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SEO Secrets, Tips & Tricks – Why it’s Not Worth Your Time

May 2, 2012 By Leave a Comment
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Whenever I go to a conference, or at least a dozen times a week by email, I get asked “What are some ‘SEO secrets’?” or “Hey–what keywords do you rank for, and can you show me some of your websites?” Until you have earned my trust, though, I’m really not going to show you anything. I made that mistake once and 3 months later saw a “clone” site from that person. It’s not that I’m a stuck up jerk and am not interested in helping people or paying it forward, because I really believe it’s a part of my role in the community. But there’s a difference between someone showing up at my door to ask for free food and someone asking, “Hey, can I go fishing with you so I can learn how to fish for myself?”


While I’m not a first generation SEO like Greg, Rae, or Todd, I have been been around a while, asked a lot of (sometimes stupid) questions, experimented and made a lot of small and awesomely catastrophic mistakes along the way, dabbled in the black arts, tried stuff and failed, and that’s how I learned. So much of what goes on today in the SEO community isn’t about asking questions, learning, and teaching; it’s about attention whoring, popularity contests, and SEO drama. Too many people are focused on finding the secrets for quick and easy ways to set up ATM machines on their front lawn so they can parade around like peacocks on display, having people tell them how they are like fabulously famous rockstars, when instead they should be putting in the effort to learn how it works, what keeps it running, and what do when when something breaks or your whole network gets torched. Because they don’t put forth that effort, when something goes off the rails, they are right back where they started: with no knowledge. All they can do is look for the next “handout” or SEO Secret.

Learning SEO is a lot like hunting. Without learning how to stalk your prey, how to hunt ir down, and how to “make the kill” that will feed you and your family, you won’t survive. Instead, everyone wants an ATM funded by SEO secrets. But when Google announces they are changing the algorithm specifically targeting SEO sites, your website built on tricks without knowing what you were doing or why you were doing it is likely to be a casualty caught in the crossfire. However if your website has strong technical platform with good information architecture practices, good or better quality content that exists for the users’ benefit and isn’t a wrapper for Adsense, and a solid social media and real world marketing plan and strategy, you are lot more resistant to these fluctuations. Content may be king, but if your tech foundation is so bad that search engines can’t understand it (listen up, Ajax and Flash developers!), your information architecture is so crazy and convoluted that search engines cant make heads or tails of it, and you don’t market on the proper channels where you can find your customers (not just the new hot social media channel that the techno weenies are talking about like your Pinterest page for whole life insurance), the best content lies trapped under lock and key where no one but you can see it. It’s the combination of all the pieces working together–content, information architecture, and good marketing & promotion–that leads to true success, not the elusive secret you are looking for to avoid one or more of those the steps.

Instead of focusing on ferreting out SEO secrets, concentrate on learning the fundamentals–like choosing the right URL structure. Learn how to silo your website, create evergreen content, and create seasonal content. Learn when you need to pay for premium content. Learn how to market with social media, how to automate it to get more ROI for your time. Learn how to develop and and when to email to your list. Learn how to build trust through links. Learn how to audit your content regularly and to keep your website lean, mean, and up to date. Learn to trim the fat, those useless parts of your website that don’t help you or your customers. When you learn those skills, you’ll find you don’t need to spend so much time looking for shortcuts, secrets, and tips … and you’ll spend less time worrying about algorithm changes. SEO drama my be a fun distraction or give you your 15 minutes of fame–but, unless it’s adding to your bottom line, it’s not helping you. It’s a distraction.

photo credit: Shutterstock/Willyam Bradberry

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis WordPress Theme review.

SEO Secrets, Tips & Tricks – Why it’s Not Worth Your Time


Graywolf’s SEO Blog

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“Afternoon, Frank.” “Hey howdy, George.”

May 2, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Increase your business with more online customers with help from SEO Consultants London.

It’s about time these two neighbors got to talking to each other. Most Saturday afternoons you’d find them politely waving as they passed at each other by with their push mowers, tending to their neatly manicured tables, charts, and graphs. It just made sense that the grounds would look that much more complete if they removed a bit of fence between them. And so they’ve done just that.

If you use either AdSense for feeds or Google FeedBurner to track item clicks and also use Google Analytics, as of today, you will automatically start to see your feed item click analytics show up in Google Analytics with some additional information added to help you understand how distributing your feed with FeedBurner leads to traffic on your site.

Specifically, we will help you classify your links by tagging the Source as “feedburner”, the Medium as the channel in which we sent out your feed such as “feed” or “email”, and the Content as the actual endpoint application in which the user viewed your feed content such as “Google Reader” or “Yahoo! Mail”.  In order to slice your traffic by these endpoints, in the All Traffic Sources view in Google Analytics select the “Ad Content” field in the second column.

In the coming weeks, you will start to see many more distribution endpoints in your reports. The represent ongoing additions to our database of applications that process feeds.

By default, these analytics will show up in the “All Traffic Sources” and “Campaigns” views in Google Analytics. You can filter the results just to only the traffic that comes from Google FeedBurner by filtering on “feedburner” on the All Traffic Sources page or “Feed:” on the campaigns view.  You can also use these sources in the Advanced Segments views.
In this view below, we actually have two separate feeds driving traffic to this blog, and that can  now be tracked easily in one view.

If you have item click tracking enabled, we are now automatically tagging your item URLs with Google Analytics parameters. If you’re not using Google Analytics, or for some other reason don’t want these parameters in the requests coming to your website, you can turn off Google Analytics tracking on the “Configure Stats” page on the Analyze tab at http://feedburner.google.com.  If you don’t have item click tracking enabled, this is also the perfect time to turn it on, which can be done on this same page.

For instance, if you would rather see the detail of where your feeds are read directly, you can add $ {distributionEndpoint} as the medium, and then you will get views that look something like this.

Again this will happen automatically except in one specific case:  if you are already tagging your feed item URLs with Google Analtyics tags such as “utm_source” and “utm_medium” – we have disabled this feature and you will have to turn it on manually by selecting “Track clicks as a traffic source in Google Analytics.”   Note that if you do this, we will replace any existing “utm_” tags that may be in your permalinks with the values generated from FeedBurner.

In the coming weeks, we will be releasing more features in Google FeedBurner that take advantage of this functionality, so we highly recommend that you register and set up your site with Google Analytics if you haven’t done so already.

Posted by Steve Olechowski on behalf of the Google FeedBurner team


AdSense for Feeds and FeedBurner Blog

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Pictarine: pictures in the cloud

May 2, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Increase your business with more online customers with help from SEO Consultants London.

Cross posted from the Google App Engine blog.

Pictarine is a photo management web application, launched in 2010, that allows people to easily manage and share all of their photos from Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, Twitter and other sites. Pictarine developers Guillaume Martin and Maxime Rafalimanana have contributed the following post discussing their experiences using Google App Engine and Google Web Toolkit.

From the start, we used Google technologies in developing Pictarine and we wanted to share our experience with them so far. In this post, we will shed some light on the weaknesses and strengths we found in Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and Google App Engine. We will also discuss how we leveraged GWT to build a new technology that allows Pictarine to seamlessly display photos from the computer directly into the browser. The following diagram is an overview of how our application works.

Building a mashup in the cloud with Google App Engine

The Pictarine team is made of a web designer and two developers who previously worked mainly with Java based enterprise technologies and had a little experience with web technologies. When we started the project in early 2009, we were quite open on learning new languages like Python or Ruby, but when App Engine announced that Java would be supported, we were really excited to give Google App Engine a try.

The first few months, learning about the App Engine environment was quite easy and dare I say fun. Testing our code on Google’s servers from Eclipse IDE was only one click away. So we built our first prototype fast and we quickly decided to adopt App Engine. Then we started to build the core of our application: the engine that uses the API from Flickr, Picasa, Facebook to fetch the users’ photos. This is where we hit the first limitations of App Engine. Most users have a lot of photos on these services and retrieving them can take some time. But App Engine has strict limits on how long a request should last: an outgoing HTTP request cannot last more than 10 seconds and cannot process a request for more than 30 seconds. So while building our architecture we found ourselves writing approximately one third of our code dealing with these limitations: paginating our requests, creating background tasks to store data in small batches, etc.

In early 2010, when we launched our alpha version, everything went smoothly. We had some good press coverage and App Engine met our expectations in handling our first users. During 2010, we worked on implementing new features requested by our users, and during this period of time we were really impressed by the way App Engine evolved. Many of the limitations were lifted and great new features were added. We are now able to use Task Queues for requests that last up to 10 minutes, which we fully use to sync our users’ photos and albums. One of the features we like the most is the Channel API, a push notification system that allows us to instantly show a photo in every connected browser as soon as it is uploaded.
App Engine is still not perfect but has greatly improved and when we see its roadmap, we are quite confident it will continue to improve.

Building a fresh photo experience with Google Web Toolkit 

When we started Pictarine, we wanted a fast, distraction free interface that would allow our users to focus on their photos. We wanted the interface to adapt to the screen resolution, displaying a lot of photos on large screens and fewer on small ones. We wanted it to be automatically updated when new comments or new photos are added. We wanted a web application. As we eliminated Flash quite quickly (based on our user experience…) we started to look at tools to build HTML/CSS/Javascript applications. We settled quickly on GWT: while coding in Java, with all the tools we are used to (even the debugger), we could produce optimized Javacript that would run in every browser! When we started with GWT, it was already 3 years old, so we had few complaints about it. The main issue was that we had to always keep in mind that the Java code we produced was ultimately translated to Javascript. So some Java methods, such as the Reflection API, are not allowed. Another thing that was not obvious to us when we started with GWT was that a java developer needs an intimate knowledge of HTML/CSS if he/she wants to go beyond the basic user interface provided by the GWT widgets.

What we really like about GWT in our architecture is the ability to share code between client and server: we can use the same Photo or Album class on the client and the server and the GWT RPC system allows us to automatically share the same Java object on both side. We can also have the same data validation code on both sides: we can alert the user immediately on errors and still validate the data on the server just in case.

Another great feature we like about GWT is its handling of internationalisation. From the beginning we wanted to build a website available for all Internet users, so supporting English as well as our native language (French) was almost obligatory. Fortunately, GWT makes it really easy to generate centralized localization files so that we just have to translate.

Finally, to illustrate how great Javascript generation is, when IE9 came out, we waited a few weeks for GWT to support it and our application was compatible after a recompile! Of course, the IE9 team also did a good job with their HTML5/CSS3 engine.

Building an universal uploader 

After the launch of our alpha in 2010, our users were able to see and share their photos from Flickr, Picasa, Facebook. But they still had to put their photos on these websites first before coming to Pictarine. This limitation quickly became the first request on our feedback system. We needed to let our users do everything from Pictarine, including uploading photos. Uploading many photos from a website is still not a trivial process. Most websites choose Flash to allow users to upload multiple files at once, but our experience with it was that it often crashed after a while. Some use Java applets, but they are never well integrated and always look odd. At Pictarine we decided to tackle this problem by using Java Applet for their stability across all platforms but without using it to render photos or folders.

We have built a technology that uses the GWT RPC mechanism to talk to a Java Applet: photos, upload progression are rendered in HTML/CSS and the applet takes care of photos resizing and uploading. Sharing a photo from a camera is now a one-step process. This technology also allows users to browse their local files directly in their browser and it is fully integrated in our design.

We believe that this new use of Java applets can help blur the line between the Desktop and the Cloud by seamlessly integrating desktop files in any web application.

In conclusion, we can say that we are really happy with the choices we made with App Engine and GWT. App Engine is a great service that perfectly handled the spike in traffic we saw right after articles on Mashable and Lifehacker were published. So we recommend it to every lean startup out there who loves developing in Java, Python or Go.


Google Web Toolkit Blog

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