Many sites go through redesigns and in the process URLs change. In particular, most sites we redesign we attempt to use pretty urls that contain keywords for the page. The keywords end up bold in search results if they are in the search terms. The thinking is that the bolding of the keywords increases your CTR on search results. The problem comes when you try to figure out what to do with a site that is already ranked well and you are switching over to pretty urls. The question is whether you should let the old urls just 404 or should you go through and make 301 redirects to the new pretty urls. Here are my thoughts on it:

The search engines will see the 301 redirects and start to modify their index with the new urls. The entire site won’t be reindexed at once so for a period of time it will still think that there are current pages on the site linking to urls that then do a 301. This will negatively impact rankings. How much impact is difficult to say. As the entire site is eventually reindexed the search engines will see that the site no longer links to the old urls and the site won’t be negatively impacted. I’m guessing it’ll take 3 months to remove any negative impact. Its just an educated guess though.

The 301 redirects will also have a positive impact on rankings in that the urls will contain the relevant keywords. As the site is gradually reindexed, the search engines will start to see that there is a navigational importance to the keywords used in the links on the site. It will boost the effect of those keywords and improve how the search engines interpret the site’s internal linking structure. As a result, it will have a positive impact.

Once the site is completely reindexed and the negative impact from the 301 redirects is negligible the site will ultimate have better ranking potential than before the change since the internal linking structure has been given more weight to keywords in navigational structure.

This is all known and predictable. What we can’t be sure of is if the weight of the positive impact will balance the weight of the negative impact in the short term while the site is being reindexed. From my experience, I expect rankings to slide initially and over a three month period regain and surpass the original rankings.

If you simply ignore the current site urls and just do 404s, the search engines will start to reindex your site but will also register a bunch of 404s. This is probably going to give you a much more negative impact than you’ll get from the small decline you’ll get from doing 301s. I strongly advise doing 301 redirects and to remember that your rankings will likely drop slightly but will ultimately recover and exceed where they were before (that’s assuming there wasn’t any changes in the redesign itself that negatively effects your rankings).

I don’t think its necessary to go into the benefits of adding a blog to help market your site. Its widely accepted as an easy way to add new keyword rich pages and help out rankings. There are some questions about whether an off-site blog or an on-site blog is better for rankings. When I’m referring to an on-site blog, I’m assuming its going to be integrated into the main site we’re promoting. An off-site blog might be with a blogging service like Blogger or something similar. The off-site blog will link out to the main site we’re marketing. The thinking is that that off-site blog will generate more rankings potential for the main site because it will be a valuable incoming link to the main site. While that may be true to some extent I still prefer on-site blogs.

An off-site blog may have ranking benefits by having externals links from another site into your main site but the off-site blog will require its own link building campaign independent of the main site so it can get ranked on its own. I’m not sure its a good use of resources to have 2 link building campaigns: one for the blog and one for the mian site. One benefit of an on-site blog would be that we can use the blog pages as potential landing pages for Adwords and other PPC marketing (sure we can do that with an off-site blog but it would require another click before they get to your main site). I think you could write your on-site blog posts in a way that would make the main site an informational resource for its theme. I think the SEO benefit would be better as a
result.

Keep in mind that Google hires teams of people to visit every site in their search index and rate them. The purpose is to improve the quality of search results and get spammy looking sites out of top rankings. I believe there are so many spammy looking blogs out there that just link out to other sites that their effect is decreasing over time as a result of this manual rating. The blogs like this are labeled as thin sites and devalued in ranking once they are reviewed. I think its better to focus on getting blog content on-site that makes your main site look more like an information resource. I would shy away from the traditional blog look and feel and try to make it look more like a rich resource of information about issues related to the topic. When it gets manually reviewed, you’ll more likely get a bigger thumbs up than you’d get from a thin off-site blog.

Of course this is all just an educated guess at best so take it all with a grain of salt.

I’ve been working with one client for several months now and they are extremely pleased with the results I’ve produced for them thus far. Here is a snapshot of the monthly analytics data for the site over the past year. You can get a larger view of the graph if you click on the image.

I started working with them in July and by August you can see that their traffic more than doubled. From July to now, I’ve continued to work with the client on increasing rankings through seo, link building, and improving visitor retention. The result is that their natural organic search traffic has seen an increase almost 10 times what it was, from 1,800 to 17,000. I’m pointing this out because I like the latest Google Analytics monthly graph view. It really helps in showing trends over time and its encouraging for clients to see the upward results from my seo work.

Its been a long time coming but we’ve finally got our new site design finished for Onomojo. We’ve also expanded our services to include graphics design, logo design, web design, and a whole slew of other graphics related services. That’s in addition to the services we already provided which were primarily programming, seo, and marketing related. Here’s a screenshot of the new design.

I’ve been through the ropes when it comes to SEO and PPC advertising (particularly with Google’s Adwords). Clients come to me either looking for SEO or online marketing solutions. Their objective is obviously to increase their sales and they want it to happen yesterday. The first thing I look at is where a site is currently ranked in search results for their targeted keywords before beginning any SEO or PPC campaigns. I like to also take a look at their Google Analytics data to see what’s already working well for them and to get a perspective of the volume of traffic they’re dealing with. Some business have none of these things setup and are simply trying to make a push to increase online revenue. Whatever their motivation the objectives are all the same and the same techniques apply. Except, however, for my recommendation for PPC ads.

Small businesses which don’t get much online traffic are usually looking for a quick fix and instant gratification. I usually take the time to explain the benefit of SEO and link building to these companies but in the end they usually choose PPC advertising. I’m not against PPC ads but I do have a pretty quantitative reason for trying to dissuade some of my clients from pursuing that route. From my experience, PPC ads only work if you have a high return on a product that has a high conversion rate per click. In essence a high ROI. The problem for many small businesses is that they sell low dollar items which themselves produce a small profit margin.

Lets take a small handmade soap manufacturer as a perfect example of a small business looking to expand their sources of revenue by setting up a shopping cart. A company like this might make a dollar on each bar of specialty soap sold. They aren’t likely to have huge resources like a large technology corporation so their budget for the project is relatively small. Lets say less than 5k USD. Part of that covers development costs and the rest ends up in limbo while I exude the benefits of SEO over PPC advertising to the client. From the perspective of a business if someone tells me to spend a few thousand dollars and it’ll pay off in maybe 6 months but they can’t guarantee first page placement my natural business sense tells me to tell this person where to go. My alternative is to pay per click advertising which will result in instant traffic and likely increase my sales immediately. The choice is simple in that regard and its why many small businesses with little understanding of online commerce end up abandoning their get rich quick online schemes.

Lets dig a little deeper into PPC ads. Lets assume a bar of my handmade soap costs me $3 and my typical order contains 3 bars of soap. Lets also assume I make $1.50 off each bar of soap I sell. Those numbers are pretty realistic examples. I now want to start an online marketing campaign and put in 3k USD to PPC ads for a month. That means I need to sell 2000 bars of soap in a month and have about 666 orders with 3 bars each on average. If we stretch those orders out over the entire month then I need to get about 22 online orders a day to simply break even with my PPC advertising campaign. Now lets look at the budget I have allocated for the month, $3,000. That’s about $100 a day. Lets assume that with my amazing skills I’ve managed to optimized my Adwords campaign so well that I’m getting an average CPC at $0.40. That will give me about 250 visits a day just from my Google Adwords campaign. If 22 of those 250 visitors placed orders that would make my conversion rate 8.8%. Depending on the industry that’s a pretty high conversion rate for online sales. Now take a look at what we just went over. This looks at what we need to just break even and we had to make some incredible assumptions like our amazing CPC at $0.40. A average CPC of $0.60 to $1.20 is more realistic for the targeted keywords but we gave ourselves the benefit of the doubt for this example. We still needed a 8.8% conversion rate which isn’t too probable. Its an example where some simple upfront analysis of the numbers will tell you that my $3,000 is better spent doing some SEO and link building so that I can get natural free search traffic that will last longer than a single month.

Lets take an example of a high dollar product, travel. People spend about $1500 on a travel sale and per sale I may make on average 10% or $150. The example above needs to be modified to have an average CPC at $2.00. If I need to make $100 a day in sales it means I need to make just 1 sale a day or 2 every 3 days. If I’m spending $100 a day on ads with an average CPC at $2.00 I’ll get about 50 visitors a day. If I need just 1 sale from those 50 visitors that’s a conversion rate of 2% which is certainly much easier to get than the 8.8% I needed from selling soap. This campaign has a high likelihood of succeeding and will probably be well in the black at the end of the month.

Travel has a high profit margin and requires a low conversion rate which is why PPC campaigns work for it. Soap has low profit margins and requires a high conversion rate to simply break even so a PPC campaign isn’t likely to succeed. My soap business will end up negative at the end of the month and I’ll likely be bitter at the waste of the small investment I made towards PPC ads.

In summary, SEO is the way to go for small businesses selling products with small profit margins. Its a more calculated and well thought out method of generating sales online. The benefits may take time to show but the payoff is that your online business may actually succeed. PPC ads on the other hand will have you bleeding money with little chance of ever turning a profit.

The other day I noticed a pretty significant SEO related problem with using a built in Rails construct. I noticed a problem when I started getting application errors that were letting me know that the user agent was none other than our friendly Googlebot. A closer look at the app shed light on a problem you may not have even expected. When using

it will take a look at the HTTP_REFERRER and redirect the user to that url. The problem, however, is that Googlebot doesn’t send a referrer and neither do a whole bunch of other search engine spiders. The result is that when they visit your site they get a nice 502 server error because Rails raises an exception. It doesn’t know what url to redirect to so it send a 502 error. Googlebot then sees your site as a bunch of 502 errors in the situations where you’re using redirect_to :back. Take a look at the Rails API and you’ll see the last line clearly mentions this.

The solution is to catch the RedirectBackError the redirect_to raises when there’s no referrer. Its a simple fix but one you need to be on the lookout for or else you might end up with a few 502 errors giving you bad mojo with the Google gods.

I’ve been meaning to write about this for quite a long time but somehow never seemed to get around to it. I started a SEO, online marketing, and web development company called Onomojo a while ago. I’ve just been so busy since its conception that I found it hard to find the time to blog about it. I’ve decided to take a break from the hustle and bustle of the routine and say a few words about us.

We offer a complete marketing package for online businesses who are looking to increase their exposure and increase their revenue. A lot of businesses throw money at expensive marketing firms and end up with little to show for it. We found that in most cases the marketers weren’t developers and the developers weren’t marketers. Onomojo is different. We are all programmers, designers, and marketing professionals. This gives us an edge and the ability to offer complete marketing packages that complete the necessary learning loop to achieve success.

Any successful business must learn from what it does right and learn from what it does wrong. When your marketing agency has to communicate their wishes to developers the intentions are often lost. Programmers aren’t typically interested in the marketing aspect of development. Marketers usually have no clue how to program or design. We are different. Our developers have a passion for SEO, marketing, graphics design, and everything else it takes to make a company successful. Our feedback loop of what works and what doesn’t is extremely short with a complete package. We learn from the marketing and SEO and we directly apply that learning to your site design and content. We take learning from CPC ads and traffic analysis and we apply those lessons learned to make your site more effective. Onomojo offers complete online marketing packages for business looking for a competitive edge. Visit our site at http://onomojo.com and fill out the contact form for more information on what Onomojo can do for you and your company.

Google called me out of the blue the other day asking if I wanted a job. It sounded like a good idea at first so I followed through with my updated resume and such. At some point they said they had 3 separate positions for me and that I should try to get in their core team first. I had a brief interview with the core team where they judged my qualifications based on 3 questions. I don’t remember what they were but I answered them all wrong. Well, the second one I didn’t even try and just said I don’t know because I was pissed that they were giving me a pop quiz and I got the first one wrong. No googling. After that interview it took less than 1 minute to find the answers. I never responded to the other requests from them because I don’t really want to work for a company who is so full of themselves that they honestly think that pop quizes are the best way to weed people out. Pass. Good luck though google. Now, onto the real meat of this post.

Google’s index seems like its continuously updated. That’s great for search if there were so many junk results.

• Internal linking - Google loves internal linking which is one reason why there are so many junk results in their search. From my experience, tossing in link dumps all over your site actually helps it do better. The result? Everyone link dumps and gets better rankings so you get a bunch of crappy search results.
• Sensitivity - For get search for now, lets focus on Google from a developer’s perspective. Google continuously updates their index. Great. What does that mean for a developer? It means that if you forget an apostrophe on an anchor tag you end up with dozens of 404s. No big deal if you catch the mistake early right? Wrong. What happens is the missing apostrophe bleeds the link on to whatever follows causing invalid links. If the Google god happens to see your mistake they will try adding those invalid links to their index. They won’t be valid so you will be penalized for having 404s on your site. That’s a sure fire way to see your rankings drop off the map for some ridiculous mistake that was corrected a few hours after it was made.
• Poor tools - Luckily Google provides you with a way to remove invalid links from their index but good luck using that thing. Lets say that one mistake created 50 404s across your site. You have to copy and paste each 404 url to the url removal form, one at a time. Not only that but you have to remove the domain name from the pasted version. So its copy paste edit, copy paste edit, 50 times in a row. Yay! Or you can copy paste them to a text editor and global replace the domain and then copy paste them into the removal form 1 by 1.
• Poor responsiveness - Ok so what? At least they provide a way to remove your urls from their index instead of waiting around for weeks right? Well, kinda of. Its not the same continuous updating that they do themselves. They’ll eventually listen to your request but only on their time. When they’re good and ready. I’ve had a request pending removal for over 2 weeks. That’s 2 weeks of being penalized for a missing apostrophe that was only live for less than 1 hour. Way to go Google.

This wouldn’t be complete without some suggestions. First, get a clue about hiring good developers. You’re going to eventually end up with a crap gene pool like Microsoft and Yahoo and be usurped by my new search engine. Next, don’t be so harsh on the occational 404 and at least provide a quick way to remove them. Your index is updated continuously, if you want feedback then use it. Don’t sit on my feedback for weeks. Next, give your web developer tools some love. They’re so primitive with little thought put in to usability. Also, internal linking shouldn’t count for nearly as much as you give credit. Look at the sites coming out these days. Huge link dumps that people pass right over. You’re forcing the creation of millions of junk sites on the internet. That’s not a good thing. And finally, your search obviously uses some type of machine learning and appears to be in a rut. People have your search figured out and are taking advantage of that. You need a smarter machine learning algorithm.

There are plenty of people talking about how you can make your Wordpress blog titles more SEO friendly. No one I’ve found however has mentioned what I’ve stumbled upon by accident. Pseudo-indented listings in Google search results. What I’ve started doing on my blogs is making my title like this:


<title>
<?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> &raquo; <? } ?> <?php wp_title(''); ?> <?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> &raquo; < ? } ?> < ?php bloginfo('name'); ?>
</title>


This adds a » in front of your post title. The result is that when the search results show up in Google your links look like it stands out more because of the » in the title. It almost makes it look like your site is more official and Google is giving you a little arrow in front of your link to prove it. It won’t effect your rankings as far as I know. Its more of a psychological advantage than anything else but I have no scientific data to back up that claim. Take a look at the title of this post to see an example title.

For some strange reason, I have this funny feeling that Google will be doing some updating this weekend. If you have an Adwords account, you may have noticed the message that some services may be unavailable on January 13. It’s been a while since the last PR update so we’re about due for something from Google. All of you who constantly watch your rankings, pay close attention in the next few weeks if its not this weekend. Its coming soon.