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Avoid Cookie Cutter Sites

By Just A Web Company Staff | Published April 26, 2013
Avoid Cookie Cutter Websites

Avoid Low Quality Sites

Low quality can mean different things to different people. When we talk about low quality websites, we are specifically discussing the areas of back end code and cookie cutter websites. There are of course other areas which can deem a site low quality, but these two areas rank high in terms of effects in search engine results, and more importantly in corporate brand perception.

Corporate Branding and Trust

There are thousands of sites that offer “free templates” or “low cost” templates that many people choose to use on their websites. On the surface, this appears to be an excellent choice from a cost perspective. The problem is these website templates are not unique to one particular company or brand, and over time you run into many sites that look alike. We refer to this as the “cookie cutter” technique. If your site is not distinguishable at first glance, you have lost your opportunity for branding impression.

Many web developers who are starting out, or come from other areas such as a marketing background with little to no technical expertise will advocate the use of these free templates. They will swap out logos with your company brand, and change some header and footer colors, but in the end, the final website still comes across as a cookie cutter website that was based off of a free or low cost template.

Low Quality Code

A very important, but often over looked issue with free template based websites is low quality code. While the code that drives a website is often the furthest thing from a customers mind, it is actually one of the most important parts of a successful website. You can have the most beautiful website in the world, but if the code used to drive that website is not using the latest standards, chances are you are loosing out on valuable search engine ratings, causing un-pleasant user experiences for certain types of vistors, and in the big picture, you are de-valuing your brand, company, or service.

Importance of validating.

W3C HTML5 Validator

One of the quickest ways to determine the code quality behind your website is to use the W3C validator. This tool allows you to enter your website address and click the check button, and receive almost instant results of your websites code errors. Keep in mind this tool is only checking the home page of your website. To check the other pages you need to enter each unique page address one at a time.

At the top of the results page you will see something titled DOCTYPE. If the result is anything other then HTML5 then you are loosing out on search engine ratings, and run the risk of having a site that is not accessible to certain visitors. If your website was created within the last 3-4 years then this should not be an issue, this will mostly pertain to older websites.

The next thing to look at is the errors, and chances are you will see errors being reported. Each one of these errors results in missed index opportunities for your website. The more important factor is certain viewers will not be able to view your website as intended depending on the device they are using at the time.

Ask Questions

When choosing a web developer for your web project it is important to ask these questions.

  • Can you write your own HTML5, and CSS3 Code?
  • Do you use free templates or create your own from scratch?
  • Do you outsource your web development work?
  • Do you validate your work in the W3C Validator?

This list is just a sampling of a much bigger picture, but is a quick way of weeding out who should not be working on your web project.

Remember when choosing a web development company to work on your project, do your research, and definitely do not go with the lowest price, it will cost you more in the long run.

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SEO – TRUTH, MYTH, and LIES – PART 10

By Just A Web Company Staff | Published April 9, 2013
SEO Do's and Don'ts

Wrapping Up

Well, here we are – the last our 10 part series on SEO – Truth, Myth, and Lies. We are going to take the best elements of the last 10 sections and create an action plan for your SEO efforts in 2013.

The Truth – the DO LIST

  • Make sure your site has something UNIQUE to offer
  • Update your website regularly with fresh original content
  • Write content for your AUDIENCE
  • Create Backlinks NATURALLY
  • Make sure your website passes validation tests: W3C Validator
  • Have a PROFESSIONAL WEB DEVELOPER create your website
  • Separate Content from Markup
  • Use Keywords in Backlinks – VERY SPARINGLY
  • Use RESPONSIVE web design
  • Use Social Media to engage your audience and promote your brand

The Myths – Things that could cause SEO issues

  • Using Keywords in all of your backlinks
  • Using EMD – Exact Match Domains
  • Overuse of WordPress Categories
  • Not using semantic Markup in blog posts
  • Using Free – or low cost WordPress or other CMS templates
  • Using Create Your Own Website software such as Weebly, Website Tonight, or other similar services
  • Using Keywords in all of your headings
  • Creating content for the search engines
  • Participating in Link Building Services
  • Not using latest standards such as HTML5, and Responsive web design
  • Slow – Outdated websites

The Lie or LIES

  • Content is King – it is not – it is simply ONE PART of successful SEO
  • I can create my website myself – This usually leads to sites having to be re-built later on
  • My SEO guy only does SEO – Make sure your SEO guy has extensive technical knowledge
  • Exact Match Domains work – Google’s Matt Cutts has stated these actually will cause loss of page rank
  • I can create my website in WordPress – WordPress is a CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM – not a website creation system.
  • I can post my own blogs – yes you can – but you need to make sure you use proper HTML markup or you are missing out on rankings
  • My site looks good – I dont care about semantics, markup – etc. The search engines do care about these things, and this will cost HUGE SEO points

By now you should have a clear picture of some do’s and dont’s of SEO. SEO and marketing boil down to a few simple principles. Make sure you have something of quality to offer – either content, news, products, services etc. If you don’t have something unique, no amount of SEO is going to change that. Write your content for your audience, don’t take shortcuts, follow best practices, and make sure you are using the latest technologies.

One of the most important things when seeking out an SEO company to handel your marketing needs, is to make sure your SEO person undertands proper coding techniques, and knows how to create websites writing their own code – not just using free WordPress templates and doing some basic backend configuration. If they do not undertand how to create websites by writing code you are 100% without a doubt loosing out on over 50% of your potential SEO rankings.

As always – with any sort of marketing, service, etc – You Get What You Pay For.

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SEO – TRUTH, MYTH, and LIES – PART 9

By Just A Web Company Staff | Published April 8, 2013
Website Performance Matters

If you have been reading ANY of our blog posts, you will realize we are passionate about Semantics and proper coding techniques when creating websites. Besides being the professional thing to do, we believe it carry’s a HUGE impact on SEO.

How does site speed effect SEO? Amazon stated in their internal testing that for every 100 milliseconds of load time, that sales decreased by 1 percent. The average user expects a load time of 2 seconds, and after three seconds site visitors leave.

SEO is measured not just by your site showing up on a search results page, but the ability for visitors to navigate from page to page on your website in a concise and logical manner, and a timely manner. The biggest culprit of slow sites are sites that are not semantically correct, which means sites are using outdated, bloated, and mal-formed code.

What is the cause of bad code? We believe it is primarily from two sources, one from so called “web developers” that have to use automated software to create websites, and second from most of the “free templates” you see floating around on the internet. If your web company, or web person can’t dig in and write code from scratch, they are not professionals, and chances are even though you may have a “decent” looking website, it will not perform up to standards.

The Truth

Speed Matters – plain and simple. We live in a world of instant gratification, and if visitors have to wait for content to load, they will leave and find another site.

The Myth

We can save you money by using a free or low cost WordPress template. This is probably the single worst thing you can do in regards to your websites performance and SEO performance ratings. We won’t say that ALL of the WordPress templates floating around on the exchange websites are not up to standards, but we feel comfortable stating that over 90% of them would fail validation checks, which ultimately effects your bottom line.

Remember the old rule – you get what you pay for.

The Lie

Why would I pay for someone to develop my website, I can go and use a free service online to do it myself. Well this isn’t a lie, you can, but it will not perform well, it will not SEO well, and ultimately if you rely on that website for your marketing needs it will not succeed.

The websites from the free or low cost create your own website templates have value, but they are best suited for a personal blog, or for a sports legue, or some other purpose beisdes business.

The following video covers a few items from Google’s Matt Cutts, in regards to SEO. This video touches a bit on site speed, and then a few other topics.

Tomorrow we will wrap up our 10 part SEO serires with look back over the past 9 days, and outline the steps to take for a successful SEO campaign.

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SEO – TRUTH, MYTH, and LIES – PART 8

By Just A Web Company Staff | Published April 4, 2013
SEO Myths

Links – Part 2

Okay, yes – we have talked about links in this series already, but due to the nature of the confusion around the topic of links we feel the need to expand on this a bit more.

A local company who is a competitor of ours recently posted a blog in regards to the Penguin update. During their post they asserted that the Penguin update does not target good links like those found on StumbleUpon.

The Truth

Links that are placed on sites such as StumbleUpon, Digg, Facebook, etc all use what is called a “nofollow” attribute. It looks like something like this <a href=”http://www.example.com/” rel=”nofollow”>Link text</a>. What this means is the search engines do not provide any weight whatsoever to these links, they are simply ignored.

This however does not mean that sites like StumbleUpon are a waste of your resources. They provide many benefits, the most of which is exposure. Even though the search engines discard the links from these sites, visitors to these social networking sites still see your site and can provide valuable traffic to your website.

The Myth

The same company mentioned above, went on in their same blog post and stated that bad links (i.e. ones that were paid for) could run the risk of being detrimental to an entire website.

Here is a video from Google’s Matt Cutts – Head of Spam at Google on this very subject- Listen in this short video as he directly contradicts what other SEO companies are trying to sell their clients.

The Lie

Don’t exchange links. This is simply not true. What is true is you should only exchange links sparingly. Don’t over due it. However, if you have quality content, and you feel your visitors would benefit from heading over to another website, and that websites feels the same about your website, there is nothing wrong with exchanging a link or two.

Let’s see what Google’s Matt Cutts had to say on the subject.

Q: People are all about links but then there’s a concern about linking to bad neighborhoods. How do you identify bad neighborhoods? Should you nofollow them or stay away totally?

Matt: Use your gut. Trading links is natural and it’s natural to have reciprocal links. At some level, natural reciprocal links happen, but if you do it way too often, it looks artificial. My advice is to go with your gut and if you’re worried, you can use nofollow.

There are two lessons to take away from this post. One – There are a lot of companies who claim to be SEO experts, the sad truth is, most of them are not. If your SEO company does not take the time to undertand the technologies and best practices, in the long run they will do more harm then good.

The second lesson is what we have been saying all through this series. Write your content for your site visitors, not the search engines. If you market your website honestly, effectively, and with the help of true professionals, you cannot go wrong.

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SEO – TRUTH, MYTH, and LIES – PART 7

By Just A Web Company Staff | Published April 3, 2013
Mobile SEO

Mobile Optimization and SEO

What exactly is mobile SEO and how does it differ from traditional SEO efforts? Let’s tackle the easy part first. From a traditional SEO standpoint, everything remains the same. For both mobile and traditional SEO campaigns, you need to have high quality relative content, you need to update your website on a regular basis, offer interactivity, and make sure your site is using Semantic Markup as outlined by the W3C.

So what is different about MOBILE SEO? Mobile SEO is really just a new term that incorporates the best of traditional SEO practices, and takes advantages of the latest industry technologies. In the past Mobile Websites meant you had to have two physically different websites, one for desktop browsers, and one for mobile phones. That meant double the production costs, content to update two sites, and less features for your mobile visitors. It also meant that you had to double your SEO efforts across both sites and in some cases run the risk of duplicate content penalties.

Now with the advent of HTML5, CSS3, and Media Queries, we can take advantage of Responsive Web Design. This means that your website will dynamically change it’s overall look depending on the size of the viewport, regardless of the device; an iPhone, a tablet, or a full sized desktop computer. This is fantastic news for website owners, as you only have one website to maintain, one content stream to update, and only one website to keep up with in regards to regular SEO efforts.

Just A Web Company’s website is fully responsive and HTML5 compliant. A great way to see this in action is to grab the corner of the browser window with your mouse, and drag it horizontally to make the window smaller. You will notice that the content, graphics, navigation bar, etc. are all responsive and make adjustments on the fly in regards to the size of the viewport.

Responsive Web Design is the number one recommended practice by Google. You can read about their recoomendations on mobile development here. You will notice that even Google does realizes that responsive web design while the number one recommended procedure may not fit all cases and does provide alternative instructions on how to handle mobile websites if you have the need for a separate site. The most common reasons for a separate website would be a website that is more of an application serving a specific purpose, as opposed to a common website.

The Truth

Mobile websites are exploding, but they are not really “mobile websites”, they are the same website that responds to the device that is accessing the data.

The Myth

Responsive Web Design

Mobile Specific Content is a MUST. This simply does not exist. There is only content vs. experience. The content remains the same across your website, however the experience may change depending on the size of the viewport. Case in point: Assume your website has a sidebar for navigation, or latest blog posts. A sidebar is appropriate for a large viewport such as a desktop computer, however on an iPhone that same sidebar will need be dropped down below the main content for ease of use. All of the same content and options exists, but the experience slightly differs.

The Lie

Mobile websites are not necessary. As of July 2012 10.5% of all web traffic was generated from a mobile device. Source

The fact of the matter is you cannot control how people access your website, and chances are, they are accessing your site from an iPad, Android Table, of Mobile Smart Phone. Your website needs to be accessible and respond to your viewer. The by-product of having a website that responds to your visitor, means you are using HTML5, CSS3, and semantically correct mark-up, which is half the battle in SEO.

If you are using a website built on outdated technologies such as HTML4, HTML4.01, XHTML, or XHTML1.1, you will need to make some major overhauls to your website before making it responsive. If you have had your website built within the last three years or so, chances are your website was built using standards compliant HTML5 and the time and money to transition to a responsive website will be substantially less.

To see if your website is a contender for being made into a responsive website, go to the W3C Validator and type in your website address. At the top of the results page is a line item titled DOCTYPE. This should say HTML5. Anything other that and chances are you have an outdated website, or one that was built using automated software.

One more test to run on your website to see how search engines view your outline and semantic data is to visit the W3C Semantics Extractor. After you enter your website address, the results page should display a nice hierarchical outline of the webpage you entered.

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SEO – TRUTH, MYTH, and LIES – PART 6

By Just A Web Company Staff | Published April 2, 2013
Link Building

Link Building Services

We wrote about backlinks earlier, but wanted to give this particular subject some more “air time” because of the implications they have to your websites overall health.

Many SEO companies will tell you one of the most important things you can do to gain traction in you search ratings, is to build links. These companies offer “hundreds” or even “thousands” of “High Quality backlinks” from “high PR sites in your niche”. (PR is short for Page Rank). As with many things we have talked about during our series, this was true – at one time, now, this is a sure fire way to loose standings in your search efforts.

First off, we firmly believe that backlinks are not as important as the once were, and that more efforts need to be placed on Semantic Markup, quality content, and Social Media interaction. With that being said, backlinks are still important, what has changed is the way in which their importance is ranked.

The Truth

High Quality Link

You do want to spend time building quality links to your website. One or two well placed links from high ranking trusted sites within your niche are worth gold. These links do not happen over night, cannot be built through “automated software”, or through “link agreements” that a lot of SEO companies seem to offer.

These HIGH QUALITY links are like relationships, they take time to build, and most of them must be done through personal interaction, to the point of reaching to site owners and asking them directly to link to your website.

The Myth

You must build hundreds of backlinks a month to be successful. This is not true. Think about it from this perspective. A brand new website pops up on Monday that deals with cell phone repair. If by wednesday there are 1000 websites linking to that new website, and those website topics range from baby clothes, to auto parts, what does that tell the search engines? That you paid someone to “build links” for the purposes of gaining higher rankings.

Now, lets say a website pops up in January, steadily post articles, has a few links on other websites that occurred naturally, and then in July that website wrote an article on how to repair your cracked iPhone for free, and CNET picked that up and linked to the site. That one link would carry more weight, then 10,000 links built with a service.

The Lie

You must place as many links as you can using keyword anchor text in your links. Again, this USED to be true, and was a quick way of gaining high rankings. Only about 20% of your links should actually use keyword anchor text. Even the 20% is not an exact science, but the point is, most of your links should be truly natural links such as the ones that say “CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE”

By now you should be seeing a pattern with our recent articles. A lot of companies our using old and shady techniques that invovle short cuts for what we term as “Blackhat SEO”. Even before the recent updates to the search engine algorithms, if you produced quality content, honest links that were not paid for through a link building service, and were in the race for the long haul, you have no doubt seen your websites flourish, and will continue to do so in the future.

Stay tuned for part 7 of our series tomorrow

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SEO – TRUTH, MYTH, and LIES – PART 5

By Just A Web Company Staff | Published April 1, 2013
Keyword Myths

Keywords and Their Importance

If you have spent anytime researching what it takes for a website to succeed with SEO, you have no doubt heard the term “Keywords”. Just how important are these “keywords” and how much time should you spend focusing on them?

The Truth

Keywords are important, to a degree. If you are going to develop and market a website selling coffee cups, it will not help if you write articles talking about children’s toys, the two have nothing in common. So it stands to reason you will use the words Coffee and Cups in your website’s content.

The Myth

SEO Myths

I actually read an article that was placed on another website that was put out earlier this month, that stated you should include smart keywords in your heading, your first paragraphs, your subheadings, and in your anchor text.

This could not be further from the truth. At one time this was a short cut way to spoof the search engines. Doing this today is one of the quicker ways to have your site rankings demoted. The mere fact that there are still SEO companies, and SEO experts providing this sort of advice and service, is one of the reasons why our company is doing so well in the SEO marketplace.

The Lie

You Must Have Keywords All Through Your Content. This is simply not true, and here is the proof. Go to Google and type in the phrase examples of sites that doesn’t use keywords. Within the first 3 or 4 results is the following URL: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=79812. This is an entire article written about site rankings, but you will not find the term Keyword anywhere in the article. You will not find it in the heading, the meta-description, the paragraph text, or anchor text, yet this page comes up when you google a term about keywords. Why is this?

In an effort to cut down on spam, provide relevant search titles, and not give weight to low-quality SEO practices, search engines, not just Google, are looking at the actual content within a website and the context in which that content is presented. Back to our coffee cup example. If you are writing a article on Coffee Cups, it stands to reason you are going to talk about Coffee, temperature, dishwasher safe, the materials the cups are made out of etc. You are not just going to have an article were the word or term Coffee Cups is used over and over.

Further more, search engines now compare your website to other sites within your niche category. It stands to reason that if you are talking about a particular topic, there are natural phrases and words that are used to describe your niche. The search engines compare your site with others, and if you are using common secondary words and phrases when describing your product or talking about subject, then chances are you are an authority on that topic.

Remember the golden rule, write your content for your audience, NOT for the search engines.

Tomorrow we will be looking more about Link Building and keyword anchor text, and why you should avoid most of these services at all costs.

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SEO – TRUTH, MYTH, and LIES – Part 4

By Just A Web Company Staff | Published March 28, 2013
HTML5 Logo

Semantics and SEO

What do Semantics and SEO have to do with each other? EVERYTHING!. Let’s define semantics in regards to the web. Semantics is short for Semantic Markup, which is what provides meaning and context to webpages.

Imagine if you had a web page full of outstanding content, but there was no separation of paragraphs, headings, indentations, font spacing, etc. A visitor to a site like this would have no idea what should be a heading, a beginning of a new thought or subject, what was quoted from someone else, you would quickly loose your vistors interest, despite having great content.

HTML5 Semantic Tags

Semantic Markup is a bit like providing content separation for web browsers, even if all of the graphical content, styling, and effects were taken out of a website, the readability would remain, it is apparent what is a heading, what is paragraph, what is a list, etc.

According to Google, advatnages of semantic markup are as follows:

  • It’s the professional thing to do.
  • It’s more accessible.
  • It’s more maintainable.

The TRUTH

A website that passes validation checks, and uses semantic markup will out perform a website that does not posses these features. Your site will index better, rank better, perform better, and be more accessible.

The Myth

Anyone can post a blog and succeed.

This is not entirely true. There are great blogging platforms such as WordPress, which make it very easy for non-technical people to add content. The problem is, WordPress is a content management system, not a website creation system.

A Content Management System by its very definition is a tool for adding content, it does not alleviate the author from ensuring that proper HTML semantics are applied. It simply offers a way to quickly add and manage content, and the corresponding semantics.

An example would be to make sure your paragraphs are wrapped in the <p> tags, and make sure your headings are wrapped in <h1>, <h2>, <h3> tags, etc.

The huge problem being overlooked here is accessibility. Yes we want the search engines to correctly index our websites, however, people that are using screen readers, i.e. the blind, depend on our websites having the proper semantic markup, other wise our sites are useless to them.

Case in point, Target Stores settled a 6 million dollar lawsuit because their website was not accessible to the blind. This is because their website was not coded to standards, i.e. using Semantic Markup. You can read more about it here.

The Lie

You can create a website using some free software on the internet, why would I pay a professional do this for me?

Well, this is isn’t entirely a lie, because you can, however, the software that is available creates sites that are not Semantically correct. This means that websites being created use outdated coding techniques that will cause issues with your website and at some point will make them un-usable..

Some quick tools to find out how your site fairs in the issue of semantics are http://validator.w3.org/ and http://www.w3.org/2003/12/semantic-extractor.html

In addition we highly recommend reading Googles write up on The Semantic Web and their recommendations Here

Remember, there are no quick fixes, and you get what you pay for. If you are using free development software, or quick development software there is a 100% chance your end product will be full of errors, and although it may look okay, it will not perform okay and will cost you money in the long run.

We will pick up the rest of our series, SEO, THE TRUTH, THE MYTHS, and THE LIES on Monday April 1st.

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SEO – TRUTH, MYTH, and LIES – Part 3

By Just A Web Company Staff | Published March 27, 2013
Wordpress Duplicate Content

Duplicate Content

Even the most novice of so called “SEO EXPERTS” will tell you that duplicate content is bad. This is primarily true.

WordPress – THE TRUTH

At the end of 2011 WordPress 3.0 had been downloaded over 65 million times. Source – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress Needless to say, this is one extremely popular content management system. One well loved feature of the WordPress platform is it’s ease of use for updating a website, and keeping fresh content flowing through the use of a blog. While this is excellent for content generation, and SEO, in the hands of a novice it is also a way to have your website penalized for Duplicate Content.

WordPress Category Tags – The Myth

Wordpress SEO

WordPress has category tags, in other words, when you create a new blog post, you can assign that post to a category, which is nice for your visitors, because perhaps they only want to see articles you have written on a particular topic.

SEO companies have made a habit of using these Category Tags as pseudo keyword tags, with the thinking being, the more categories you assign to a blog post, the more likely it is to be seen, and the better it is for SEO.

The Lie

Category Tags are great for SEO. Not only are category tags not helpful for SEO, they can be detrimental and cause penalties to your websites ranking.

Here is how this works, lets assume you have a blog on automobiles. You write an article on improving gas mileage through driving habits, which is make and model agnostic. In an effort to improve the likely hood of your article being read, you use the following tags, CHEVY, FORD, BMW, MERCEDES, FIAT, HONDA, and TOYOTA. Further more you decided to tag your article in these additional categories, Driving Habits, Performance, General, and Tips and Tricks.

Now lets add these all up – you have duplicate content on 11 separate pages, plus the blog roll, the archives page, plus the link to the article itself, now we have 14 separate pages with the EXACT SAME CONTENT. This does not take into account a lot of websites will place their latest blog on their homepage, so now we are 15 different pages for the exact same content for one blog. Multiply that by the number of blogs you post in a week, month, year, etc and you can see how GOOGLE, and the other search Engines see your site.

Does this mean you should avoid categories all together? Of course not. What it does mean is that you should give serious thought to organizing your content in a logical layout, and using categories where appropriate, and not as a shortcut SEO method.

Tomorrow in part 4 of our series we will look at organizing content and site structure, and what that means to a successful SEO campaign.

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SEO – TRUTH, MYTH, and LIES – PART 2

By Just A Web Company Staff | Published March 26, 2013
SEO Spam

EMD – EXACT MATCH DOMAIN

Exact Match Domain is when a domain name is created for the sole purpose of matching words or terms used in a search query. Let’s say you wanted to target the search term Broken Cell Phones, creating the domain name www.brokencellphones.com would be an Exact Match Domain.

Matching a Domain Name based on search terms is a trick that SEO companies have been using for years, and for a while did actually yield results. In doing research for this article we saw the following on a forum where the subject was Does Your Domain Name Matter When It Comes To SEO?

The response was:

Of course domain names matter in terms of SEO…. it’s one of the reasons we’re so successful at what we do…

The problem here in lies that a lot of SEO companies relied solely on this technique to obtain instant results, and did not focus on making sure their clients websites were properly developed. A lot of websites that used the EMD technique, had a sole purpose of collecting information from visitors, such as sign up forms, or multi-level marketing scams. They did not provide value to their visitors or contribute value to the internet.

EMD- THE TRUTH

September 28th, 2012 Matt Cutts, head of web spam at Google, annoucned via his official twitter feed the following:

Minor weather report: small upcoming Google algo change will reduce low-quality “exact-match” domains in search results.

The Myth

SEO ExpertSEO “Experts” thought their techniques would last, were future proofed, and that they could could provide quality products to their customers using short cut methods.

The fact of the matter is, companies that actually spend time updating their technical skills, following industry best practices, and provided quality over quantity not only saw this coming, but didn’t have to worry, because the sites they developed actually had a purpose beyond ranking high in the search engines for data mining and multi-level marketing.

The Lie

SEO Lies

EMD’s still provide value. The fact is, they do not. Not only do they not provide value, but they are being penalized. Google and other search companies are cracking down on spam, including data mining for the sole purpose of collecting someones contact information, such as all of those OPT IN low quality websites that have sprung up like a fungus on the internet.

Should you use your company or brand name as your Domain Name?

Yes, using your companies brand name, or corporate name, will not penalize you. It is still a recommended best practice. Search engine algorithms are being updated all the time in an effort to cut down on spam, and they are smart enough to distinguish between brand names, company names, and EMD’s for the sole purpose of ranking high.

Remember, as long as your website is created for your visitors, has something unique to offer, and serves a purpose for the greater community, you have nothing to worry about. If you have a site that is only intended for opt in email forms, multi-level marketing type schemes, or designed to get instant results for one or two terms; if you haven’t been penalized yet, you will.

Tomorrow in part 3 of our 10 part series, SEO, the TRUTH, The Myth and The Lies, we will be looking at the content management system WordPress and discussing how Tags in the blog section can be detrimental to your SEO campaign, and look at some recommended industry best practices.

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