What do you like the most about SEO?

The best part of SEO is getting to see companies grow, and being a part of it. Sometimes we'll start an SEO project for a company and they may only be getting 10-20 hits per month from keywords. It really feels good to help them grow that to hundreds or thousands of hits per month.

What do you like the least about SEO?

This is split between two things:

First, it's frustrating when you hear stories from clients that have had bad experiences with other SEO companies. There are SEO companies out there with relatively no SEO experience asking for 16 month contracts and profit sharing (true story from a client).

The second would be those occasions where you really put a lot of work and quality content behind a keyword, only to be out-ranked by what appears to be a low quality site with a lot of spam links.

What skills are helpful for someone wishing to become an SEO?

There are a lot of skills that can help. Some people can be really good at one area and that is all they need, but for the most part, I think it helps to develop skills in each area of SEO.

Here are a few notable skill areas:

• Working knowledge of Coding/HTML - When you are working with websites, it helps to know the language of websites. This is extremely helpful, but probably not required.
• Networking/Link Building - If you are really good at finding ways of getting others to talk about or link to you, this will go a long way in being a good SEO.
• Writing - Oh yes, being a good writer can definitely help. Web pages and blog posts are made from good creative writing and thinking.
• Photoshop - Sometimes SEO involves reworking images. An example would be taking an image with text in the image, not readable by search engines, and converting it to an image with text in html. While you can hand this over to a developer and designer to do, you will become much more efficient if you can do these types of edits yourself.

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There are about .71 web pages (with "Utah" and "SEO" in the title tag) per person in Utah.

Visit our latest blog post to find out how many results there are compared to the population in your state.

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U.S. Translation Company recently launched their new website design. The project was a combined effort between Red Olive and the U.S. Translation team to merge design with a large amount of content, while maintaining ease of use.

One of the goals of the new site was to highlight the wide range of translation services U.S. Translation provides. They serve a wide range of industries and they translate nearly any kind of document for nearly any purpose.

Website:

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Along with our recently updated website documenting a lot of our web design work.  We will also be updating our SEO pages by adding SEO case studies and recent work.  If you have any questions about SEO or looking for an SEO, please don't hesitate to contact us.

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Red Olive Design has been designing websites in Utah for 12 years. During those 12 years we have launched 4 major revisions to our own website. The latest redesign features a dual-width layout where visitors get an optimized browsing experience depending on their monitor size.

The new design was a team effort by our 3 designers to come up with a site that is easy to use and highlights our work. The new extensive work portoflio shows off over 50 projects completed for local Utah companies and a few national brands.

Enough talk, here is the latest design:

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I created a goal in analytics and added a required step at the beginning.  I didn't quite get all the data I was looking for with the standard reports.  So I created a custom report.  Here is what the custom report looked like:

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Check out our recent post on short general keywords vs longer more specific keywords in a conversion rate showdown. Also known as short tail vs long tail for the people that like to confuse clients. (not me)!

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Information is great for seo. Slides are a great way to present information. So naturally, a slideshare.net account might be helpful for your seo campaigns. Hence today, I created a slideshare.net account for our Utah SEO program. Taking the time to present some helpful information is usually a good thing. This was also my first power point. Although I can hold my own with excel, formulas and conditional formatting, I am new to power point.

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Intro
I recently ported my iphone number to Google Voice. I did this without fully understanding how Google Voice works, and now that I do, I thought I would write up some notes on my setup and how I am getting the most of out Google Voice.

Making calls from your PC or MAC with your newly ported number displayed as the caller:

• You'll need to download and install the Google Voice plugin here
• Next, you'll need to activate Google Chat as one of your forwarding phones in Google Voice. Log in to Google Voice, then settings, then voice settings, and then checkbox. Detailed instructions can be found here.
• Lastly, log in to gmail, and look for the call phone button in the left side navigation.

Start sending and receiving texts (without phone service):

• Download the Google Voice app for your device of choice - ipad/ipod/iphone/android etc.
• You'll need to log in and have some form of internet access.
• Enter the phone number and hit text.

Message Notifications:

I am currently in the (not receiving text messages for 3 days period) since I just ported my number, but I can give you a breakdown of how "voice mail" and "call" notifications have been working. If I am in a wifi environment with my iPad and someone calls my number, I get a push notification noting the call and the subsequent voice mail. I can then open the Google Voice app, and read the transcribed voice mail, all on my ipad. I can't answer the call or call them back with my setup, but I can text them back within the Google Voice app. I did temporarily try the whistle phone app, and I was able to make phone calls from a wifi only environment. But I did have to disable my router's sip firewall setting to place the call (I am not exactly sure what that does).

Summary
These are the steps I have taken after porting my number to GV, and I must say I am enjoying the results. As with anything phone related, make sure you speak with your cellular service provider to get the facts on how Voice, Data, Texting, and Messaging Rates apply to using your phone and Google Voice.

Next stop is a pre-paid phone to forward and receive calls from Google Voice. I'll probably wind up using my old cell phone "in wifi" environments to: surf the web, watch hulu plus, send and receive gv texts, and *receive* gv transcribed voicemails left on my phone roughly 90% of what I need. Then use a pre-paid phone to cover me during the other 10%, when I am on the road and when no wifi is available, or if I need to place an actual phone call (I mostly text).

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I thought I would write a post about how to evaluate links when link building. In other words, what due diligence can you perform when researching links?

1. Check the domain with McAfee SiteAdivsor. McAfee SiteAdvisor rates sites based on testing for spyware and other malicious items. They also have a strong community of site reviewers.
2. Check the page rank of the domain. SEOmoz has a powerful historical page rank checker tool that will allow you to see if the site has had any drastic changes in page rank recently. The historical data is not always there, but it is in a lot of cases. (I think you can get access to the tool from a free membership)
3. Search Google for a unique text string or full sentence appearing on the website, and see if the website pulls up. Hopefully they will show up.
4. What is the title tag on the homepage? Do they rank for any phrases from their homepage title tag?
5. Perform a whois search on the domain. I typically use godaddy, enter the domain, and then click "get info." If it's a site about "Utah web design" and the whois information points to a country far far away, you probably want to look elsewhere.
6. Lastly search yahoo for links pointing to the site in question. Go to yahoo.com and enter "link:www.thewebsiteinquestionyaddayadda.com." This will often uncover secondary sites the site owner *may* own. If you find a lot of spammy sites pointing to the website in question this could possibly raise some flags. Check the whois information on the spammy sites (see #5). Do any of them have the same whois information as the site offering the link?

These are some of the things I check when evaluating links. If you have any tips or suggestions, please comment below.

Tips courtesy of the Utah SEO team via @ Red Olive Design

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Profile and brand search volume data posted on our main blog.

Utah SEO via @redolivedesign

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In addition to regular SEO efforts, you might want to create business profile pages with the following sites:

• http://listings.local.yahoo.com/csubmit/index.php
• http://www.yelp.com/business/unlocking
• http://www.insiderpages.com/session/new?header_link=true
• http://www.judysbook.com/Join
• http://places.google.com

Utah SEO via @redolivedesign.

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I posted some data back in July showing the web browser usage from a variety of Utah web sites. I tried to pull a sample of web sites with a diverse range of visitors.

Sample of 7 web sites, 33,189 visits - June 2010 compared to October 2010:

• IE8 is up from 37.88% to 39.98%
• IE7 is down from 18.21% to 13.67%
• IE6 (thankfully) is also down from 6.26% to 4.53%
• FireFox is slightly up from 22.22% to 22.50%
• "Other Browsers" are up from 15.43% to 19.31%

Next time I'll add the data from Safari and Chrome. I can tell you that out of the 19.31% from "Other Browsers" 11.02% came from Safari. So Safari is number 3, after IE and Firefox, with my samples.

With the increased sales of Mac computers, iPads, and iPods; Safari vs. Chrome will continue to be a close fight.

Data compiled by:
Utah SEO via @ Red Olive Design

Update:
It looks like w3schools has firefox pegged at 45.1% and IE at 31.1%. I am showing IE totals to an amazing 58.18%

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So the old keyword tool seemed to allow you to quickly filter out the "suggested" phrases. The new tool, as far as I know, only allows you to filter the suggestions to the level of "Ideas containing my search terms."  You still get some suggested keywords mixed into the data. So if you are trying to compile a report with specific phrases it makes it difficult to process/handle the data.

So if you prefer the old way of being able to get the search volume numbers from just the keywords you enter, you can use the PPC traffic estimator. And if you want the "Exact Match" numbers make sure you enter the brackets [search phrase].

For more information about SEO or help with ranking for national or Utah SEO phrases, visit our site.

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Working at one of Utah's oldest web design firms, I've learned a few common mistakes companies make during the web design process. One of the mistakes I often see is the timing of hiring an SEO specialist.

Every month we have companies fresh off a new web design approach us about SEO services. Sometimes it's a site we've designed, and sometimes it's a site designed by someone else. Either way, the mistake is the same. Companies will get all excited to launch a new web site. They'll invest tons of resources in designers, developers, and old school marketing professionals, but they will put off SEO.

Some of the typical reasons I've seen for not hiring an SEO specialist in the beginning stages of a web project:

• The company doesn't understand SEO
• The VP thinks it's a threat to their dealers or resellers. Meanwhile their competitors are cashing in on direct leads from the web and from resellers.
• They consider themselves a b2b, and they don't need to target people searching. That's fine, then just don't expect to be found.
• They are already paying for an in-house old school "marketing" professional, and they assume they are all set. Yeah I'm calling out the in-house marketing guy, or girl, with the degree from 1998 that tries to play SEO. There is nothing wrong with degrees, I have one in Psychology (University of Utah, 2003), but in most cases I've seen, they don't know web. They often don't know html, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, or even how to write a simple "a" tag or "title" tag. Not a likely SEO hero.
• Simple procrastination. They are going to sign-up for SEO, just not until the site is completed

Jumping ahead to the latter stages of the project. The web design and development have been completed, the site launched, and the business cards are getting printed. The site is awesome, and it looks amazing. But the phone doesn't ring. They pull up a traffic report after the first month, and bam only 25 hits from Google! And 20 were searches for their own company name.

Now they are ready for SEO. Too bad the site is done: content organized without significant thought, important text is locked away in images not readable by search engines, and typically no keyword research has gone into creating navigation titles, page names, image names, or copywriting. Now all this can be fixed, but it can take a lot of time and resources to do so.

Obviously you can still perform a lot of SEO tasks away from the actual site and as an after-thought, but hopefully this post finds you before you start your new web design project.

Ryan

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 In summary:

 When you are providing SEO and Web Design Services, you need to pay attention to the type of industry that you are targeting.   You’ll want to make sure that visitors to the site have a good experience, regardless of what browser they are using.  It will do you no good to bring in a lot of traffic from people using Ie6 and the site is non-functional.  If you don’t have a way to test for cross-browser compatibility, check out Adobe’s new “BrowserLab” service.

 Data provided by Utah SEO via @ RedOlive.

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1.       Must be using current FireFox. (Note I've recently found a much easier and more accurate way to track rankings.  I would advise doing research and watching Youtube reviews of various keyword tracking services).

2.       Set Google search results to top 100 and then save.

3.       Search Term

4.       Hit “Ctrl” “F”

5.       Enter site URL

6.       Select and highlight from your site up. (Stop before PPC at the top.  (Sometimes the first 3)).

7.       Paste into notepad. (Should be a “#” before each site - Excel counts the position based on the number of #s).

8.       Copy notepad contents and paste into supplied excel doc (Paste into A1 or the top left cell).      Excel Doc (right click "Save Target As")

9.       ** In the top right of the excel doc you’ll see a field with a dotted background.  This is used to subtract the sites that get more than one listing (when sorted by 100).  These are the secondary “indented” results, typically to a website’s interior pages.

Post if you have any questions.  As far as I understand, this is a non-automated Google friendly way to count keyword rankings.  Please let me know if it’s not the case. Please Visit and Link to www.redolivedesign.com. Also, you may or may not want to turn off the google settings for "Enable customizations based on search activity."  I suspect you'll probably want this disabled.  To do so, search something in google, then click "Web History" in the top right corner. Then simply disable or able customized search results.

See the full gallery on Posterous

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Here is a short list of things you want to see in an SEO company.

• Experience
• A medium to large portfolio of websites - for trend monitoring. When you make regular changes and perform site maintenance on a large portfolio of websites, you learn things.
• Knowledge of html. You don't want to hand over FTP access to someone who doesn't know html.
• How strong is the overall team?... Do they have a strong technical side to help with execution of SEO creative concepts? Do they have have a strong creative team?
• Do they offer copywriting to help with blog posts and pr related material?
• Do they have experience with off-site link building? Ask for a few ideas / suggestions to ensure it's white hat.

For more information about web design or SEO, visit our site

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