Social bookmarking and Web 2.0 have become all the rage. One can easily spend hours upon hours playing with social bookmarking sites. The question is how can these sites and methods by helpful to a company or corporation? The last thing you want is another production wasting distraction for your employees. However, if you have a strategic goal/vision and understanding of how social bookmarking and Web 2.0 can be harnessed in a beneficial way they can become very powerful promotion tools for your company.

Social bookmarking is simply a method for sharing bookmarks of specific web pages between internet users. Social bookmarking sites such as Delicious allow users to publicly share, store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata. Once a network of users is established beneficial cross-linking and sharing of useful websites starts to occur and can become a viral means of self-promotion for a particular website.

We plan to initially use Delicious to help promote and make sure all of our “search engine friendly” press releases get picked up by the major online search engines and to promote the corporate websites of all our clients.

SlickRockWeb’s Social Bookmark

Kind regards,

SlickRockWeb Inc. a leading provider of affordable SEO services - "Bringing you business one click at a time."

SlickRockWeb is proud to announce the launching of a new small business website in Denver Colorado.

Pool and Spa Professionals is a relatively new company based in metro Denver Colorado that provides retail and commercial pool and spa solutions and consultations throughout the state of Colorado.

Pool and Spa Professionals wanted to create an online presence that was clean and professional looking. They contacted SlickRockWeb Inc. of Minnesota to provide web development services and search engine optimization expertise. SlickRockWeb designed a simple to use and professional looking website that allowed their vendors to make online payments and created an easy way for prospective clients to make contact with the company. This site will continue to grow and provide expanded content in the coming months.

At the same time SlickRockWeb will begin implementing its properitary search engine optimization techniques to get Pool and Spa Professionals properly listed in the search engines, to generate online visibility and advertising for the company and to start producing highranking pages within the site for “non-branded” searches.

You can view this new website by going to www.pool-spa-pros.com

Kind regards,

SlickRockWeb Inc. a leading provider of affordable SEO services - "Bringing you business one click at a time."

A new very clever phishing (scam) email is circulating the internet. The email asks people with Paypal accounts to upgrade their passwords to "Military Grade Encryption". DO NOT RESPOND TO THIS EMAIL OR CLICK ON ANY LINKS IN THE EMAIL.

The following email was received on June 16th by us and after careful analysis it was determined quickly that this was a spoof email sent by someone in France pretending to be a legitimate Paypal email. Below is the screenshot of the email (note our private information has been removed for these illustrative purposes).

Please be aware that any emails similar to this are to be treated with utmost caution and remember Paypal and any other Financial Institution will NEVER send you an email asking for you to click on a link to verify your account and/or password. These types of emails are 99% of the time completely bogus and intended to steal your account information.

For more information on protecting your email information on your business website, to inquire about our affordable anti-spam methods, or to inquire about a website security audit to analyze and identify any potential security gaps or holes in your website please contact us at 1-800-975-5695 or go to our main website at SlickRockWeb Inc.

Screenshot of Fradulent Email:

Analysis of the basic header information: – Note the information in blue indicating that this email DID NOT originate from the Paypal network. Note the original IP address in red orginates in France. The lines highlighted in blue show the information about "www.ovh.com" network which is also in France.

Return-path: service@paypal.com
Envelope-to: xxxxxx@slickrockweb.com
Delivery-date: Mon, 16 Jun 2008 23:17:31 -0400
Received: from impinc02.yourhostingaccount.com ([10.1.13.102] helo=impinc02.yourhostingaccount.com)
by mailscan19.yourhostingaccount.com with esmtp (Exim)
id 1K8RhK-0000MC-Sr
for xxxxxx@slickrockweb.com; Mon, 16 Jun 2008 23:17:30 -0400
Received: from smtp21.orange.fr ([80.12.242.47])
by impinc02.yourhostingaccount.com with NO UCE
id erHW1Z0211242Dc02rHWtw; Mon, 16 Jun 2008 23:17:30 -0400
X-EN-OrigIP: 80.12.242.47
X-EN-IMPSID: erHW1Z0211242Dc02rHWtw
Received: from User (ns355200.ovh.net [91.121.122.193])
by mwinf2107.orange.fr (SMTP Server) with ESMTP id 40A111C00095;
Tue, 17 Jun 2008 05:17:21 +0200 (CEST)
X-ME-UUID: 20080617031721264.40A111C00095@mwinf2107.orange.fr
Reply-To: service@paypal.com
From: "Service PayPal" service@paypal.com
Subject: Update Your Paypal Account Information
Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2008 05:17:30 +0200
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/html;
charset="Windows-1251"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-Priority: 3
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2600.0000
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2600.0000
Message-Id: <20080617031721.40A111C00095@mwinf2107.orange.fr>

Main Body Text of the Spoof Email:

We have recently noticed one or more attempts to log into your PayPal account from a foreign IP address and we have reasons to believe that your account may have been hijacked by a third party without your authorization.

If you recently accessed your account while traveling, the unusual login in attempts may have been initiated by you. However, if you are the rightful holder of the account, click on the link below to log into your account within the above-mentioned period.

>> Click here to Secure your account <<

If you choose to ignore our request, you leave us no choice but to temporaly suspend your account.

We ask that you allow at least 72 hours for the case to be investigated and we strongly recommend to verify your account in that time.

Kind regards,

SlickRockWeb Inc. a leading provider of affordable SEO services – "Bringing you business one click at a time."

Las Terrazas is a premier real estate development on the island of Ambergris Caye in Belize and has just released Phase II residences at pre-construction prices. The press release highlights the value that real estate in Belize is offering American and Canadian investors considering the current meltdown of real estate in the United States.

Read the full press release here.

Excerpt:
"Compared to similar units in the Bahamas, Dominican Republic and Cancun, buyers in Belize can find idyllic Ambergris Caye real estate for a fraction of the price," said Chris Roberts, General Manager of Las Terrazas. With one-bedroom units priced from $289,900 and three-bedroom units from $399,900 investors are finding that Las Terrazas’ stunning location and "natural way of life" offers the kind of sound investment opportunity that has become an increasing rarity.

For more information on Belize real estate and belize condos please vist the Las Terrazas website.

We have been asked this question on more than one occassion recently. It is not an easy question to answer as there are so many different factors that come into play. I will try to break this question out into three different factors that I believe need to go into assigning a value to any website. Most of what I will discuss will relate to business websites that are essentially 100% online - based. If you are going to sell your entire business including your website and your business includes physical assets such as buildings, real estate, and /or equipment the following valuation method would obviously not apply.

So here we go, in this blog post I will try to assess the value of a search engine friendly website like the ones we develop for our clients. The first piece will be the software piece which essentially includes all the webpages and graphics that have been created for your site. This piece would also include all the back-end functionalities, scripting and databases. The easiest way and most conservative way to assign a value to this piece is to add up all of the development costs that you put into the creation of your site and then double it. Now if your site is more than 2 years old you will need to adjust this for inflation and/or determine a current replacement cost and double that. This additional 100% premium on top of the development costs is the fact that you have a "search engine friendly" website and includes the time and sweat you have invested into the development. Presumably this custom development under your guidance has made your site unique and successul. The extent of how unique the coding is will obviously increase this factor. Also if you have any patented or proprietary technology involved this would also greatly increase the overall valuation. These additional factors are much too complicated to be discussed here.

The next component is to assign a value to the aging factor of your site and any premiums that our search engine friendly design and SEO services have produced by creating higher rankings in the search engines and increased visibility on the internet overall. The age of a site will obviously increase its visibility on the internet and this provides a higher weight when the search engines try to rank a website. In addition, you can add a premium to the site for its domain name and its current search engine rankings and visibility. This is very difficult to assess. One way to do this is to value the traffic that is generated to your site from "natural" search engine results.

If you had a site that did not rank very well naturally in the search engines then you would have to pay someone to generate this traffic to your site and doing so almost any other way would cost you easily $2.00 a click or more. I will illustrate the value of our "search engine friendly" websites as follows, if your "natural" search engine rankings are generating traffic of about 3000 visits (clicks) per month this is generating about $6000 worth of visibility. What that means is that our efforts replaces $6000.00 worth of advertising costs that you would have to pay some other way. This is obviously a very real value for your site. Now to value this further becomes a little more difficult. In some cases I would say 12 months worth of traffic would be appropriate or about $72,000.00 just for this piece. Other cases maybe just 6 months worth would be appropriate. This is the really difficult piece of the equation but I think you get the idea.

Notice that I am talking about clicks or unique visitors and not "hits". Hits is a metric that scam artists and sellers of snake-oil use. We NEVER use "hits" for ANYTHING and if you are getting quotes from someone in terms of "hits" you need to stop the conversation and tell them that they need to start talking in terms of unique visitors or you are walking away. End of story. Okay enough on this.

Now on to the last piece of the puzzle. Lastly you would value your current annual revenue that the site is generating (and the client lists ect.) and value this piece as 2 or 3 times the annual sales. This is a price to sales ratio of 2 or 3 which is a standard metric in the business world. Now if your site is an ecommerce site that resells items and your profit margins are very very low then the price to sale ratio estimate will obviously not be as accurate and may need to be adjusted downward.

Hope this makes sense and this is the best guess-estimate that I can come up with at this time.

Kind regards,

SlickRockWeb Inc. a leading provider of affordable SEO services - "Bringing you business one click at a time."

SlickRockWeb specializes in search engine friendly websites that are both attractive to the visitor and are well indexed by the search engine spiders. By not taking into account some of the ethical coding guidelines that the search engines have put into place a business can quickly find its online presence blacklisted by the search engines which essentially makes the website is completely removed from Google’s database (or the database of any other search engine) and it becomes essentially "invisible". If your business depends on its online web presence, imagine waking up one day and seeing your online revenues disappearing by 50% or more overnight.

Google is constantly adjusting its indexing algorithm to filter out and block those who are trying to manipulate the ranking process. Because of this it is critical to partner with a specialist that knows the difference between search engine optimization and spamdexing. There is a growing field of so-called experts claiming to be search engine optimisation specialists and SEO copywriters, and as Google and other search engines improve their algorithms almost monthly, a so-called expert can implement an obsolete method or worst a banned method that can turn out to be a death-sentence to your business.

There are various techniques that the search engines have made clear are not considered ethical techniques to use and should be avoided at all costs. These guidelines of course are constantly being updated by the search engines so this list is by no means all-inclusive.

Basically, make sure your web design does not contain clearly banned elements such as cloaking, spamdexing, doorway pages, phishing, and / or excessive linking that will possibly get your domain name blacklisted by Google and the other search engines.

If you believe your site may have already been blacklisted by Google or any of the other search engines you can use our new "Search Engine Blacklisted Tool" to determine if your website has in fact been blacklisted by the search engines.

Please feel free to call us at 1-866-486-7747 if your site has been blacklisted and you need expert help to get your site re-indexed.

Below describes in more detail some of the various techniques that should be avoided.

1. Cloaking

Cloaking is when you code text and links into the HTML of your web pages in a way that makes them hidden from your human visitors, usually by making it the same color as the background of your page or spacing the page so that the additional text and /or links occur way below the usable content of the page. The hidden text used tends to be repetitive keywords that the author thinks are very popular searches and the "false" hope is that people searching for high traffic search terms like "sex", "drugs" and "rock ‘n’ roll" they will stumble across their site.

Sadly, even if you somehow avoided getting caught, this technique no longer works for more reasons than I have time to address. For some strange reason, people forget that there are millions of websites out there and if they do a search for "Britney Spears" and they come to your site that sells "sneakers" they will IMMEDIATELY leave your site and go to the next one on the list until they find the site that is relevant to their search.

2. Spamdexing and stuffing the content with keywords.

This technique describes the process of including a key word dozens or even hundreds of times on a web page so that a search engine will more heavily weigh the relevance of this page to the search term than pages on other Web sites. The media and so-called experts love to simplify the algorithms of the search engines into nothing more than than a simple equation that ranks websites with lots keywords in their text the highest. WRONG! Firstly, if these repetitive keywords are not relevant to the overall topic of the webpage as well as to the rest of your site, Google won’t take much notice of it anyway, and secondly, too high of a keyword density is an easy way to get flagged by the search engine algorithm and possibly even blacklisted.

The best solution, and the standard of coding that we implement for all our clients, is to write good quality, unique, keyword-rich copy that your "human" visitors will find relevant and interesting. Remember that Google’s mission to create an online search tool that produces the faster, most relevant and best possible search results for every search that is performed by a "human" visitor. The day Google stops providing this is the day everyone goes to another search engine such as Yahoo.com or MSN.com. We are experts at producing good quality websites that the search engines like Google and more importantly our client’s customers love.

3. Automated Content Creation

It is true that the search engines like lots of content. So you decide if you can create hundreds of pages for your website that this will you rank better in the search engines. Because you don’t have time to create hundreds of pages manually you use an automated content generator that takes content from other sites and repackages it into your own sites templage. There are many reasons why the search engines will penalize you for this. First off all, Google monitors the growth rate of sites, and if your site gets bigger too quickly, they’ll suspect you are trying to spam them. They will also flag you for duplicated content (see below) because the coding profile using a fixed template can be over 85 -95% identical if you don’t understand the hidden coding profile. Lastly you can get into legal trouble for copyright infringement. It is always best to create your own content and release it on a periodic basis. Better yet hire a copywriter and pay them to create good quality content on a weekly basis.

4. Duplicate Material

Google likes fresh, unique content. Duplicate content has become a very big penalty in the search engine algorithms lately. People were trying to duplicate content and place it on multiple websites, or steal content that ranked well in hopes of helping their own site. Besides the obvious copyright infringement issues this technique is another sure bet to get you blacklisted. Basically the search engines will only rank content once. When they find duplicated content the newest instance of this content is removed from the index. This penalty also applies to "templated" websites. If you purchase a cheap templated website and only change your name, address, and photo it is very likely that your site would NEVER get indexed by the search engines because the overall coding profile would be too similar to someone else using the same template. This gets to be very technical and is just not suitable for further discussion here. You really need to be a web programmer to understand all the nuances with this. We posted a recent entry on the issue of duplicate content that can be read here.

There are some very specific exceptions to this rule which we help our clients take advantage of and are completely ethical and legitimate. Again, too technical to address in this post.

5. Link Farms, Paid Links, and Excessive Cross-Linking

Here is another perfect example of the saying, “a little bit of knowledge can become dangerous”. Everyone who knows just a little bit about the search engine ranking process and about search engine optimization knows that websites that link to your site will help your site in the search engine rankings. Then they try to extrapolate this half-truth into, “if 10 sites ranking to me is good then 10000 sites linking to me would be GREAT”!!

WRONG!! Putting a link on badly constructed directory sites where hundreds of other people submit their links to be listed on a single page in return for a link back to their site is a complete waste of time. There are two problems with this; One is that only one-way inbound link (IBL) to your site carry sufficient more weight to provide any benefit. A reciprocal or two-way link is not worth the time you spend creating the exchange. A simple way to think about this is that reciprocal links cancel each other out. The second problem is “relevancy”. If a florist website has a link to your “sneaker selling” website then there is no relevancy and the link is virtually worthless. Trading links from pages with hundreds of unrelated links is a complete waste of time and will provide virtually NO BENEFIT.

Even worse still is the potential that you trade links with a know link farm that Google has banned and now you will very likely get your own site blacklisted. Google obviously doesn’t penalize you for who links to you, because you can’t help that, but they will ban you for linking to a link farm page or a pay-for-links scheme. Google in recent months has really cracked down on this type of scheme and is very slow to response to site reinstatements if you have been caught doing this.

6. Doorway Pages

A doorway page is a specially coded webpage using scripting languages that will try to determine if the visitor is a human or a search engine spider. Once this determination is made the script then sends a different webpage to the search engine spider than what the human visitor sees. The pages served to the search engine spiders contain keyword-rich copy, or even just a list of keywords. Some webmasters, knowing that different search engines have different algorithms, make separate doorway pages for each search engine. There are even software packages that will automate this process and create hundreds of doorway pages each targeting a specific search phrase.

In almost all cases, doorway pages are a bad idea. Most search engines prohibit their use and will ban you if they find you out. The use of these pages is particularly unacceptable if the keywords you use in the doorway page are not related to the content of your site.

Many suspect SEO companies employ variants of this technique and the coding of these pages get more and more clever every day. Many times the search engines have a difficult time finding this out and may not catch you for months. For this reason most search engines have employed a human editorial process of self-reporting. Thus if one of your competitors found out that you were using this technique they could report you to Google and a Google editor could review your site by hand.

7. Forwarding domain name aliases to the same main domain name.

A virtual hostname is an additional hostname that redirects to your site’s first published hostname. Sometimes these can be used legitimately, especially when your original domain name has a very long URL that is difficult to remember. A company will register a second domain name that is easier to remember and /or they may want to use it in a print advertising campaign and be able to distinguish where the traffic came from and it will automatically forward to the older website. Having dozens of them all forwarding to the same place, however, is misleading, and the search engines will not be impressed.

I provide a simple example of this below. Say you have a website called www.greatplainsflax.com. You decide to buy additional domains such as:

www.cheapflaxseeds.com
www.freehealthfoods.com
www.vitaminsandflax.com

and forward them all to your main domain, www.greatplainsflax.com, in hopes of capitalizing on the additional keywords and achieve higher rankings in the search engines. This technique in reality will accomplish ZERO benefit as far as the rank of the main website …. and in some cases may actually hurt you if not done correctly.

8. Illegal Material

Illegal pornography, and other illegal material, will be banned from Google and other search engines as soon as it is found for obvious reasons. Many people using the "cloaking" technique and hidden text found out about this the hard way, even if they were not in fact selling or providing any of the actual items. There are some that believe that Google looks for "poison words" within a site. This is a topic that I will probably discuss in more detail in a future blog.

I don’t think much more than common sense is necessary for this.

9. Phishing

Phishing is an illegal activity whereby a website is set up to look like a legitimate site, such as a bank or credit card company login page. The site is then used to steal unsuspecting visitors’ bank and contact details, fooling them into thinking they are simply logging in as usual or changing their password. Google permanently bans phishing sites like these whenever it finds them. There is obviously no legitimate reason to employ this technique.

For various security reasons many website owners can fall prey to this technique where the hacker hijacks the business owner’s website and uses it as the phishing site. This buys the hacker extra time because the Feds and the FBI contact you first thinking you created the phishing site. We have been involved with providing expert testimony demonstrating that a site was hacked by someone other than the owner and was used in an unsuspecting manner. Believe me this is not a fun position to find yourself in. This is why we put such a premium on security measures for all our search engine friendly websites.

Using any of these techniques for trying to boost the rankings of your website will be a complete waste of time and will almost guarantee that your site be penalized in some way and /or be blacklisted and disappear completely. Waking up and finding yourself banned could be devastating and many times could take months if not years and 10’s of thousands of dollars to fully correct.

Kind regards,

SlickRockWeb Inc. a leading provider of affordable SEO services – "Bringing you business one click at a time."

Most people do not realize that Google has a completely separate indexing algorithm for its pay-per-click search engine advertising program (Adwords). The reason I say this is because this week it is rumored that Google’s Adword algorithm may now be taking into account the loading speeds of web pages and assigning higher minimum bids to pages that take longer to load. This seems to be one additional factor that will now go into computing what Google calls its "quality score" for the web pages of advertisers using the Adwords program.

Basically Google is trying to crack down on low quality sites that are using the Adwords program to drive traffic to the advertisers website. In a nutshell, for pay-per-click advertising campaigns, the advertiser has to pay Google whatever the current bids are for each click that is generated from a particular search phrase and sends the visitor from the sponsored ad on Google.com to the advertiser’s site. If Google deems that the advertiser has a site with a low "quality score" that particular advertiser may have to pay a higher minimum bid for the click than another advertiser with a site that has a higher "quality score".

Thus it is very advantageous for companies to hire SEO and SEM companies like SlickRockWeb that specialize in optimizing pay-per-click campaigns so the company can maximize its advertising dollars with web pages and/or landing pages that produce the highest possible "quality score".

As David A. Utter on Webpronews.com states, "Slow loading pages hurt the user experience, and can lead people to abandon those pages, Google noted on the Inside AdWords blog. Once Google drops its load time evaluations onto an account’s Keyword Analysis page, advertisers will have one month to make adjustment."

Because Google has datacenters all over the country, apparently Google will assess the load times relative to servers in the geographic region of the site in question.

If Google has found that your site is performly poorly in terms of loading speeds there are a few suggestions that Google makes to improve this. Use fewer redirects, make sure all images in the site are adequately compressed, minimizing usage of iframes, and minimize the usage of bandwidth intensive files such as audio files and/or Flash files.

Many other factors go into how Google determines the "quality score" for a particular webpage and essentially the lower your "quality score" the more you will have to pay relative to your competition. Our analysis on some of our client’s pay-per-click campaigns have revealed that with the higher "quality scores" that we achieve for them results in savings of anywhere from 10-40%. In a couple of cases we have been able to reduce monthly spends of $10,000 down to $1,000 with very little difference in overall performance.

Feel free to contact us if you would like to investigate whether or not your pay-per-click advertising campagins are completely cost-effective.

Kind regards,

SlickRockWeb Inc. a leading provider of affordable SEO services – "Bringing you business one click at a time."

1) When Bill Clinton became president, there were just 8 .com websites on the internet, now there are over 90 million .coms on the internet.

2) Over 80% of all internet users look on search engines to find information about the products and services they want to buy.

3) Pay-per-click (PPC) costs are rising (over 37% higher on average this year (Q1 of 2008) over Q1 of 2007.

4) Up to 85% of searchers ignore paid listings

5) 63% of the top natural (organic) listings get click throughs

6) Natural (organic) search results convert 30% higher than PPC

Send us a comment with any fascinating stats and facts that you know of and I will post them and credit them to you or your website.

Kind regards,

SlickRockWeb Inc. a leading provider of affordable SEO services – "Bringing you business one click at a time."

A client of ours recently asked us the question that is the title of this post. Below is our answer.

How this method works is that people have to install external software, in this case a program called WebMenu, which is a search toolbar technology. The people who have these toolbar programs installed on their computer essentially make up the total reach of the advertising program. So if a certain company is selling you advertising space on their toolbar based network you need to know how many people are actually using the toolbar and not how many people have downloaded the toolbar. This is the MAXIMUM reach that your ad can reach. As an advertiser in this network you will show up ONLY in the people who have downloaded AND INSTALLED this toolbar into their browsers. Because many of these toolbar programs only work in certain browsers, the number of people actually using this will be a fraction of the total downloads. There are many other reasons why the number of toolbars in use will be much much less than the total downloads. So if a company claims that their toolbar has been downloaded 29 million times a very liberal guess would be that only 20% of these downloads actually are using the toolbar. We would guess it is probably more like 5% but this number is only going to be know by the company.

So if it is 10% then the total possible reach of your ad would 2.9 million people. Of course your ad would only show up when any of those 2.9 million people searched for your desired search term. Now in comparison you can advertise directly in the search engines like Google and Yahoo and have a total reach in the 100’s of millions of people. So the key point is the cost-effectiveness. Just because it may cost $5.00 a click on Google for a very popular keyword does not make this more expensive than using a smaller company using a toolbar technology that circumvents the normal search engine positioning in your web browser. The old adage is that just because it is cheaper does not make it better …… or in this case more cost-effective.

Another issue to consider is that many security programs will treat these toolbar programs as Spyware or Malware and may prevent the program from even working on someone’s computer. These toolbars also have the potential to collect alot of information from a person’s computer and this is precisely why they are considered Spyware. That doesn’t mean that these companies are doing anything illegal or unethical but they do have the keys to your computer so the potential for harm is there.

Here is the description of one of these such companies and this is in their own words right from their website.

Star Position is an authorized reseller of WebMenu, the world’s most innovative search engine with Cluster Search Technology. WebMenu promotes itself through unique venues, including WebMenu’s Cluster Search Toolbar which includes free anti-spyware and free Video/VoIP. This toolbar is at over 29 million downloads and growing daily. The WebMenu toolbar provides UNIQUE search functionality across GOOGLE, YAHOO and several other search engines. Try it for yourself by getting it at WebMenu or at one of WebMenu’s partner sites.

Here is what Google themselves says about companies like StarPosition:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35291

# Some SEOs may try to sell you the ability to type keywords directly into the browser address bar.

Most such proposals require users to install extra software, and very few users do so. Evaluate such proposals with extreme care and be skeptical about the self-reported number of users who have downloaded the required applications.

Now clearly Google is not going to be a big fan as these toolbars are circumventing the positioning of the normal search engine rankings. Thus there is going to be an obvious bias from Google, however there have been some suggestions that Google might penalize searches and companies linked to those searches that use external software that circumvent the normal rankings of Google. You may not think this is fair but then again Google is a publicly traded company and they can do whatever they think is in the best interests of their shareholders. The last thing you want to do is hurt any of your current rankings in Google’s own database so be very careful.

Lastly I asked around and a few other colleagues have tried these toolbar based advertising campaigns and the consensus was that for about $700.00 they got only a couple of visitors for keywords that were relevant to their clients. Considering the average pay-per-click Google account for our clients averages about $1 - 2.00 dollars of cost to you for every visitor you aren’t going to beat this with $350 -700 a click using an advertising network that uses toolbar technology. If you haven’t already maxed out your PPC programs on Google or Yahoo you would be crazy to try something that is over 100 fold less effective.

Lastly you always have to remember that any company can promise you traffic to your site. I myself could bring you thousands of clicks to your website just by writing a simple computer program. There would be no way to know that these visitors were not real and only an automated computer program. In fact we have even been approached by companies trying to sell us these types of programs. You would be very naive to think that there are not unscrupulous SEO companies that are using these types of techniques to artificially inflate the traffic that comes to their clients websites. That is why any company promising only traffic needs to be very carefully evaluated. What you want is conversions and visitors that turn into bookings or sales. This can only be determined using web analytics and business intelligence techniques which is precisely what we provide for all our clients so that they know what they are getting and they know that our services produce actual results and not just traffic.

Remember this is our humble expert opinion and I don’t mean to suggest that any of the companies mentioned in this post are scam companies but I do think that the cost-effectiveness of these alternative methods of advertising always need to be carefully evaluated.

Kind regards,

SlickRockWeb Inc. a leading provider of affordable SEO services – "Bringing you business one click at a time."

The following email was received on January 11th and after careful analysis it was determined quickly that this was a spoof email sent by someone in Cairo Egypt that funneled the email through the "ThePlanet.com Internet Services Inc." network in Dallas, TX pretending to be a legitimate Paypal email. Below is the screenshot of the email (note our private information has been removed for these illustrative purposes).

Please be aware that any emails similar to this are to be treated with utmost caution and remember Paypal and any other Financial Institution will NEVER send you an email asking for you to click on a link to verify your account and/or password. These types of emails are 99% of the time completely bogus and intended to steal your account information.

For more information on protecting your email information on your business website, to inquire about our affordable anti-spam methods, or to inquire about a website security audit to analyze and identify any potential security gaps or holes in your website please contact us at 1-800-975-5695 or go to our main website at SlickRockWeb Inc.

Screenshot of Fradulent Email:

Analysis of the basic header information: – Note the information in blue indicating that this email DID NOT originate from the Paypal network. Note the original IP address in red orginates in Cairo, Egypt. The lines highlighted in blue show the information about “ThePlanet.com” network.

From service@update.com Fri Jan 11 12:03:35 2008
Return-path: service@update.com
Envelope-to: xxxxx@slickrockweb.com
Delivery-date: Fri, 11 Jan 2008 00:45:51 -0500
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Subject: SPAM: security alert - please confirm your paypal information

Main Body Text of the Spoof Email:

We are currently performing regular maintenance of our security measures. It has come to our attention that your PayPal billing information are out of date. This require you to update billing information. Click Here

You will now be taken through a series of identity and billing update pages.

Protecting the security of your PayPal account is our primary concern, and we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Kind regards,

SlickRockWeb Inc. a leading provider of affordable SEO services – “Bringing you business one click at a time.”

SlickRockWeb Inc. and Ability Building Center Join Forces for Web Development Training and Employment of Individuals With Disabilities.

Details of our joint relationship with Ability Building Center in Rochester, Minnesota can be found in our news release below that was published yesterday, January 8th, 2008.

Minneapolis SEO company and Ability Building Center Join Forces

Recent SEO work done by us on a massive ecommerce site (more than 8000 products) illustrated the importance of the duplication penalty and how it was affecting individual product pages and preventing them from achieving high-ranking SERPs.

I will try to highlight this issue, how we solved it, and how it subsequently produced a two-fold increase in traffic and hundreds of top 5 rankings in Google for individual product terms.

This issue first became apparent when our client asked us why many of his products were not showing up in keyword search results. We did some preliminary analysis and determined that a link on every product page that sent the visitor to a “Send this page to a friend” page was the culprit. Normally these “Send to a friend” scripts do not interfere with the search engines in any noticeable way. However this link was coded as a PHP script which essentially replicated exactly everything on the product page and just added a couple of form fields to allow the visitor to email the product page to a friend.

The following two links highlights the subtle differences between the normal product page and its parallel “Send to a friend” page.

tooldiscounter.com/ItemDisplay.cfm?lookup=OTC205049

and the “Send to a friend” link.

tooldiscounter.com/ItemDisplay.cfm?lookup=OTC205049&friendmail=getinfo

Notice the coding is not 100% identical between these two pages but it is identical enough (>80%) for Google to decide that it should not index both pages. For whatever reason the Google spiders ended up picking one or the other. Now it doesn’t take an SEO specialist to tell you that the original product page will rank better than the “Send to a friend” version of the same page.

So we did the simple search in Google “site:www.tooldiscounter.com +friendmail” and found out that thousands of the “Send to a friend” version of the product pages had been indexed instead of the original product page. The following three figures illustrate the differences:

Figure 1 shows 72 results when you find all the specific “Send to a friend” Tooldiscounter pages that are remaining in the Google index. Note this was in the thousands before we took steps to get these duplicate pages out of the Google index so that the original product pages could be indexed instead. If you look at Figure 1 it shows that the first 4 results do not have descriptions and these appear to be results that are being phased out. In fact it is very likely that these results are already gone due to our recent efforts. The next 6 results show the remaining “Send to a friend” versions of the product pages that have not yet been marked for removal in the Google index. Figure 2 below show the results when you do a Google search specific for all the pages in the Tooldiscounter site that display the “SNX9914M” product. Notice only the “Send to a friend” page shows up and the original product page does not appear.

In comparison figure 3 (below) shows when you do a search for all the pages in the Tooldiscounter site that show the “OTC205049″ product you see two pages. The old “Send to a friend” version and now the main product page which was not previously indexed. As a result this product page now ranks #6 on Google for “OTC-205049″ which was unranked before.

Figure 3:

Kind regards,

SlickRockWeb Inc. a leading provider of affordable SEO services – “Bringing you business one click at a time.”

No this is not a blog post about her recent endorsement of Barack Obama for President. Rather it is a post to highlight the power of coverage in the media on a topic by a celebrity of the status of Oprah Winfrey. In mid-October Oprah discussed the topic of super foods on her show. Flax seed has often been included as a super food and its mention on the Oprah Show in mid October caused the total number of people searching for flax seed and flax seed related information to go up by 2-3 fold. Keep in mind that this was a transient phenomenon that was completely independent of any changes in the SERPs for our particular client.

Over the period of August 1st until now the direct traffic and non-search engine traffic was pretty much stable. However the search engine generated traffic to our client’s site doubled and even tripled during about a two week period in October. The keyword phrases of "flax seed benefits" had a huge increase in searches throughout the month of October and also November. Those particular searches have decreased significantly almost back to the level seen in August. At first we thought maybe of client had lost ground on some of his high rankings in the search engines but after more analysis we cannot see any evidence for this. He is still #2 on both Google and Yahoo for this keyword.

#2 - flax seed benefits - Google
#2 - flax seed benefits - Yahoo

So it really seems that it was purely a function of public awareness and that the transient increase in the number of people searching for information on flax seeds was generated from the buzz from the Oprah Winfrey show. Of course we had helped position our client to be one of the first companies seen after people searched for flax related information and fully take advantage of the "Oprah Effect" when it happened.

This question was recently posed on one of the SEO forums that we monitor and it was a very interesting question that we have talked about before and have done a fair amount of analysis on.

The question was essentially this, "…. just how much weight does the age of a website get in the Google ranking algorithm".

And the question was framed in the context of will a website created in 2000 have an age advantage over a site created 2-3 years ago? Of course the sandbox affect for brand new sites is taken out of the equation.

Our simple answer to this is of course the age matters. It matters for your link popularity index, the age of your inbound links, the size of your site and the freshness of your site.

mjtaylor made the following comments: "Well, if there are 100-200 factors and this one is a fairly important one it should be worth a couple of percentage points. I would say this would be more important for a newer site than an older one … in other words it’s a negative factor to get over …. sometimes called the Sandbox … but once your domain is a year old, the relative value decreases.

Similarly, the age of incoming links is a factor."

She seemed to indicate that the aging factor was predominantly important with regards to the sandbox affect. I agree that the sandbox affect is of a huge importance but for the purpose of this question we are taking the sandbox completely out of the equation. I don’t believe the weight of the aging factor goes down after the sandbox affect goes away. The sandbox affect is really a separate issue and definitely plays a role in allowing a brand new site the ability to achieve SERPs but once a site is out of the sandbox it still has to compete against sites that could be 5 or 10 years old.

We have done some pretty extensive analysis and the age of a site seems to play a significant role. Enough so that I think we would consider it one of the top 20 factors in the Google Algorithm. Maybe even top 10.

We always recommend to our Minneapolis SEO clients that if they already have a registered domain name that they haven’t completely developed that they are many times better off using the older domain than purchasing a brand new domain name instead.

Peter, a WebproWorld Veteran, also made some very intelligent comments on the basic question of site age: "In my experience I have seen webmasters complain for years that Google is stupid because their website was stuck around position 40. No matter what they did, they just couldn’t get the site higher. Then after so many years, all the sudden the site starts to climb and it reaches the top10. Often webmasters try to figure out what they “did” to make that happen. But they didn’t do anything special. All that happened was that they finally got to age. This often happens in markets that have been around for many years already. Imagine for example the hosting market. You really need to have a site that is reasonably old because most of the top ranking sites are many years old and the average age factors in this market are pretty high."

In a nutshell and with all factors the same a site that is 5 years old WILL in my opinion rank higher than one that is 2 years old.

Launch of MyMinnesota411.com deemed a Success

SlickRockWeb Inc. is pleased to announce the launch of their new Minnesota Small business Directory. This new directory located at www.myminnesota411.com is a free online directory and resource site for any Minnesota small business.

We get this question all time and there can be many many reasons why. The algorithms for the search engines take into account dozen’s and dozen’s of criteria to determine a website’s rank.

One of the not so obvious reasons can be the actual age or registered age of a website. A recent client asked us to explain why one of their competitors was ranking higher than them even though on the page content of their competitor seemed very sparse and not very relevant. This can almost always be explained by off-page factors.

The competitor’s site was created in 2002 and is registered until 2015. That is an actual age of 5 years and a registered age of 13 years. Our client’s site targeting Minnesota weddings is a relatively new site and had an actual age of 2 years and a registered age of 3 years. We informed our client to extend their domain name registration for another 7 years to get an even 10 year spread. It would be the best $70.00 they could spend.

I first learned about this concept in one of Google’s 100 page patent applications. Because many scam sites are only registered for 1 year at a time Google came up with a creative way to determine which sites were more serious and legitimate about staying in business. The age of a website and the "spread" of its registration period are one factor that Google and probably the other major search engines take into account to determine legitimacy and "expertness". So if your site was created in 1995 then a forward registration period of 2008 would be fine. However, because our client’s site is relatively new compared to their competitor it makes sense to extend their registration to look more serious in the eyes of the search engines. Now I am not saying that this simple little trick will instantly help you but it is one of dozens of criteria that the search engines look at.

The other important issue is that their competitor has a popularity index value of 107. That is very good and it is partially because their competitor has had an online presence of some form since 1999.

By comparison our client’s popularity index is only 9.

This is clearly one of your site’s weaknesses in terms of the search engines. It is also the most time consuming and expensive to improve. This is where our search engine friendly press releases ($300.00 each) can add anywhere from 5-10 points to your popularity index. A couple of our releases that were picked up by TV stations across the country added 30 points to one of our client’s website.

More on the popularity index in the coming weeks.

Thanks for reading the SlickRockWeb affordable SEO Blog. “Bringing you business one click at a time".

I think I neglected to mention a few months back we(SlickRockWeb) were invited to write an advertorial on SEO and SEM for “Small Biz” magazine which is produced by Businessweek to cater to the small to medium sized business demographic.

Of course we said yes and I am happy to say that our article titled “340 Million Reasons Why SEO Can Help You Grow” turned out great and was published at the end of September.

We are quite proud of this achievement and I think it is a good testament to our abilities to have been invited by Businessweek. The print article is in the Fall/2006 quarterly issue of “Small Biz” on newstands all over the country and at most major bookstores. The supplemental online article is hosted by Sapien partners on their website and can be read here.
“http://www.expert-insights.com/report.asp?id=716“

SlickRockWeb is quickly becoming a leading provider of affordable SEO and search engine marketing services. SlickRockWeb creates and manages cost-effective pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns and can improve a website’s natural ranking in the search engines through a variety of proprietary SEO methods. We have produced tremendous results for clients, many of them seeing triple digit growth in web generated sales leads, and all for less than the cost of one magazine print advertisement.

Even spending as little as $300 to have an optimized PPC account created or using our SEO-Optimax service to do a simple SEO recoding of a homepage can have a tremendous impact on a small business. In fact our clients who have invested in our SEO services have seen their business grow by anywhere from 30-100% this past year which has corresponded with huge increases in traffic to their websites from the search engines.

We have had tremendous results using our proprietary methods. Many of these results are shown on our website and in fact using our own techniques has given SlickRockWeb the #1 position on Google for “affordable web development” out of 20,900,000 results.

Below are just a few of the SEO results we have achieved for our clients:

Kanantik Reef & Jungle Resort (Belize):
#3 in Google for belize resort

Daffy Apple Corporation:
#1 in Google for caramel apples denver

Las Terrazas
#3 in Google for belize condos

Mines & Associates:
#5 in Google for eap programs

In mid June of this year Google added a long overdue feature to its Adwords pay-per-click campaigns. Ad scheduling which Google also refers to as “dayparting” allows you to schedule when you want your sponsored ads to show up on Google and/or Google’s content network and when you want them to not show up (be temporarily paused). In addition, more advanced users can automatically modify their bids based on time-of-day and day-of-week cycles to improve campaign performance.

So for instance if your ad campaigns targets an audience that would only really be searching for your ads during normal business hours then it makes sense for you to have the ads turned off during the weekends or even during the very late evening hours.

Some of the click fraud audits that we have done seem to show alot of the click fraud occurs during the 12:00 midnight to 5:00 am times so it also makes sense for some of our clients to have their ads off during these periods.

Every client and business will be different and many businesses may get the majority of their online business occuring during the weekends so it would thus not make sense to turn their ads off on the weekends. Thus the decision to use ad scheduling should be done on a case by case basis.

To use this new feature you log onto your Adwords account and then you can enable it via the Edit Campaign Settings page. Below we show you the step by step process to enable and setup ad scheduling or “dayparting".

Step 1: Log onto your Adwords account and then click on the “Edit Campaign Settings” link as depicted in the image above.

Step 2: Scroll down the page and in the lower left portion of the page is a section called “Advanced Options". Click on the link called “Turn on ad scheduling” to enable the ad scheduling feature.

Step 3: Click on “Edit” for the days of the week you want to schedule your ad to show or not show. You will be allowed to select any block of time to turn off your ad and you can even select the quick link for weekends to turn off the ad for the entire weekend. The combinations of scheduling are endless and you choose certain days and/or hours of the day to turn off your ads.

Good luck and as always if you have any questions or would like to have an SEO expert help with the management of your pay-per-click accounts feel free to visit our website at SlickRockWeb.com.

Answer: We get this question all the time. Alot of people seem to think that the keyword meta tag is all it takes to get listed in the search engines and if you are not listed you must optimize the the meta tags.

Here is a good example to start off with in an effort to try and dispell the myth that the keyword tag is so important. Mathematically if you figure for example there are 29,200,000 results for the search “affordable web development” it is near impossible to have 29,200,000 results sorted and ranked solely based on the 300 - 450 characters that might occur in the keyword meta tag. And that is for ONLY one keyword phrase combination. Most keyword tags contain many different keyword phrases. Next if you look at our site we rank #1 out 29,200,000 results for the extremely competitive keyword phrase “affordable web development” and here is the clincher …… we don’t have a keyword tag anywhere on our homepage.

Search results in yahoo

How do you suppose we rank so well and we don’t even have a keyword meta tag??? Because the search engines have stopped putting any importance on most meta tags years ago. I can find you hundreds of examples of top ranking sites that don’t even use ANY meta tags. We also rank #5 for “Affordable SEO” …. again we did that without using a keyword meta tag.

Back in 2002 Google began completely ignoring the keyword meta tag because it had become so misused. If you consider the amount of spamdexing (stuffing of Keywords shamelessly into Keyword Tags) it’s not hard to figure out why the search engines starting discounting this tag. In September of 2002 AltaVista also abandoned the keyword meta tag. At that time Inktomi was the only major search engine supporting the keyword meta tag. Since then the search engines have kept their algorithms and ranking criteria’s very close to the vest so no one knows for sure if any of the search engines even look at the keyword meta tag anymore. Most SEO experts agree that it is of very little importance. I challenge you to find me a SEO expert who would argue any of these points with me. In fact I would love to have anyone contact me and discuss why they believe they are important and the basis for why they believe that.

The ranking of a page for a specific keyword is a very complex process and the search engine algorithms have very complex multivariate equations taking into account dozens of criteria to sort and rank the sites for a specific keyword. This is precisely why “natural” SEO will be such an important discipline in the coming years. If you think about a specific keyword phrase that is important to your business …. there are essentially 10 spots for that keyword on the first page of Google. Those 10 spots are fixed and will probably not increase much. However, the number of companies competing for those top 10 spots increases every day and every month and every year. It is the law of supply and demand. The supply will not be much different 5 or 10 years from now. I can guarantee to you that the demand will however be VERY different 5 or 10 years from now.

Finally it is human nature to still do what you believe in your heart will help so for those of you who insist on playing with and changing the keyword meta tag here are a couple simple tips on using the keyword meta tags. Keep the number of repeated keywords or phrases to a maximum of three. Use Keywords, which are relevant to your page and target market and make sure any words used in the keyword tag for that specific page also show up somewhere on the visible part of the page. Keep the number of characters in the keyword tag to around 450 characters or less. If you ignore these rules you could incur a SE penalty which would do far more damage than the almost unperceivable good that you think having the keyword meta tag will do you. Actually messing with the meta tags has the potential to do far more damage and than the very trivial good it could do. The “description” meta tag is treated differently and it is probably the ONLY meta tag that carries any weight with the search engines. But again there is very specific criteria on how to use this tag which I will save for another day.

I hope this was educational and takes one step in dispelling some of the very persistent SEO myths that are still circulating across the internet.

Well I decided to finally get my own Blog. I resisted getting a cell phone for many years and I guess the same has been true for starting my own Blog. But here I am starting my own SEO blog. As the owner and operator of a SEO firm, SlickRockWeb.com, I have been at the forefront of the this new fledgling industry and I have to say it is an exciting plact to be. SEO has and will continue to revolutionize the way small businesses compete and advertise in a global market.

The definition of SEO, as defined by Wikipedia.org is the following: Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of methods aimed at improving the ranking of a website in search engine listings.

SEO to me is a combination of computer science, marketing, HTML programming, data mining, business intelligence, and analytical research.

I hope to provide real life example of how SEO has helped some of our clients and I hope this blog will provide an avenue for you the audience to ask questions, post ideas, and just sometimes talk about anything that comes to mind.

Well that is all I can think of for my first and introductory post.