SEO and SEM « The SlickRockWeb Minneapolis SEO Blog

August 11, 2012

Using Social Media for Brand Reputation Protection

Filed under: SEO and SEM — Eric @ 6:56 pm

Protecting your brand online has become more and more difficult and competitors are starting to play dirty. Some are even hiring outside companies to tarnish your brand and submit fake negative reviews. The frequency of "gripe sites" using domain names similar to yours to plant the seeds of doubt with your customers are also on the rise. When someone searches for your business name in Google the last thing you want showing up in the search results are bad reviews and these "gripe" sites.

You can be proactive by taking advantage of all the Social Media sites out there. For example we have created a SlickRockWeb Twitter account, Facebook account, ,Linkedin account, YouTube account, Angieslist and on and on. All of these sites, because of their inherent domain authority, will typically move up the rankings in Google in a matter of months after you have created them. Just make sure you use your branded business name in the main title of the accounts or better yet make it your login and/or alias. By doing this you will eventually control at least 10 different accounts and hopefully all of them will be in the top results for a Google search of your business name.

We have just created a another new profile for SlickRockWeb at Disqus. Disqus is a very nice service that allow you to use a single login to register across multiple sites for forums, news and blog sites and be able to quickly provide comments and discussions about the relevant articles using only a single login account. On top of that it creates a public profile for your account and the opportunity to briefly describe your company and provide another backlink to your homepage. Another free account that you control.

Below is a screenshot showing a number of social media profiles for SlickRockWeb Inc. What is important is that all of these profiles are controlled by us and thus we dominate all 10 spots on the first page of Google results.

Of course if you don't have the time or inclination to put this strategy in place you can always call us. For more information about our proven SEO strategies call us at 1-800-975-5695.

Kind regards,

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

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April 27, 2012

How Google Sitelinks Work

Filed under: SEO and SEM — rossm @ 2:55 pm

The sub links shown beneath a Google search result are known as sitelinks (see image below). What isn't as well known is how and why sitelinks are created, and what you can do about changing them once they've appeared for your page.

Currently, Google sitelinks are 'automatically' created. Google analyzes the structure of your site and creates links they think will save users time in finding the information they are looking for. Of course, if Google isn't able to find your pages, they aren't going to create any sitelinks - so having an updated and accurate sitemap is probably the most important thing to take care of first.

Although you can't currently set your own sitelinks (this feature may be rolled out via Google's Webmaster Tools at a later date), you can use some 'best practices' to push Google in the right direction. Linking to important pages from within your own site seems to garner results, especially when anchor text and alt tags are used correctly - meaning keep them informative, brief, and don't "stuff" them into your page.

At the end of the day, Google really is trying to provide the most useful information. So by creating a site geared towards helping users navigate your site efficiently, you'll organically be helping the crawler decide which pages are important. The more you try to cheat the system, the more you'll probably just confuse Google, or worse, they'll penalize you in the results.

If for some reason the sitelinks showing up for your page are wrong or not exactly what you'd like - you can demote them through Webmaster Tools.

To demote a sitelink URL:

On the Webmaster Tools Home page, click the site you want.
Under Site configuration, click Sitelinks.
In the For this search result box, complete the URL for which you don't want a specific sitelink URL to appear.
In the Demote this sitelink URL box, complete the URL of the sitelink you want to demote.

For more information about our proven SEO strategies call us at 1-800-975-5695.

Kind regards,

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

Comments (1)

April 26, 2012

Improving Word Press page load speed

Filed under: SEO and SEM,Wordpress Tips and Tricks — rossm @ 1:35 pm

With each new Google ranking algorithm update - it's becoming increasingly important to optimize websites for page load times. Wordpress websites, especially pages using a lot of plugins, can be notoriously slow. Luckily, there's a few tweaks you can do to help speed things up.

To improve the Page Loading metric, especially on Word Press sites, sometimes the "Keep-Alive" setting should be enabled or improved.

In the php.ini configuration file you can change the following to improve the "Keep-Alive" connections.

Change:

; Default timeout for socket based streams (seconds)
default_socket_timeout = 60

to:

; Default timeout for socket based streams (seconds)
default_socket_timeout = 600

Instead of changing the default settings of the php.ini file, one can also use the ini_set() function which can be defined within the PHP page code. All you do is change it to a really long amount of seconds, at least 600 seconds and the connection will not close, when trying web page send/recv commands.

ini_set( 'default_socket_timeout', 600);

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August 12, 2011

Get Emails as Texts with SMS

Filed under: SEO and SEM — Tags: att, email, iphone, smartphone, sms, texting, verizon — rossm @ 5:01 pm

With SMS (Short Message Services) the lines between emails and texts are becoming even more blurred. This is great news for anyone without a smartphone or in an area without 3G or WiFi who needs to be able to receive email messages on the go or be able to receive and respond to email alerts quickly.

If you have a cell phone and a service provider that provides texting services, then you have everything you need to start getting emails as texts. Your new address will start with your phone number without any punctuation. For example, 123-456-7890 would need to be 1234567890. Following that would be the usual "@" symbol - and then the SMS ending (or 'Gateway') which varies carrier to carrier. Verizon customers end with "vtext.com" for example. In this case, the full address would look like this:

1234567890@vtext.com

For a full list of carrier gateways check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_SMS_gateways.

Contacts can either send emails directly to this address, or you could set up email forwarding to this new address whenever you're going to be away from a computer. Regardless, now there's no reason everyone can't have access to emails on the go without having to pay for a media plan and a smart phone. Of course, SMS has a limit of 160 characters (hence the word 'Short' in it's name), so you won't be able to read all the novel-like emails from your great aunt Betty, but that's more of a pro than a con anyway.

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July 10, 2011

To Keyword Stuff your Domain Name or To Not Keyword Stuff: Matt Cutts Tells All

Filed under: SEO and SEM — Tags: adwords, google, marketing, sem, seo, seo company — Eric @ 9:32 am

Matt Cutts of Google Discusses Domain Name Authority and Whether Keyword Stuffing in your Domain name is a good idea.
This idea of purchasing domain names that have important keywords stuffed in the domain name has recently come up and we thought it was worth discussing. Check out what Matt Cutts of Google fame says in the following video. Here he compares brand domain names vs keyword domain names and which is more important and pertinent. Matt Cutts gives us an insight to having your brand name in the domain rather than just stuffing keywords in the domain strictly for the SEO Benefit. He also highlights here that Google may well ‘dial-down’ soon and give a lesser weight in the ranking algorithm to domains containing keywords. If your new SEO firm is advising you that this method might be your magic bullet you might want to think twice about hiring them ...