I have been working on the new PlasmaCAM site for awhile. It employs a number of technologies.

The home page was made using Flash. We made sure and added links at the top and bottom for SEO value. The home navigation of the slides were done using Actionscript 3. All the slides are called from a loading php page in Actionscript, and all the slides are separate SWF files. This allows the ability to create a new SWF file and ‘plug it in’ easily without making any changes to the loading SWF file or the php code.

The rest of the site is database content driven. This is going to allow the ability to change text without going into the html and changing it. It is the step PlasmaCAM needed in separating the content from the style.

Other parts of the site, such as the owners community, uses jQuery and ajax functions to save user data and perform client validation.

So far the result are favorable, the conversion rate has almost doubled and the length of visit has gone up by almost a minute. This has been pretty consistent as it was launched at the end of November.

Well I did it, just upgraded to Adobe Web Premium Edition. First I would like to say I love it. It is actually based on web standards and not IE6 which I am grateful for. But one thing I feel got “too easy”, that’s AJAX. I like the way Dreamweaver using Spry to build AJAX into your site, but there is one problem, one word JavaScript. Search Engines have been known to have problems with links and content generated by JavaScript. Don’t get me wrong, I love JavaScript, it’s a great client side scripting language, but with Spry I really feel it will be overused.

Now that it is easy to build these “widgets” what stops someone from building all their content onto one page fed by an xml file? Not much except ignorance by which search engines will index the content. I feel a lot of web designers clients are going to get hosed with regards to engine traffic once a very creative and non-technical designer get a hold of this tool. That’s ok, if everyone starts using this it will just get easier for others that understand SEO to rank well. This is like the Flash epidemic.

I have heard of a lot of even well known companies being plagued by what is called “Google Hell“. Google calls it the Supplemental Index. This index was create for weeding out spammers. It looks for pages that are keyword stuffed, or duplicate content from original source pages. They have very good intentions, but this has been harming a lot of legit sites. All it takes is for Google to think you copied you content from another site and BAM there you page is in the supplementals. When really your site the original content and the other sites are the copycats.

When this happens to a page, whatever search terms your page ranked for is gone. And the problem is that the supplemental index is spidered a lot less than regular indexed pages. This means your page could be there forever unless you do something about it. Here are a few tips on getting out of Google Purgatory:

1. Get relevant inbound links to the page you would like to get out. This does two things: A. Google will hit that page more when it follows the link to your page. B. Creates a since that the page is important and relevant, after all most spam pages don’t get a lot of people from relevant industries wanting to link to them right?

2. Change the content on the page. Look over the content on the page and see if in fact it looks like keywords are stuffed all over the page. Even if they are not, change the content anyway. This will help you bee seen as original and not to be stuffing your page with keywords.

3. Submit a sitemap to Google’s Webmaster Tools. This will help get your site crawled faster. Also put a modified date of a resent date in your XML sitemap.

Those are just a few tips on getting out of the supplemental index. I think with some work and strategy there is no reason for a page to be in the supplemental for 6 months or a year as I have heard other people talk about. Change the page, get links to it, and get Google to crawl it.

When I see a site like www.mysolitaire.com and they complain they have 99% of their pages in the supplemental index it makes me wonder who their SEO person is. I guess they complained so much they ended up on forbes.com. But if you actually go to the site it is stuffed with links all over the place with rings and earrings. There are hundreds of links containing the words he is targeting. Even when they list the products, if its rings, the text for every ring is “view ring” 16 times on the rings section. Google is dinging him for having too many links with the identical word in the link hundreds of times on a page.

The last few days there has been some heated debate over an article written called SEO Workers.

Now it reminded me of a year ago when I found on a forum a company that claimed they provided SEO services. They would not touch HTML code at all. This just went to show you they did not understand onsite optimization. You see, engines look not only your incoming links, but also at your title, heading tags, and even ALT’s for your images to see how relevant it is to the search term. Of course there are a few rouge sites that show up for terms that don’t even appear on the site, and I think this is not common and they just are not competition. So if a SEO company will not change your content or site structure, stay away.

On the flip side if they believe all you need is onsite optimization, also stay away. Engines also look at your incoming links and the anchor text used in those links to also judge your ranking and relevance. If they are unwilling to do things such as directory submissions, article submissions, placing links on relevant sites, and blog/forum posts, Stay away.

These are the two extremes I have seen in the last year in the SEO world. And a company that goes out and blindly does some of these thing does not know what they are doing. They need to know what areas need work and focus on that, while keeping their client informed and analyzing results. In the article mentioned above Janeth mentioned a list of things a site should consider doing to be successful on the web. But here is a list of things an SEO company should be performing or willing to do if necessary.

1. Change your HTML.

2. Create internal links.

3. Analyze keywords, and see which ones are worth ranking for (conversions and traffic).

4. Aggressively seek for incoming links.

5. Research and test areas for improvement.

6. Keep the client updated.

With new knowledge of SEO and web technologies over the last few years, I find web advertising and marketing a must in the world today. But some people have an opposite view of this critical business facet. After looking in forums today I found a link to a site. I will not add a direct link as I do not want to support his cause in leading people astray as to the importance of web marketing. But here is the text version: www dot warringtonwebworks dot com/112/seo-mind-crime/ I would just like to comment on some points on the obvious lack of common sense and SEO understanding. At one point he says:

“…are wondering how to get more traffic to their websites and achieve that holy grail of a top ten position on Google.”

Of course it’s the holy grail, with millions (if not billions) searching Google, and 60% of searchers choosing the top organic result businesses have every right to want to be at the top.

“She was approached by an SEO firm which guaranteed a top ten position on Google for three years!!”

Just a note, stay away from any company that makes guarantees about Google. The algorithm this engine is based on is so complex that Google probably has a hard time ranking in their own engine.

“She then pointed out that the SEO Company wanted £15,000 (US$29,000) for this work.”

Hmmm, is this really that much? $30,000 for three years. Let’s break that down. That’s $10,000 a year, or $833.33 a month. Lets say an SEO expert charges by the hour at a rate of $40/hr (this is cheap) her business will get 21 hours of SEO work done per month, or two and half days. So you can see this is not such a bad deal if the company did not make claims of guaranteeing such high results and if they were legit.

“She should not be considering search engines as the only way to get traffic to her site.”

No she shouldn’t but she should not ignore it either!

“£15,000($30,000) is my entire budget on websites for the next 40 years.”

So if this were true his budget is right around $62.50 per month. Seems like he either is paying way too much for his hosting or he is paying for some sort or web advertising. Isn’t this contradictory to the entire article?

“I want to do a live test now with you the reader, just for some fun and your education. Over the next couple of days go to Google and search for SEO Mind Crime.”

Come on! Why don’t you try it for an actual competitive keyword? Like I said in my comments, this article is a joke. I have done SEO work for different companies and have seen great improvements in sales and brand recognition, to say that SEO is a complete waste of time is like telling your client that marketing and advertising is a complete waste of time. Understand it is not the ONLY avenue of advertising, but with more people searching by the day, it is very important.

As a business with web sites, I have started to get calls from SEO companies. Before I tell you of my experience yesterday I want you to know I am active in a few SEO forums, and do all my SEO in-house. I am ranking on the first page on Google for a lot of terms. So I am no newbie to SEO.

Well, yesterday I received a call from a company called SEOP. He first started off by telling me what SEO stands for. Then he asked if we were happy with our ranking. I did the wrong thing at that point and told him no, and that I am always working on my rankings as it is my job. He then asked me to go to Google and type in some keywords. Then he gave me the word of ‘bank’ and explained that Bank of America was their client and they got them to the #1 spot, doubtful(a company that big is not hiring someone to submit to directories for them as they have 95,000 back links), but I humored him. Then he gave me a great keyword ’spine surgeon’. That’s when he told me that he got the top listing in their position. I proceeded to laugh at him at that point and told him to give me a real competitive keyword to search for. He couldn’t think of any so I asked him if I could find his site under the first 10 pages for Google for the keyword ’seo’. It was not there! How about that!

Remember that there are over 300,000,000 results for ‘bank’ and could supposedly rank them first, but ’seo’ returned just over 100,000,000 and they were not in the first 100 results.

I have come to regard these companies as “SEO Telemarketers”. They promise the world, but have not a leg to stand on. In the end he was transferring me to a “senior technician” but after being on hold for more than I minute, I had all the fun I could handle and hung up.