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Affordable Web Design SEO Case Study – Botswana Travel

August 24, 2010 By admin

Another Affordable Web Design SEO Case Study – this time we’re looking at Botswana Travel.

OK let’s see what’s at stake on Google for the phrase “Botswana Travel” and we’ll check to see how the government websites in the nation of Botswana are doing with the phrase.  We begin by going to the:

Google Keyword Tool

and after searching on Botswana Travel and sorting the results alphabetically we get these 4 medium to high value related phrases…

OK so in terms of Global Searches per month we find:

Botswana travel – 27,100

Botswana vacations -14,800

Botswana lodge -12,100

Botswana safari -33,100

and on a related search I found

Botswana tourism – 9,900

OK so what do these Google Adwords numbers mean? The “Global Monthly Searches” is an average of the last 12 months worth of traffic data on the Google ad networks.

all together the 5 phrases above get almost 100,000 searches per month. If you were paying 5 dollars per click for PPC Advertising with Google, you would be spending more than $100,000 a month to get the top percentage of those clicks via Adwords. That’s because out of 100,000 searches you might be lucky to get 20,000 clicks. We can probably get the same number of clicks for free using organic search.

Next factoid – I want to get a feel for the level of competition on that target phrase. I want to see how many pages on the internet that Google knows about that have the word “Botswana Travel” in their title.

I use this advanced operator command in a Google search box:

allintitle:Botswana travel

and Google tells me there are 11,600 web pages it knows about that have those words in their meta title. That’s decent competition but nothing major… big competition is in the half million area and above.

OK lets look at the SERP for Botswana Travel:

  1. www.lonelyplanet.com/botswana
  2. wikitravel.org/en/Botswana
  3. www.botswana.co.za/
  4. travel.state.gov
  5. www.go2africa.com/botswana
  6. www.africaguide.com/country/botswana/
  7. www.virtualtourist.com
  8. www.worldtravelguide.net/country/38/…/Botswana.html
  9. www.botswana-places.co.za/
  10. www.sa-venues.com/regions/botswana.htm

Well the government sites did not make the Top 10 Page One Google listings for that important phrase. The top listing is from Lonely Planet and it’s a Google PR6. That’s a lot of PageRank for a single interior web page.

But Botswana Tourism has a PR6 also so they could be a contender for the #1 position if they did their SEO a little differently.

http://www.botswanatourism.co.bw/

Here are their meta tags

<TITLE>:: Botswana Tourism Board ::</TITLE>
<meta name=”description” content=”Official web site for Botswana Tourism Board”>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”tourism,botswana,official,site,web,tourist,game,attractions,animals,birds”>

And the phrase “Botswana Travel” does not appear on their homepage anywhere. Neither does the phrase “Botswana Tourism”. So they are getting that phrase just on the inbound links with that phrase and the meta title and the url match.

I checked the phrase “Botswana Embassy” (www.botswanaembassy.org) to see how they ranked for Botswana Travel but it was down… this is what the world was seeing this morning

The following directories must be writable by the web server:
tmp/cache
tmp/templates_c

Please correct by executing:
chmod 777 tmp/cache
chmod 777 tmp/templates_c
or the equivilent for your platform before continuing.

Oh well. When the site is up I will add to this blog post to see how well their meta tags are doing in terms of SEO.

Now look at the power of their main “government portal” a HUGE PR7  http://www.gov.bw/ Now that’s the kind of SEO power that can be used to gain whatever phrase they want.

The Botswana Ministry of Foreign Affairs is a solid PR5 and it’s at http://www.mofaic.gov.bw/ but it’s responding so slowly it took a minute on broadband to see the HTML under the homepage from the New York area. When it appeared I found this as the meta tags for the homepage of their 2nd most government website:

<title>Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation – Home</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Joomla – the dynamic portal engine and content management system” />
<meta name=”keywords” content=”Joomla, joomla” />

Wow. The critical description tag says “Joomla – the dynamic portal engine and content management system”. That’s unfortunate. There was no attampt at SEO on this page apparently. If they used that powerful PR5 for some targeted SEO they could be getting thousands and probably tens of thousands of additional clicks per month for lucrative phrases that would absolutely help their countries economy.

Filed Under: Learn About SEO Tagged With: ,

What Are Website Validation Errors?

August 18, 2010 By admin

Website validation errors are like building code violations. Would you move into a house that the building inspector said had 78 building code violations? No way. Well look at the annotated screen print below. There is a website homepage with 78 validation errors. That means the official website inspector (which is called the W3C Markup Validation Service) said there were 78 violations of the rules that all websites are supposed to adhere to.

Can Website Validation Errors Cause You Problems?

You better believe it – the answer is yes. Absolutely. Here is a list of reasons why validation errors can cause you and your business problems…

  • First of all the errors are an indication that the web design team was “less than professional”. If they made this many mistakes here where else did they make mistakes?
  • This many errors is almost a guarantee that the site is not “cross-browser compliant” meaning it’s going to look different or broken on different browsers.
  • There is a good chance the search engine spiders will get confused and not be able to crawl your site completely. When they hit lots and lots of errors they just give up trying to crawl your site and they put you on the back burner in terms of crawling it again.
  • Forget about Google PageRank. The site might actually rank for some of it’s key phrases, but it most likely will have a PageRank of zero. If Google can’t crawl the site they are not going to give it a lot of PageRank credit.
  • Security problems? You bet. A site with this many problems also probably has left big opportunities for hackers to do malicious damage using your website.
  • If your web designer tells you the ton of validation errors in the website they build for you are normal or they aren’t doing any harm… pack up and leave (politely). They are lying or they know so little about building websites they actually believe the errors are a joke.
  • SEO problems. Use the validator errors as a Red Flag. Look for a complete lack of Search Engine Optimization and you will probably find your misgivings were correct. Having no clue when building a website usually means they have no clue when charging you for SEO as well.

Now that is a bit horrifying to programmers that know what they’re doing. A lot of what we do at Web Design Workplace is to save companies from code that looks like that. But this is a good time for a “before and after” look at website validation.

Here is a picture of the Web Design Workplace homepage after running it through the official W3C Validator… Perfect with no errors. Just the way we deliver websites to you.

Filed Under: Learn About SEO, Web Designer's Corner Tagged With: ,

Want More Google PageRank? Get More Inbound Links

August 17, 2010 By admin

Lots of clients tell me they “tried everything” to get more Google PageRank but they still have PageRank zero (PR-O). When I look at their inbound links, it tells a big part of the picture. Google gives more credit to a webpage if it has inbound links that it considers “good” links. That is they are “do follow” links that have NOT been discredited with a rel=”nofollow”. The example above is from Web Design Workplace. Over 5,000 inbound links. That’s a lot and it’s because we have lots of websites that link back to our homepage. It’s typical for web design companies that have launched a lot of websites to have that many.

What is a Do-Follow Link?

A do-follow link looks like this:

<a href=”http://webdesignworkplace/about/”>

This link tells Google that the web page where this link resides trusts the target and it gives it full link credit.It allows Google Pagerank from the page where this link is written to flow to the target web page.

What is a No-Follow Link?

Here is the same link above written in a no follow style

<a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://webdesignworkplace/about/”>

This means the target source is NOT trusted and it’s an explicit command to Google telling it NOT to allow PageRank to flow through the link to the target.

So Do-Follow links are “good” links and they provide what we call “link juice” or PageRank going from the source page to the target page. That helps build Pagearank for the target page.

Do No-Follow Links build PageRank?

Google’s official answer is NO.

Take a look at Matt Cutt’s blog for his viewpoint. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/ The Google Algorithm clearly does not allow PageRank to flow through a no-follow link, although it subtracts PR from the page where the link is placed whether the link is do-follow or no-follow.

But the real answer is Maybe.

Google knows a real web page in the real world gets a mixture of do-follow and no-follow links. If a web page had a bunch of do-follow and no no-follow links at all, that would look a little weird. Maybe suspicious even. So my personal recommendation is to try to develope a mixture of both good links and no-follow links. Google is always looking for natural progressions in link building. To have a quick spike in do-follow links without a similar spike in no-follow links might seem artificially manipulated. So although the no-follow link does NOT pass PR, but it helps to prevent a trigger for link manipulation just by being there.(That’s my Professional Opinion).

Regards Everyone – Mal

Filed Under: Learn About SEO Tagged With: ,

What is LiveOnGoogle.com?

July 31, 2010 By admin

I was just typing a favorite search phrase of mine and the #1 listing on Google Maps for “NYC Bakery” was a domain called “liveongooogle.com“. I had to marvel at the thought of this for a minute. So Magnolia Bakery has 1,000 citations and reviews and it got beat by a brand new domain with only 100 citations? How? I had to ask is this a new form of official Google Advertising where the will sell a #1 position on Google Maps and not label it as “sponsored results”?

Unfortunately this post is all questions and no answers. I have begun to investigate these mysteries and I will report back once this is solved. I’ve submitted a question to the company and I’ll post again when I get the results.

I can tell you that the competition to be #1 on any related phrase like “Manhattan Bakery” or “New York Bakery” is high. The Google Adwords Keyword Tool estimates there are 50,000 searches a month for the phrase New York Bakery. So to get a place as the #1 listing on Google Maps is hugely valuable. What’s it worth? Thousands of dollars a month IMHO.So I’m hugely interested in how they did this.

Filed Under: Learn About SEO Tagged With: , ,

Affordable Google Local Listings

July 28, 2010 By admin

A web surfing prospect goes to Google and types a location and a key phrase like “Ramsey NJ Restaurant”. What happens next? Google will probably deliver a Local Maps Listing.

Google used to call these the LBC or Local Business Center Listings. And since they change things fast with Maps, it’s now called Google Places.

Here’s what it looks like:

Since the Google Places Listing is “above the fold”, surfers get to look at it first, before they see the main list of results. That makes it very valuable to a business that wants to get seen by prospects surfing the web. Most business owners simply don’t know about the Google Places Listings and how much business they generate which is tens of thousands of phone calls and website lookups every day.

How Much Does A Google Place Listing Cost?

It’s free. That is IF you know how to enter all the information correctly without violating the sometimes vague Google Quality Guidelines.

But most companies charge between $500 and $1,000 as a one time fee for getting your listing in the Google Local, Yahoo Local, and Bing / MSN Local Directories as they’re called. Web Design Workplace charges $500 to get you into all 3 directories. It’s something we’ve done around 100 times and we’re very good at it. Considering how much time it takes to get this done right, that $500 fee is downright affordable. For some businesses it can be the most affordable business advertising they ever paid for.

Claiming a Google Places Listing

Google may already have a listing for you even if you don’t own a website. It does this by using “citations” from other trusted sources like review blogs and listings in other websites like Best Of the Web. Whether Google has the information or you need to enter it for the first time, there is a verification process called “claiming” your listing. If you can do all that by yourself that’s great but most get hung up somewhere along the way. To avoid any hassles and ensure it’s done right call Mal Milligan the owner of Web Design Workplace at 201-696-5375.

Filed Under: Learn About SEO Tagged With: , ,

Did Your Ranking Get Hurt By A Spammy Site?

June 14, 2010 By admin

An MFA site is a “Made For Adsense” site that delivers Google Paid Advertisement clicks to make money… but the site itself typically strips content from other sites using robots, and it provides no useful purpose to surfers. MFA sites are spam. But sometimes these spammy sites get to the top ranking in a competitive phrase and that is when they become more than just spam, they can hurt your hard earned ranking.

You followed all the rules according to the Google WebMaster Guidelines. You watched 40+ Matt Cutts videos to glean useful information to help you to rank higher and avoid violations. And after all that, you got beat by a scrapper site. Wow !! Well here is what you can do… report them to Google !! Simple… yes. And I can tell you from experience – they do listen when you report sites that are in violation. They sometimes will remove the offending site from the first page of results.

How do you…?

Submit A Spam Report to Google

  1. Go into your Google Webmaster Tools account (create one if you do not already own one).
  2. Follow this golden trail https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en
  3. Submit the report and check this to verify they got it  https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/message-list

Here is a video from Matt Cutts – the Google Spam Boss – telling the public that they do indeed take the spam reports seriously. On top of that if the spam site is having a serious negative impact on quality rankings, it will be dealt with at a higher priority. I presume that the spam site in the annotated screen print below taking a #1 ranking for a hugely contested competitive phrase will get looked at soonish.

Who Can I call To Help ?

If Your Ranking Was Hurt By A Spammy Site, Web Design WorkPlace can help you. Please call the owner Mal at 201-696-5375. Or use our Google Voice line at 41-99-GLOBAL.

Filed Under: Learn About SEO Tagged With: , , ,

Switching a Target Phrase

June 11, 2010 By admin

You have a website and it is ranking for a target phrase on your homepage but you want to change it. And that brings up the 64 dollar question:

How long will it take Google to reconfigure your target phrase?

Web Design Workplace  was #1 and #2 for the phrase “NJ web design” for 6 months and we changed our homepage completely yesterday.We are switching our homepage target phrase to “affordable web design” now. It’s got lots of competition from some players that have been entrenched on the first page for a very long time – years in fact. But we decided we had to get out of the “NJ web design consultant” competition becasue we were not getting the number of clients we wanted. We were also shifting the business from doing a lot of higher end SEO jobs to making lots of affordable webs instead.

So look who took over 12 hours after we rolled out the new homepage, a guy who has multiple websites for the same company and gets away with it all the time somehow. The #1 and #2 now are the guy who black hats Google and seems to get away with it. What is a black hat? A person who is bad and uses tricks and cheats to get more clicks. The #3 guy now (Barry Wise) is a great guy and a real SEO pro. So at least we know Google is telling us it knows we changed our target phrase. We got moved to positions #5 and #7 for a phrase we dominated until we cut over the new content and look and feel for our site. Now begins the long march for the new target phrase…

We just answered the first part of the question… it takes a matter of hours for Google to recognize a big change has occurred and start to reflect those changes in the main index. Wow – it used to take weeks or months but now it was that fast. Part of the reason is that our website has been a solid PR4 for over a year. We are very proud of that. Google spiders sites that have higher page rank more often so we expected they would find out soon that we did the big change.

How Long Till We Start to Rank for the New Target Phrase?

We are not in the top 500 yet after 12 hours. That is expected. If I had to bet on this one, I would say we will enter the index for our new target phrase somewhere between 51 and 550 over the next week. And if we blog a lot and get more new links we can move up to the 40′s within a month. But this is what we do for a living here and I can tell you it is so much fun we are laughing our butts off and having a great time. From the armchair we can only guess. Top 40 within a month, top 10 within 2 months. That’s my guess. If we are very lucky and work hard, we might be able to get on the first page (Top 10 results) for our new phrase withing a month.

Where are the Rules For Switching a Target Phrase?

Year ago we thought the black hat game was the fun one and we found over time there was a lot more reward playing by the white hat rules.  If you want to know where those white hat rules are… look no further than Google WebMaster Central. The guy who uses multiple sites to try to get more clicks is a looser. He’s a cheater. Sure he is gaming the Google system now… you can see for yourself by looking at the sites. But in the long run Professional SEO’s like our team and the hundreds of SEO’s we know all frown on the black hatters for being non-professionals. We will keep you posted as to our progress on the new phrase!! Cheers everyone !!

Filed Under: Learn About SEO Tagged With: ,

Winning Google Images

May 28, 2010 By admin

I built a WordPress site for a friend to showcase his bakery products and I am currently the #1 result for “chocolate strawberry cake”. I’m so honored for a number of reasons. Google images reports it has over 3 million images results for the phrase, and my big beautiful Nikon picture is on the top of that very big, and mostly delicious looking pile of cakes.

How Did I Win the Chocolate Strawberry Cake Popularity Contest in Google Images?

  1. Well, first, I took quality photos with a camera that might be considered an entry level professional rig – the Nikon D-60. I also bought 3 Nikon lenses and a professional grade Nikon flash unit. So I got started with about $2,000 worth of photography gear.
  2. Next, I made the picture look as beautiful as I could using PhotoShop CS3. I’ve actually been using Photoshop professionally for more than 15 years and it’s too much fun to call it part of my work.
  3. I put several sizes of the picture on the website with the largest being about 1 MB in total size and 2500 pixels wide. Wow, that’s a lot of high resolution cake.
  4. I got the site ranking well and garnered an overall PR2 for the homepage which helps me to get interior pages some home made link juice by linking right from my own homepage.
  5. Eventually the picture got really popular and the website for the last 4 months has done nearly 10 GB (Wow that’s Ten Giga Bytes) of bandwidth a month. For a bakery that’s through the roof. I have Google Analytics installed on the site so they do know how popular the site is. I don’t know if that is factored into the reason they put my picture at a #1 position but I would hope so. This is one of the Holy Grail questions in SEO and I need to get to the bottom of it. Did Google actually apply the popularity it can grasp from Google Analytics to help rank this photo at #1? I would love to know and I will let you know if I find out.

So my advice to you if you are looking for a #1 picture in Google images is “don’t try to game the system”. Just walk the walk. Is that the “Cake Walk?”

Filed Under: Learn About SEO Tagged With:

Web Design Consultant

May 24, 2010 By admin

Web Design WorkPlace is the #1 “Web Design Consultant” on Yahoo. Here is the photographic proof. We are very proud to achieve this milestone achievement.

After more than 9 years as a full time Web Design Consultant to get the #1 position in the natural results on Yahoo for the phrase is very gratifying. We are going into a redesign phase during the next week and this will stoke our furnace moving forward.

We are Web Design Consultants, but we are also SEO Search Engine Optimization Experts as well. Can you be #1 for a category on Yahoo where they report 500 MILLION results without being an SEO expert? No way – no how.

Sometimes being #1 on Yahoo or Google is short lived. We are going to enjoy it while it lasts though. There is a never ending battle to be the king of the hill and in SEO to be on the top of a hugely competitive phrase like this makes us the targets of thousands of other I.T. firms. Honestly we don’t care that much because our focus is working for the best customers in the world providing the best web designs in the business. Whether it’s WordPress web design or HTML.

Web Design Consultants have more fun.

Web Design Workplace has always been just a bunch of consultants who have worked together for years. We all worked together for one company or another and as independent consultants now, we work on each other’s projects as requested or needed. Do we have more fun now – you betcha. Working for a big box company has some advantages and some big disadvantages. For one thing, as a group of world class consultants, we never ever have to lay down a corporate lie to a customer. It’s not in our play book and never will be. You always get a straight shot with us and we sleep like babies at night knowing we did the best job for our clients that could possibly be done. Down to the last pixel in design and ranking in SEO.

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NJ Web Design Consultant

January 5, 2010 By admin

Why does Google consider me the #1 and the #2 result for the competitive phrase:

NJ web design consultant?

Good question. I’ve been working as a professional SEO since 2001 to be able to tell you the answer to that question. Even better, I can tell you how we could get YOUR business listed at a #1 position on the search engines for competitive phrases.

First of all, if you are talking with a so called “web design consultant” and she or he guarantees you a #1 Google ranking, thank them for their time and steer them towards your competitor. They are lying and they are unethical. I see this sort of thing all the time unfortunately. A prospect will tell me they are going with a competitor because they guaranteed them a #1 Google ranking in the contract. Wow. That’s totally negligent and morally wrong to guarantee a Google #1 ranking in writing. Companies and individuals that do that are scam artists and there are lots of them out there – beware. None of those people owns Google. And if they have a secret method that will trick and manipulate Google to making your site #1 then I can guarantee you that the trick won’t last long. Google has a team of engineers that look for what we call “black hat” or manipulative techniques. In the long run it could be bad for your ranking health to be involved in these bad practices.

I got to be the #1 and the #2 ranking on Google for the phrase “NJ web design consultant” because of more than 200 reasons that make up “the Algorithm“. First and foremost, my site has been live for a few years so I have a good “aging factor”. Next, I have lots of solid inbound links from relevant authority sites. Third, I have lots and lots of excellent unique content. My site is structurally perfect or close to it and I have all the latest patches and updates. And the list goes on for 200 more reasons that we will get into more on another blog post.

The bottom line is I got to the #1 and the #2 positions for NJ web design consultant due to a lot of careful planning, honest effort, and hard work. Sometimes you may find a bogus listing in a #1 spot in the Google main index but it got there most likely due to an error in the Algorithm. Major ranking errors like that are usually corrected within a week or two. How do we get your site to a Google #1 position? I’ve got the same answers for you: we carefully plan a strategy and we work on the plan using techniques that are recommended by Google in their WebMaster Guidelines.

Filed Under: Learn About SEO Tagged With:
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