRank
• Having a link from WikiPedia will not increase PageRank – they implement a No Follow model on all out going links.
• Getting a link in DMOZ or ZoomInfo or YahooDirectory will not give you any kind of “Special” PR bonus! – The simple fact is that Google uses DMOZ for results only where the meta information is missing. However google isn’t special in doing this, DMOZ the open-directory is used by many thousands of sites for this kind of information.
• Having a sub directory doesnt mean that the sub directory will have less page rank than its root … remember that pageRank is per page not site or directory.
• .edu, .gov, .org sites do not have a higher PageRank “automatically” … the fact is they tend to supply better content and have more links to them thats all… its PageRank working at its best.
• Multiple links/votes from a page do not count as more than one vote.
• Not all search engines treat the No Follow attribute the same – Google: doesnt use it for PR, or index the link – Yahoo doesnt use it as a vote but does index the link – ASK (formerly jeeves): does class it as a vote and does index the link…all pass the traffic.

Summary of Findings (this article)

So we’ve looked in some detail (though i have cut alot of crap out!) at Page Rank, how it works and some of the misconceptions. So here are the Top 10 things you should be takings from this article.

1. PageRank does NOT mean search rank – it is a part of it though.
2. PageRank is about links, a link is a vote, the more links on a page the less they are worth … but you do not leak pagerank via links.
3. PageRank is for a page not a site, and is based on incoming links (or votes).
4. Bad incoming links don’t impact on PageRank, but link farming does.
5. PageRank is expodential, meaning its harder to get between points… also PageRank should be seen as a float of % not an integer.
6. High PageRank does not mean a High Search Rank.
7. The level of the domain doesn’t automatically mean high PageRank.
8. Wikipedia links don’t count towards PageRank.
9. No Follow links don’t count towards PageRank.
10. Links to and from high PageRanked sites can have an impact on PageRank.

Like the Article? Buy me a Drink

Ok, I apologise firstly to the guy who first asked this question 2 months ago. I have been doing quite a lot of research into this question and even managed to contact the web design company whom made the website in question.

So the question:

I have found a website which uses IFrames to call in conent, there are multiple fronts to the site for various “shop fronts”… yet it does very well within Google… how is this so? – question has been changed to generalise

The answer isn’t so simple, not least because much of the code is hidden away… having delved deeper into this I do have something of an interesting answer though. In essence the developers wanted to include various content on multiple pages and of course didn’t want to repeat the content and waste server space and precious loading time. This is a puzzle quite a lot of us have faced … now with this in mind most (i should add “Silly” here) people will simply use an IFrame to call in the script, but there are multiple issues with this including that the “nofollow” of an iframe is no longer recognised by google, and more importantly that search engines will see the two (or more) pages in question as seperate pages… and if one page is IFramed into another multiple times the external pages is likely to rank higher on Google and therefore appear before other pages.

When i questioned the company involved they gave me full access to every bit of code used… and if im honest the guys (and girl) had done an amazing job of coding the site(s). In reality they hadn’t used an IFrame … but rather a series of simple JavaScript (AJAX) pullin scripts in conjunction with scrollable Div tags. And in some areas they had thought about graceful degredation and had just used a simple php include (which ok made the page really quite large but made life alot easier for all things Search).

PHP includes are by far the simplest and best option (and of course there are evil microsoft equivs).
Ajax used in conjunction with PHP is by far the best option and makes things look a hell of a lot better, a great example of this can be found over at Headscape.
Ajax libaries are amazing tools which make life alot easier, the two I would suggest looking at are JQuery and MooTools … I also advise you load the libary externally to release load from your server… an example is JQuery from Google Code.
Want to see some more simple non js-libary bedded scripts? Head over to Dynamic Drive.