SEO Guy Blog

From time to time I love to write about things that are not SEO or my projects, this time I’m writing about Israel Earth Hour 2011. “Earth Hour” is an initiative that began in Australia back in 2007, which calls to individuals and businesses turn off their lights for one hour as identification with a global move to increase awareness of global warming. The purpose of the global event is to deliver a powerful global message, that we can take meaningful and effective action to reduce injury in Earth’s climate, using simple ways to help save energy.

Global warming is one of the biggest threats ever faced before the human race. Our use on electricity generated from coal fired power stations causes a dramatic increase in Earth’s temperature, which leads to sea level rise, increased droughts and storms severely great changes in an environment where we all depend for survival. “Israel Earth Hour 2011″ shows that together, small actions can affect global warming. The main goal for “Israel Earth Hour 2011″: is to influence as many households, communities and businesses turn off their lights for one hour on March 24.

When we are going to turn off the lights by Israeli cities:

* 20:00 – Tel – Aviv, Yeruham, Modiin
* 20:10 – Jerusalem, Dimona
* 20:20 – Ra’anana, Nes Ziona
* 20:30 – Netanya, Arad, Eilat
* 20:40 – Ashdod, Givatayim, Bat Yam, Herzliya
* 20:50 – Holon, Haifa, Yokneam

Last month, Google made a very large update to their algorithm, the update was mainly a change in the ranking of poor quality reference content web sites. The change hit on article directories and sites with large amounts of content (not news sites). This algorithm updatecalled by everyone – Google Panda, you can read here why this update got this name.

History

Google recently received a lot of complaints about the existence of  very poor quality content on web sites, web sites with poor quality content appeared at first results actually instead of quality content sites. These sites are known as “content farm” (from the lovely home of the name “links farm”). Most affected web sites are the one’s that offer everyone to post content in thier website, these web sites did actually want that people will write content for SEO reasons. Among the sites that appeared in the first places for  popular keywords are: “how to”  web sites such as ehow.com, articles directories, news sites that take content from various sites (not unique content) and web sites that used not unique content.

The Results

After the change made Google’s algorithm, there was a drop of tens of percent of the amount of traffic these sites that came from Google (complete information on changes in post “Google Farmer Update: Quest for Quality“). Many SEO guys argue that compare to other google algorithm changes,this time google punished “content farm” web sites manually. Large content web sites were affected by the algorithm change, that why many SEO guys claims that big web sites punished manually by google search team.

Although the change in the algorithm (Google Panda), these web sites are still very “must to” websites for the link building job. It still a good idea to publish articles and content on these web sites but you should create only unique content and quality content. The first site that already made a change at the day after the algorithm change is Ezinearticles.com articles site – he made two important changes in requirements: 1. Minimum contents of the article must be over 400 words (before that it was 250 words) 2. More control over each articles that people send (in the past a lot of the articles was published without a complete review of the content.)

In the past month I was working around the clock to upload new design for some of my local job boards. All the job boards was publsihed in 2009 or 2010 but since then they didn’t been well known job boards in there area. The design change is in this job boards: Pune Jobs Finder, Delhi Jobs Finder and Environmental Jobs Finder. I change the job board software, now it’s based on wordpress (appthemes) and not on jobberbase like in the past.

Now in this job boards there are a lot of new jobs each day, they get all the jobs from indeed.com rss feeds, so every day there are 100′s of new jobs. There is option to post jobs directly on this local job boards, the prices are different from site to site. I hope now with this design and software changes, the sites will be more strong in the SERP for there keywords. I worked a lot on the SEO of all this 3 projects, I also added some social media work and published facebook page and twitter account for each website.

Hope to see some changes in this local jobs websites, more updates in this websites will be coming soon.

The web design itself don’t have closely connection SEO, but today even small details of site design can affect website promotion. In the past web designers used the tables format to stylize web pages. Today, the standard is to use HTML / CSS. There is a big difference in the way website is designed when you use CSS. Using CSS page design brings three major benefits associated with search engine optimization.

• Div tags instead of tables
• Less code lines
• Cleaner code

Why div is beeter than tables?

Div tags can be associated with a class or include string identifier, id. Classes are used when more than one div uses the same design. id is for a single div. The simple div or class associated with id and the design of the class or of the id is applied to the div. This facilitates the creation of more valid code.

How CSS reduces the amount of code lines?

All the information of design and style for id’s and classes in your CSS is written in a separate webpage. Each page on the site is linked to the CSS file, so that one CSS page is used to design all the pages on the site. This means that there is no need of design code lines on the html/php/asp page itself. One problem that designers had in the past is to write the same code again and again for the elements on the page. With CSS, the page design code written one time and can be associated with different elements on the same page. This shortens the amount of code drastically in the web page and makes it easier to design sites.

Cleaner code for search engines

Since all elements of the design of the web page is in the CSS file, there is less code lines in the HTML/PHP/ASP page. This helps search engines to process the pages more quickly and more effectively. Search engine needs to filter out less information, and the crawler will encounter more content and less code of your site with less relevant as the design code. When you using CSS, the div elements can be arranged so the most important content is found at the beginning of the page and search engines will notice it first. This approach creates a cleaner web page for the crawler.

What is a significant advantage?

In competitive themes, every little thing you can do to rise above the competition helps. What makes one website better than other one in the SERP from  is good SEO methods technique, on and off the page. Most important thing is to make sure that the web pages have quality design that support the SEO, if you want to compete with major sites in your theme.

First a few words about SEOMoz, this is an international site that began as a SEO news website but now mainly offers: SEO blog, an active marketplace, Q & A and PRO area with a variety of unique software tools. The site is the largest website in SEO niche, many SEO freelancers and SEO comapnies use the site every day to get update about SEO and use existing SEO tools.

SEOMoz Announced in recent days about the 30-Day Free Trial for there PRO account. By signup to the 30-day free trial (yes, must enter payment information, but you can cancel your account after 30 days), you get acsess to all PRO  features in the site(cost: 99 $ per month). Among the tools I recommend for use in the PRO are: Juicy Linkfinder, Link Acquisition Assistant, Competitive Link Finder.

I highly recommend SEOMoz PRO experience even if you SEO amateur or SEO freelancer or even you have a SEO company. There are many tools that can serve you in your daily activities in your SEO projects. Good luck!

Today after my regular decrease at the local railway station, I encountered with an old man holding a box of matches trying to catch bees near a small field of flowers. The older man had a lot of patience and really managed to catch bees with a box of matches, I asked him what he was doing and he replied “That’s my job, I collect bees and sell them later to clinics”.  Patience and much thought before action, reminded me of the process I make before choosing a articles directory to publish articles, for all the articles I publish. Today, every SEO guy working with SEO link building method known through publication of articles, in this post I will present considerations, which I think are very important before choosing the most appropriate articles directory for publishing articles.

Like the story at the beginning of the  post, choosing the most appropriate articles directory to publish articles  is process with a lot of thought behind it. You can just publish articles in any directory that offers to send articles for free, but it will not help you with the link building of your website.

Here are my considerations for choosing a perfect article directories to publish articles:

- Ranking in SERP – Of course it’s the most important consideration for me, to see how strong the articles directory in Google’s organic results. I like to check before publishing an article how the site ranking in the specific niche where I’m going to publish an article, for example when I want to publish an article about Pilates I do a Google search for “Pilates articles” / “Pilates article.” As you can see the first articles directory that comes of these searches is ArticleBase Pilates category and that why I should post the article in there.

- No-fllow or Do-follow links – Before publishing articles it’s important to check, if the link we receive from the articles directory is a direct link that will help us in terms of promoting our site (do-follow link). Not all article directories allow to get do-follow link, there are many article direcotries locate the tag No-follow in the links.

- Page views for articles – Enter the articles directory to find articles and press the last article published at your category, check how many page views were for the article. Publishin articles is not helping us only with link building, it is important that the articles we publish will help us also to bring direct traffic to the site, so it’s important to choose articles directory with the high amount of pageviews on her articles (among other articles directories we consider to publish in them).

- Articles for real human or for serach engine robots – Recently I came across a lot of articles directories, that the links in the articles content are with same color and design as regular text. So the links are basicly for search engine robots and not for real human visitors so we do not receive direct traffic from this sites!

- Publish articles in theme articles directories – Recently I see a lot of new theme only articles directories, like for example Sportarticles.net articles directory that is in the field of sports. Not all themes have there own articles directory for publishing articles, so if you do not have exist articles directory yet, you should choose post your articles in general articles directory. Publish an article on specific theme helps us a lot more than general articles directory, because we get a website theme link from the article and not just a link from one page theme (page with our article).

After all the considerations I mentioned, you can now choose the list of articles directories to publishing articles that most appropriate for your campaign. Do not forget that the process of publishing articles, is like any link building process – with many considerations and many thought before every move.

When promoting a site you can be used in a variety of different techniques. Ultimately you must decide where to invest your money, about 80% of web traffic comes from search engines, there are two ways to get some of this traffic. Traffic can be made through clicking on organic results on search engines (organic SEO) or via clicking on the sponsored results (PPC advertising). In reality, SEO and pay per click (PPC) differ in many important respects, both have degrees and disadvantages and both are suitable in different circumstances.

There are many misconceptions about organic SEO and pay per click. One misconception is that SEO is free thing, and it often advantage compared to the costs involved in Google AdWords pay per click. With organic search, you do not pay each time someone clicks and comes to your site, but it should not be considered free. I highly recommended to websites hire professional to manage the organic SEO of there site, and this will cost. The “DIY” option may be attractive but will require a long time and still most likely cost you money when you start your link building strategies. In addition there is a possibility that you will “upset” the search engines if you are not playing by the rules of “do’s and don’ts” of organic SEO. So if you assume an organic SEO will cost you a lot of money, you got the impression that the PPC is the winner option.

Organic SEO requires time and efforts. PPC campaign can be promoted and ran into the quarter of an hour, bringing traffic to your site and generate sales. In contrast, organic SEO can take months until he can not guarantee that he will rule. This smuggler many people from organic SEO, people interested in the results can be seen right away and have no patience to wait several months for them. Organic SEO is a very invasive process, the location of Web site pages in search engine results (SERP) depends on several factors related to the Web page, such as page titles, description and content. When you start organic SEO campaign, you may find your site requires redesign, or that SEO company you hire insists to add 500 words including keywords into your home page. Before you sign a contract with search engine optimization company, you must determine what work would have to be made to avoid difficulties and injuries later.

So far, compared to PPC advertising, organic SEO seems less desirable option: it requires more effort, take more time before you see results as well as it costs money. Although there is truth in that SEO campaign costs money, is much cheaper in the long run and will reflected in better ROI than you get through pay per click. After that improved in the status of your website in the organic results, the bulk of the work had be done. Although you might want to invest in link building and keep an eye on competitors, this should cost you much less than the construction cost of the campaign. In many cases you can also stop all efforts to promote the website and still enjoy the first position for years and years (in small themes only!). While this is not the situation for most commercial sites, organic SEO can generate huge amounts of traffic and result in an unbeatable ROI in the long run.

Although the sites and business requirements of most people are very diverse, it’s generally a good idea to invest money in both strategies. Organic SEO investment gives the best ROI in the long run, while making simultaneous PPC campaign will provide a steady stream of traffic to SEO efforts and it will give sales meanwhile. There is also a bonus to this process (use both strategies in same time) organic SEO strategies are expected to increase the ranking of your landing page and reduce the cost of ads on Google, it will increase your Google Adwords Quality Score. No matter what methods you choose, you should use the services of a professional. Select the companyor freelnacer carefully and make sure you know exactly what you’re signing before they start to work.

So what would you choose? Organic SEO campaign only? Only PPC campaign? Or a combination of both and abandonment of the PPC project after reaching the desired results  from organic results (with organic SEO)? All answers depend on your business scale and your budget ability, there is no single answer to all areas of business at all.

After more than a year of inactivity in my SEO blog, I took on the most serious project of restoring the situation of the blog to what it was before. SEO Guy blog was established in April 2007, at the time I started the blog to give information to users who want to know what it is SEO, at the time SEO was not so attractive in the internet (most of it was only SEM and not exactly SEO as we know this days).  My blog is about SEO news, SEO tips, information about my various projects throughout the network and important information I see fit to share with my readers.

What is planned for further?

Of course the main goal is to continue to update the blog with information that deals with SEO news, SEO tips, Tracking SEO companies, information on SEO job ads (in collaboration with SEO Jobs Finder). I also planning to begin the process of marketing the blog, the first thing to be carried out is to add a link to my blog in several of my online projects to promote the blog in search engines and generate traffic.

Right now i’m working as full time job on my site – SEO Jobs Finder. I started this project in the start of 2009 as the worldwide version of my Israeli site – seojobs.co.il free job board with SEO and SEM jobs. I decide to start as full time job on SEO Jobs FInder so I can make this site as the first site to llok for jobs in SEO and SEM. So far the site is rank well in google (first page for all the keywords) but still I working more and more about traffic from social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. Most of my daily work is blog comments in some of the biggest SEO blog over the internet. When I will have new updates about this project I will update here…

In the last month I launched the website of SEOguy company in hebrew: www.seoguy.co.il

It’s temporary website but even now you can go and see some of the clients and some info about my internet projects. The full site will be ready in few month.