Website Design, Search Engine Optimization

A Joomla 2.5 Upgrade with an SEO Perspective

These past months  I have upgraded a number of Joomla 1.5 websites to Joomla 2.5. Some of the upgrades have gone really fast and others not so fast. If you have limited components I have found it goes much quicker, but if you have to upgrade your components and sometimes recreate them then the site can take a lot longer upgrade. It really depends on how extensive the site is.

Along the way I have created a check list of details I need to remember to do. It has saved me a few times. All my upgrades have been done with JUpgrade. It is a wonderful component and I am so grateful for it. This is my checklist and  I hope it assists you as you go through the process. It is not in any specific order but some tasks should be done before others. If you have something to add to this list please do so in the comments. It would be helpful to all of us.

1. Back up the Joomla 1.5 website before doing anything else. I use BlueHost, so I do this through the CPanel. I know there are components that can do this.
2. Create a sitemap of the Joomla 1.5 website. I do this so I can create 301 redirects when the Joomla 2.5 site is complete. Joomla 2.5 creates all new url’s
3. Get the Google Analytics code or any extra code that may be on the site. It does not transfer to the new site and will have to be reinstalled.
4. Meta Tags, Joomla 2.5 has great control over the descriptions and title tags. All meta tags will have to be re-input. Make sure you transfer them from the old site or copy them down. There are components that manage the meta data, but I prefer to use Joomla core.
5. Once I have made all the changes to the Joomla 2.5 site and it is ready to launch I back the site up again (see #1).
6.  The transfer of the files from JUpgrade can be done with an FTP client or through your web hosts File Manager. At first I was using my FTP client and it was taking forever, the server would time out constantly. Now I am going in through CPanel and using File Manager.
7. It may be best just to get rid of your Joomla 1.5 website files, but I am not that brave so I go through my 1.5 files and rename some of the main folders such as administrator, components, modules, plugins and templates. I also remove all the files in the default folder and save them on my local drive. That way when you load the Joomla 2.5 files they will be clean files with only 2.5 information. As you can see I am a bit paranoid and don’t like to delete anything until I know it is working. After you have loaded the Joomla 2.5 site and it is working correctly then you can go in and delete the old file folders that you have renamed
8.  In file manager I create a zip file of the jupgrade folder > and save it on the server. I take the files in the jupgrade folder and “move” them to the default folder. All this is done through the CPanel file manager and it goes quite quickly.
9. Then I pray a lot …
10. Your site should be working correctly. I have been pleasantly surprised how well it can go. You will have to go into the sites control panel and create the pretty url’s and rename the htaccess file on the server. The htaccess file is also where I put the 301 redirects.
    Note about 301 redirects, Joomla 2.5 has a redirect manager but you have to wait for Google to serve up the 404 page. I prefer to redirect the pages before Google gets them.
11. I also edit the robot.txt file, for some reason joomla has images as disallow??!! If you want your images to show up in Google images remove that line. I also remove disallow media.
12. Don’t forget to reinstall your Google Analytics, meta tags and there is really so much more. But I will leave you with this for now.

Lastly, some of my clients understand that the upgrade is necessary and it is. But there have been a few that were not happy about the additional expense. But I guess that is technology.

WordCamp SF 2012

Even though it took up a sacred Saturday, WordCamp San Francisco 2012 was an informative and fun event. The community around WordPress is filled with excitement with so many people gathered in one place that can talk “geek”. I have been attending WordCamps for a number of years now and they continue to amaze. Matt also gave one of the best State of the Word addresses and included his great slides which he attributed to a person that lives in Japan. I have tried to capture the day with my live blog tweeting notes and some pictures. This is my first attempt to integrate pictures on the spot. They were taken with my new Galaxy S III phone, uploaded to DropBox and then inserted into the post. I used WordPress Plugin “Live Blog Entries” to accomplish the tweets / posts. For your information I have not gone back and edited the blog notes.

Additional links of interest:

• Most of the presentation slide decks are available on line and are listed on David Bisset website.
• WPCandy Live Blog – This is the live blogging I strive to attain one day. It was this blog from last year conference, saw how they included images and thought I need to figure that out.

08.48

It looks like each session is 15 minutes long #wcsf. That could be a good thing.

09.04

10 Things to make your WordPress Website Faster with @chriscoyier #wcsf

09.09

Steve Souders is the web performance guy. #wcsf 80% of the time it takes a site to load is front end stuff 20% backend

09.12

#1 turn on http compression #wcsf GZip gzipwtf.com

09.15

go  to .htaccess file and add Gzip compression #wcsf WordPress Yoast SEO plugin also has it

09.16

2. Cache stuff #wcsf  server cache W3 total cache plugin

09.19

3. losslessly your images #wcsf

09.20

4. combine css and js files #wcsf

09.28

The cool Sheri Bigelow #wcsf Hidden Gens: Little known Facts about publishing with wordpress

09.32

wordpress is getting faster #wcsf comment moderation, upgrades post-slug-only permalinks, WP-Query …

09.33

Keyboard Shortcuts built into WordPress mouse over the editor buttons #wcsf See hot keys

09.37

Comment Shortcut keys for moderating your comments. #wcsf Auto embeds put the video right into the post and it will display now tweets are auto embed. Use the http address for entering the tweet.
You can rearrange your edit window move the widgets around.

09.38

Press This #wcsf Great for interacting with other things on the web and adding content into your site

09.42

Adding pagination into your site <—next page –/> #wcsf

Adding columns to your post for a gallery Use the column code.

Slugs will redirect automatically

Sheri says wordpress is making it easier for you to publish and write.

09.43

Header Images #wcsf adding directly from your media library. Add flexible widths and heights. new in 3.4.1

09.46

Customizer #wcsf do a live preview in the theme appearance to see what a theme redesign will look like before going live.

09.50

@designsimpy Colourlover backgrounds very cool in her presentations. Happy bright and cheery

09.51

That last post should have been @designsimply #wcsf color backgrounds check them out

09.56

Up next is BBPress which is forum plugin for WordPress, I really like #wcsf

10.01

John James Jacoby the master of bbPress. #wcsf  bbPress and BuddyPress can go together like peas in a pod

10.15

there is a converter for bbPress 1.0 to 2.0 #wcsf that is huge!  You should be able to covert your data over easily.

10.16

Turnkey way to start a community use bbPress before BuddyPress. #wcsf

10.27

Making Plugins Faster #wcsf only load the code you need,  run the code ou need and hook the actions

10.29

Use Core for plugins #wcsf  Wordpress is Feature rich, fast, compatible and maintained

10.31

Now we are getting geeky talking about benchmarking #wcsf running from command lines …

10.34

#wcsf XD Bug output for profiling something shows how long things have taken nice visuals

10.35

P3 plugin that shows how long your plugins are taking.#wcsf Oh boy this is a developer talk but good for all to know.

10.37

Matt Mullenweg is up next for State of the Word 11:00. He usually has good slides #wcsf

10.39

Obviously with all the media & size of websites speed is an issue #wcsf slides at http://x.co/wcsf12 Kurt Payne

11.01

State of the Word with @photomatt #wcsf

11.05

with Matt Mullenweg @photomatt

11.07

#wcsf New ability for people to put headers in the plugins in wordpress.org

11.09

Also ability to favorite plugins and later download. in WordPress.org #wcsf

11.12

Bringing plugins and themes to international communities #wcsf is the future

11.13

The customizer editing your blog while looking at it. Big change in WordPress #wcsf

11.15

What is next in WordPress  3.5 #wcsf the 2012 theme. Full retina support,

11.17

Upload multiple images simultaneously. 3.5 #wcsf

11.17

wordpress 3.5 will be available on 12/5. They will be on time. #wcsf

11.18

New is “Get Involved” button  the wordpress collaboration space will be within WP dashboard. #wcsf

11.20

Applause for many of the people that have gotten involved with WordPress. #wcsf From all over the world. Open Source opportunity

11.22

#wcsf Parity between .com and .org, introduced JetPack. Lot more features coming to it.

11.24

wordpress.com, Mobile app Blogs | Follow #wcsf

11.26

Posting to tablets is the future and how we interact with the web #wcsf Developing for mobile platform

11.27

Web developers should start getting more involved with mobile #wcsf That may be a hint for me.

11.30

2012 WordPress Survey #wcsf 66% using wordpress as a CMS. Now they have more than just a blog.

11.33

WordPress on average small biz website cost is 00. Large business enterprise 00 #wcsf

11.39

WordPress has gone from Blog > CMS next is becoming an APP engine #wcsf

11.40

16.7% of top websites using WordPress up from 14% last year #wcsf

11.41

WordPress Challenges: Media, galleries, tagging, zooming #wcsf

11.42

WordPress Challenge: More timely releases #wcsf Like to have 3 releases a year.

11.44

WordPress Challenge: UI do a lot more testing. #wcsf How do people use the dashboard? Watch more reg. users using the site.

11.45

WordPress Challenge: Community Summit, bringing everyone together, particularly from international. Smart Iteration, Updates, Updates.

11.47

WordPress Challenge: Updates, it just all works. Much like Chrome.

11.48

One click upgrades from web hosts  will automatically upgrade WordPress if you opt in. #wcsf

11.51

This is the moon shot, real time editing. #wcsf Much like on Google Docs. Now big Applause State of Word ended.

12.02

VaultPress will help your WordPress site from getting hacked through backups. #wcsf

12.06

ooooh you can not control the Q & A’s. #wcsf

13.32

Back from a great Lunch at #wcsf first afternoon session Custom Post Type Relationships #wordpress

13.42

@randyhoyt works at treehouse presenting about relating Custom Post types with custom fields (wp_postmeta table)

Plugins that can do this are Plugin Pods and post to Posts 2 Posts plugin

Parent / Child relationship (post_parent column) – subordinate post type

WooCommerce creates separate variations for products.

13.52

Created a plugin “Subordinate post type helpers” to help create these post types. #wcsf  Slides at randyhoyt.com/wcsf
the code is at github.com/randyhoyt/subpost

14.09

Next Session #wcsf Extendable Extensions w/ Michael Fields is a theme wrangle for Automattic
Plugin – wp core contributions widget , imports the code into your site for you to use and customize.

Themes:
Portfolio Press by Devin Price, custom post type

• Registered in theme
• moved into a plugin
• users can now switch to new themes
• other themes can now add support

“Looking at plugins and themes as words that can form sentences”

The integration and separation at the same time. Plugins and themes work together. Playing well on the WordPress playground.

 

 

14.31

Next Zen of WordPress Development with Daniel Bachhuber from Portlandia (: #wcsf

14.40

Striving for elegant solutions. #wcsf Zen comes in when you think about the API fully

• Be intimately aware of your environment
• Know thy codebase, know the rules and how it opperates
  core files: formatting.php , post.php, rewrite.php, query.php, pluggable.php
• Master the tools of the trade
  developer plugin: developed by automattic
  Debug Bar Cron – scheduled cron events
  User Switching
  Rewrite Rules Inspector – useful for debugging
• Best practices are healthy ingredient for your code
• Prefix everything
• Commit wisely
• Focus on choosing the proper hooks for your APIs

14.57

The State of Themes with @RyanImel from WPCandy Where we have come and where we are going with themes

At wordpress there is a  theme review team WPTRT.

14.59

Premium Themes are themes you can buy also known at commercial themes. #wcsf Started with magazine style themes.

15.02

Customising your themes with Customizer in WordPress, Options Framework Plugin #wcsf

15.33

Next #wcsf session is  The Business of Code with adii pienaar co-founder of my favorite WooThemes.

15.47

Building a business around WordPress 8 lessons from @adii
Fusion between Entrepreneurship and development

• Learn to speak “geek”, learning to speak to these people
• Open – source economics, There’s no such thing as fast money or making easy money with WordPress
• Only clean code scales. Feature Bloat = live young, die hard.
  just adding features is not the way to go.
• Users pay for support and service. Technology and code are bonuses . Great technology and great code and supporting all of this. woo themes is great with support and service.
• Understand the ecosystem. The “community” is small in comparison. The WP ecosystem is larger and very diverse.
• Freemium is a distribution channel only. You need a real revenue model. Releasing a free theme is great but does not make us money. Converting free to paying is not a business model.
• Core Contributions are Special. Making core contributions is #warmfuzzies.
• Be a good ambassador. Stick to native code and UI Conventions. As a designer stick to doing things as natively as possible.

15.56

Theme Foundry developed the 2012 theme coming out with WordPress 3.5 #wcsf

16.10

How to design a wordpress default theme #wcsf

• Sketch first and share ideas
• Look at the work that has been done before.
• Make it look like a website tool or CMS not a blog
• Use a grid for designing, consistency and rhythm
• Use few colors and texture.
• Use the theme customizer, build in support
• Make sure the theme looks good on all devices
• Use percentage base widths. So that your design will scale.
• Use the rem (root em) unit. Set one value at the top of your style sheet and reference it throughout your theme. Will also need to use a pixel fall back
• Use CSS3 gradients instead of images
• Use Web fonts -
• Pre Processing, Sass is for style sheets. Free open source tool called Forge
• Get help from the wordpress community

twentytwelvedemo.wordpress.com – link to check out demo of the theme

16.46

Designing for the future web. #wcsf Mobile devices will surpass desktop by 2015. The mobile web will become the majority

16.48

The mobile web is what we should be designing for. #wcsf It is not an after thought. Ultimately need to design for our content.
starting to take a mobile first approach.
Flexible grids / media and images are adaptive.
Retina is changing everything. Another thing we cannot avoid anymore.

16.50

Retina Display is changing everything and adding a lot more pixels to a tiny screen mobile  #wcsf

16.52

A good ratio of Speed vs. Awesomeness. 2G is the new dial up. #wcsf

17.03

OMG now we need to think about designing for retina display. #wcsf  How do your images look on retina … ?
Retina retina.js, plugin WP Retina 2x
Retinafy your websites & apps by Thomas Fuchs an ebook #wcsf

17.25

“How to Building an Audience as a Writer” Leo Babauta is a writer. #wcsf Started blog zenhabits.net. In one year built up to 26,000 readers.

17.26

Leo has no slides. First presenter without slides. Kind of nice. #wcsf

17.40

“Most stuff you read on line for bloggers and writers is mostly bullshit” #wcsf

• mountain of bullshit – don’t need to be in big city to do well. Basically just wrote.
• As a writer you don’t need to learn marketing, learn how to serve your audience. Create something so amazing people will do your marketing for you. People forwarded it for you.
• popups they are annoying and disrespectful to the reader. What you want them to read is your content.
• Mailing list – does not have one. Doesn’t believe in SEO
• Social media does not do it
• Ads, you don’t need them.
• Put your readers first and great content. Ask why would a reader want to come to my site.
• Great content is content that solves the readers problem. Figure out how to solve their problem.
• Figure out what your differences are. People are craving simplicity. What sets you apart from everyone else
• Monetize your content through ebooks, courses …

17.48

closing speaker today Pete Davies How to run a small country…using the P2 theme #wcsf

18.00

http://p2theme.com/ P2 theme, check it out download it. Great for team work and collaboration. #wcsf

18.01

closing remarks “the end” #wcsf

GaugeCon started on Thursday March 8, 2012. This is their second conference held in San Francisco, CA. They always time it after the eMetrics Conference, which I understand is fabulous. The event kicked off  with a fabulous keynote speaker, Dan Siroker the founder of Optimizely which I will get into later. What is most impressive is his past experience as a product manager at Google, then leaving Google to be the Director of Analytics for the 2008 Obama presidential campaign.

His keynote speech was Beat the Back Button: How to Optimize for Engagement

The focus was on testing different landing pages he went through a few examples and shared lessons he has learned;

• Lesson #1 Define quantifiable success metrics
  One place to start – visitors flow identify the bottle necks in your funnels online
• Lesson #2 Less is more reduce choices you offer online
  Less boxes more people will sign up, example as simple as to  removed  the confirm email box
• Lesson #3 Words Matter – Focus on your call to action
  Donate button experiment
  Know what your viewers are looking for and use those words as your call to action
  Changing  “submit” wording to what they are actually doing can make a big difference in engagement
• Lesson #4 – Fail Fast, meaning if you are failing do it quickly make changes and move on
• Lesson #5 Start today – He discussed the following products to help with this processry these products
• Website Optimizer
• Ominture Test and Target
• Optimizely.com can change the website for testing different versions
  Needless to say I was wowed by Optimizely and it takes a lot to wow me. But the drag and drop features and the perceived simplicity of making changes was impressive. I would definitely take a good look at his product.

Slides located at: bit.ly/optimizelybestpractices

Schema.org, Rel=Author & Meta Tagging Best Practices (#smx #23C)

Moderator: Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land (@vanessafox)

Speakers:
Dennis Goedegebuure, VP Internet Marketing, Geeknet Inc (@TheNextCorner)
AJ Kohn, Owner, Blind Five Year Old (@ajkohn)
Navneet Virk, Director, Optimization, Roundarch Inc.

Disclaimer these are my unedited notes from SMX West 2012 Conference in San Jose, CA

schema.org SMX Panel

Navneet Virk -Semantic markup and what it means from an SEO prospective

Semantics is the study of meaning and the way to apply meaning on the web. What gets ignored is, is this content meaning full for a machine? What is apparent to us may not be apparent to the search engines.

Recently people have started taking a small portion of their data and make it semantic with semantic markup.

• HTML 5 makes it easy for people to start annotate and add additional content.
• need for natural language driven search.
• Commercial benefits adopted by Search Engines

Rich snippets taking good rich information and put it on the search results pages.

Also to get a lot more information about the data

you can create your own semantic categories.

schema.org – use their data

If you are not doing semantic you need to because you will be left behind.

AJ Kohn – his presentation will be the least technical

Why you should use rel=”author”

• Delivers higher click thru rates
• More exposure
• It is social it is connected to Google +
• Valuable personal branding tool and protect from plagerism

The Beginning: XFN – is a simple way to represent human relationships in hyperlinks

Rel author was introduced in 2011, uses html5 attribute and uses the XFN attribute. The difference it uses a central framework, Google+

It has a relationship between your G+ profile and your webpage

Verifying authorship, put on every post. You can do one or all of these

• Name and email
• G+ badge
• ?rel=author parameter
• Three link monte
• Check it with the Rich Snippets authoring tool
  Rel publisher is to confirm Google+ pages

schema.org

you can track it on Webmaster tools under Author Stats

Where is this all going or leading us to?
Tracking and engaging across the internet
Author Rank – who you are and how people are sharing with you and what people are saying. Author Rank.. Fuse web of people with web of documents.

Dennis Goedegebuure

How you can be more creative with your profiles?

Everyone that has rel=”author” has one and shows a rich snippet

rich snippet with books – showing product, mark up your book page

Q&A

This is used more for enhancing display than as a ranking tool

Rel author should never be used for companies, individual posts by people

Rel publisher is used for companies

Brand Google Plus page connected by Rel publisher
Each individual Author will need there own Google + profile

It pulls in your Google+ profile picture for the rich snippet

Cause your Rich snippet not to show up – set the expire date on the pages in the past. Check your expire headers.

Micro formats and meta data: Micro data / HTML5 is the way to go, stick with the schema.org . One set of tags and implement that. You should pick one or the other rel author or rel publisher. Small site use what you can do.
Not everything is showing up now.

The tool does not always work for testing your code, look at the code. There are schema validators.

Photos – flickr does allow you to put in html in comment section

Have you tested using pictures of attractive people – LOL audience laughed …

You can support multiple authors on a site but not multiple authors on a post (blog)
on the blog every author should have a profile page. Email can confirm you as the author on a post

@yoyoseo on twitter How long does it take rel=author to show up? days, weeks, months, never – We don’t know.

Personal and professional separate no one has resolved this issue.

All images on Google+ go through the safe search filter.

You can sever author-ship once someone leaves.

Product review snippets – may take about a week to show and they may never show up. There could be other issues why it is not showing up.

Easily tag old information – it is manual , it is a one time implementation

Personal and company Google+ page, new profiles no one knows if a new profile takes longer to show up

SEO For Google+ & Google Search (#smx #22A)

Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land (@dannysullivan)
Speakers:
Sean Carlos, CEO, Antezeta Web Marketing (@seancarlos)
Janet Driscoll Miller, President and CEO, Search Mojo (@janetdmiller)
Daniel Dulitz, Product Manager, Google (@dulitz)
Monica Wright, Social Media Editor, Search Engine Land and Marketing Land (@monicawright)

SMX Google + Panel

Disclaimer these are my unedited notes from SMX West 2012 Conference in San Jose, CA.

My comments: I would say that  Google+ has really been the buzz at the conference. Not only as the new kid for social media but how it is effecting search results on Google. In this session I hope to find out how to use Google+. As business people we only have so much time my goal is to learn how to streamline this process and use it wisely.

Danny Sullivan: There was a Wall Street Article on how it was not a success. Nothing in the article on how it works for ranking. Google+ is all over the search ranking pages

Daniel Dulitz, @dulitz Google, Group Product Manager is the first speaker:

The goals

• Surface the best content without SEO
• Google uses hundreds of quality signal
• You can ignore Google+ if you’re hoping to do well with Google Search. There are opportunities and it may be worth it for you.

What has changed in Google rankings is some of the signals +1 for content and who you are following

Rich snippets that make your content stand out and displays your reputation

Identity and reputation – this is one of the keys with Google+

Old days it was links coming into your web page

Now your can add:

Rel=Author

Rel=publisher

1. What is your page about
2. Rich Snippets
3. Tie it together buy who is interested in it and who wrote it.
4. Use these relationships to see who is interested in them.

The search results now:

• Show annotations from your circles
• Show the site’s G+ Page

Before Google+ Who are your strong ties Friend and Fan / Post and Discuss / Read Friends post

Now with Google+ adds a new higher intimacy through hangouts

Next speaker Sean Carlos :

Some call it an invasion of search results by Google+

Google Plus – Pages for businesses.

I can limit my search now to just google plus pages +thenyoursearch

Google Direct Connect. Need to cross link your Google+ page to the website
You do not need Google+ badge

Large snippet or result in search results goes to the Google + page
Then you will occupy more space on the search page.

People: Now profiles are coming from Google+. When you are logged into Google
Google profiles you can opt out of indexing
About tab link to old presence on the web

Authorship Attribution: Links to Author’s  G+Posts

Related People & Pages from Google+ when you do a search and is moving the paid ads down. Also gives Google+ information

Promote your employees or your products
Professional Services is also represented ie realtor

+1′d – number of people that have

Sharing – if we share something on Google+ it will show up on the search results

Do we want to promote Google+ or do we want to promote our business. You can do this with how you engage on Google+

Google.com for searches in English – that is the only place you can see this.

Download his slides they were good.

Janet Driscoll Miller discussing the technical side

Three parts of Google+
Direct Connect: The way to connect all things about your brands

What is the adoption rate: 43% don’t have a G+ page of Fortune 100 only 2% have direct connect enabled

Google+ Badge:

Does help enable Direct connect can help to put you in circles

Helps enable rel=author

3% of Fortune 100 have the badge

to get a badge go to Google Developers

There is a rich snippet testing tool to test your badge and how it will look in search

+1 Buttons: Similar to the like button on FB
Two types +1 for brand and +1 for content – the buttons look different
think about how you place it on the page.
11% of sites have the +1 of fortune 100

Caution on addthis button: Add this does not have the +1 until later you may need to update your code.

Webmaster Tools: the data is only there for 30 days.

Analytics: only on the new GA, no email option for the new GA

Monica Wright – Google+ Why bother? @monicawright

Day to Day management of all of this:

Referral traffic has increase with Google +

Posting links on Google+ should have UTM tracking parameters such as bit.ly.

Really focused on tagging., then you show up in their notifications
Hashtags also good

Hangouts only 10 people at a time. Great tool for a limited audience, or an internal meeting.

Organize Circles:
Have them for brands, commenters, newbies, researchers, loyalist …
Different ways to slice and dice them. They are not automated

Ripples as a tool: To see what is going on and who links to what. Not sure what to do with the information yet.

Things to takeaway:

• ** shortened links
• **tags
• **hashtags
• **tag people and other brands

Q&A:

Business  page cannot tag a person – this is a problem with google + for users

Share what you share on Google+ on FB this is not a problem or duplicate content.
There is an audience on Google+

Google+ wants increased intimacy therefore there in no automation. They are looking at this internally.

Placement of the buttons on your page: there is no great place you have to experiment.  (we love those answers)

My notes from the SMX session: These notes are not edited – raw … notes
A Hitchhiker’s Guide To Surviving SEO Changes (#smx #14B)

Moderator: Elisabeth Osmeloski, Managing Editor, Search Engine Land (@elisabethos)
Speakers:

Kerry Dean, Chief Traffic Officer, PMG (Performance Media Group) (@kerrydean)
Michael Martinez, Owner, SEO Theory (@seo_theory)
Mark Munroe, Senior Director, SEO, Reply!, Inc (@markemunroe)
Marshall Simmonds, Founder and CEO, Define Media Group, Inc.

Surviving SEO Changes Presentation at SMX West 2012

Disclaimer these are my unedited notes from SMX West 2012 Conference in San Jose, CA.

 Mark Munroe is first from reply.com

How to protect yourself from algorithm changes.

Panda goal was to:

• closing link farms
• link begging, buying and bartering
• low quality content

SEO’s need to control the experience starting on the SERP

• Your information needs to be relevant to the page and above the fold of the page
• Freshness
• quality content
• site performance
• Lots of pages with long tail search
• Blended search – integrated relevant content from additional indices

Panda works at a site level not at a page level

Kerry Dean, PMG @kerrydean

Surviving SEO changes, make sure your site has the following

• Tagging
• Navigation: Top Nav and Breadcrumbs, Footer, Sidebar and contextual
• IA: Make your products easy to find
• Crawling:
• Sitemaps keep them updated

Google Analytics is free, add Statcounter for free this is another one

• Google Analytics use the filters
• Track everything

Fresh content:

• Editorial calendars – media and PR stuff
• Be unique do your best – be unique with your product descriptions. Add descriptions to your categories
• Dust off your blog and post a lot

Every visitor is telling you something about your site by what they do on your site. – From GA

• If you have a blog set up REL-Author – very important
• AuthorRank / AgentRank – know what these are
• Start getting added into circles this will add traffic to your site. Friends search results will show up.
• Have social sharing buttons, test where they work best for you they have potential to drive traffic to your site. These things  are also effecting rankings by popularity.
• Mobile ecommerce. Can people buy your products on the phone.
• Responsive web design – great for mobile, you don’t have to build a separate site
• Really good content is important
• Don’t be stupid about paid links
• Social Media – Use all the social media sites got on them and be active. Have someone manage it.
• Monitor referral traffic- What referral domains are giving you a return and act there.
• Use Google + – Google is telling us to do this.

Marshall Simmonds -

Googles  freshness update came out in 2011

• Now search results is showing timeliness. Google wants to see timely updates. Blog and blog more often and find a unique angle. When did you update last?
  +1 is important too.
• Do an SEO audit of sites, find things that are wrong.. No index content that is not performing. Syndicating content and are you doing it right. Syndication strategy. Page speed is important
• Site maps need to be done. Your one way to communicate with Google. This will increase traffic from implementing a site map.
• Video – YouTube is the one way in. 84% of video listings are from YouTube. Learn how to optimize them for the search engines.
• Google stand out tag – Gnews Standout Tag.
  Goes in the head tag. Syntax <linkrel=”stamdout …
• Rel=Author puts your face on the listing in the SERPS
• Webmaster tools – look at internal links pages in the report
• On Open Site Explorer, check what your top pages are.

Q&A:

Overall do you think Panda algo has improved search results – everyone on the panel said yes.
The review category really got trashed.
Michael Martinez: Panda recoveries, very few people have recovered from Panda
You can find a lot of data how people have recovered from Panda – search from them.
Mark Munroe: Some have recovered through a re-design
Moderator: Thinks that is a common answer is with a re-design

Johah in the audience: You have to move poorly performing content. The rest of the site starts to get healthier. Look at engagement tag under user behavior on GA (Google Analytics)

Should we constantly chase the algorithm?
Michael Martinez: Guest blogger sites will start to get downloaded. You need to trust the knowledge.
Go down Google’s list of what makes a good or bad site after the Panda update.
Google has changed their guidelines quite a bit lately and you should follow the webmaster guidelines staying on top of these changes.

Pulling out low level pages -
Pull out pages that have no traffic. No index No follow the pages. Ask yourself are these pages adding value?

Tweet from @CatOrosco:
Play to the guidelines, don’t chase the algorithm. Stay up to date, test, be strategic, remove poor quality #smx #14B. Good reminders