Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with seo

There's a sure-as-shooting sucker born a minute, but Ma'am you mighta been the minute in between.

Anonymous — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 10:10:19 -0800

She spent $8,000 at a seminar on an "internet business opportunity". Now what? My mother-in-law is bright and professional (she has been a CFO for 30 years), but one day last month, she informed us that she had attended a seminar and wanted us to be partners in her new internet business. She had already given them $7,000 for their "platinum professional package", which includes web site construction and all of the training she needs to market her web site. I agreed to help her get something started and went to work researching the company and found out easily by Googling that they have an F with the BBB and hundreds of unhappy customers who never made the six figures they were promised. She did not seem to think that this information was important to her situation, since she is obviously smarter and more motivated than the people who failed with their sites.

The next weekend she went to another seminar and they got $1,000 from her for "business development", which includes walking her through incorporating, setting up a merchant account and tax advice. Then, last Saturday, in a conference call with the two of us, their "success team" mentor convinced her to give her credit card number for another $15,000 charge for "coaching" us through the entire process step-by-step, doing all of the SEO, and a warranty that she would make her investment back in six months. I immediately convinced her to cancel the contract and get the charge reversed. I explained that if we need this part of their services later, we can always call them back and order it later when we can get something in writing and it's not just an impulse buy. She now has some understanding that they have been using high-pressure sales techniques on her to sell her things she did not need.

I am tip-toeing around this because I absolutely do not want to make her feel like she did something stupid. (Back-story: when she encouraged my developmentally disabled little sister-in-law to marry someone she knew for 5 weeks, who needed a green card and we strongly protested, the result was a two year rift and little sister being banned from speaking to us. Yes, he abused her and they are divorced already and he's been deported). So, she sometimes gets lost in hope and deep denial and I want to make sure she doesn't lose everything in the process.

I am committed to helping her build some kind of online business. I am sickened by the idea of giving this company any more money, but I know the high pressure salespeople will continue to call her because she's a good mark. (Side note: the company is in Utah, entirely Mormon and contributes a lot to Mormon politicians. I don't want any money going to fund anti marriage equality efforts ugh!)

She understands that it could take years to build an online presence and longer than that to recover her investment. She is looking for something to supplement her income and keep her busy after she retires. She is willing to take a loss on the $8,000 and not use this shady company, but is still really excited about the idea of starting from scratch to do this right. She trusts me completely at this point and is letting me take the reigns of the whole project. So, what now?

What can I tell her is a more realistic amount of money to spend on building an online store in one of the niche product areas she's interested in (green or pet products or green pet products)? I've found many quality drop-shippers and I've spoken to them on the phone and feel that they are legitimate. Is it even possible to build a business this way that can eventually bring in a regular monthly income?

How can I learn more about the process so that I can protect her from being further exploited? And how can I assertively protect her money without making her resent me? What other questions should I be asking?

SEO Study Help

snapplepop — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 06:25:27 -0800

Can you help me become a Foreign Service Security Engineering Officer? I have recently been granted the opportunity to be assessed/interviewed for this job. In less than a month, I will take a series of written and oral tests that cover my technical knowledge and current world events. They didn’t give me any advice on what to study, except to tell me to read the job posting and be familiar with the description of duties and qualifications. Here is what I’m a little hazy on:

1. Specify, design, procure, install, and certify equipment or products for technical security and information technology systems, such as:

--Technical systems/closed-circuit television, intrusion detection and alarms, locking devices, access control and denial systems, countermeasures equipment, and acoustic/RF attenuation technologies.
--Computer systems/encryption, firewalls, forensics, network intrusion monitoring, and system security audit products.

2. Understanding of the electromagnetic spectrum, and RF interrelationships and characteristics as they relate to the design and operation of electronic and electromechanical systems

3. Knowledge and hands-on familiarity of computer systems, computer security, and familiarity with operating systems, hardware platforms, and networks

I currently hold a bachelors in mechanical engineering and am finishing up my masters in mechanical engineering where I am studying automation and mechatronics. My real worry is the computer and network security, but I would like to be more familiar with everything. That being said, could you guys recommend any technical or current event related study material for me?

Oh, and I have seen this post.

Name Recognition

Ann Onymous — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 17:45:22 -0800

One business + two Flickr accounts + lots of Google recognition = one frustrated business owner. Help me decide which Flickr account to use, or if I should delete both and start over. Some time back I opened a Flickr account and chose a personal URL. I also opened a second Flickr account with the name of my business. I've been using the personal account with greater frequency than the business account, so the personal account is the one that shows up in Google searches if you search for the business name.

I'd prefer the Flickr account with the business URL to be the one that shows up in Google searches, but Flickr does not allow changes or transfers of custom URLs. So I'm tempted to delete the personal account and start over, but doing so means losing all the Google recognition. So I'm faced with three options:

1. Delete the personal account (con: lose the Google recognition)
2. Use the personal account as the official business account (con: personal URL)
3. Delete both accounts and start over

All advice is welcome.

What is the optimal and proper format for naming e-commerce product images for the purposes of SEO?

orehek — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 06:16:25 -0800

What is the optimal and proper format for naming e-commerce product images for the purposes of SEO? We are redesigning our retail e-commerce website from scratch and trying to implement as many SEO measures as possible. We were told that naming our product images properly can prove valuable and is just one more thing which can help potential customers pull up our site better in Google for instance if we name our products the way they would search for them.

However, my question is specifically…what is the ideal format? Please let me know which version below is most beneficial. Thanks!

Custom Blue Widget.jpg
Custom-Blue-Widget.jpg
custom-blue-widget.jpg
custom_blue_widget.jpg

Note: our admin panel will allow us to upload any version above...we just want to know which is best? If there is yet an alternate version please let me know. Thanks so much.

How can I increase traffic to a porn site?

Anonymous — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 10:43:22 -0800

How does one go about promoting a porn site? I do freelance work, and recently received a proposal from a client who wants me to do promotions work for a porn site; my commission would be based on increased traffic. I have to admit total cluelessness in this arena, so I'm hoping Ask MeFi can help. For example, I know for a food site I'd submit pics and links to TasteSpotting, FoodGawker, etc. I'd use Twitter a little, and because food is an interest of mine I'm already a member of lots of communities where recipes are discussed. Porn? Not so much; I've never been into it. A friend already mentioned Fleshbot, so I'm trying to figure out how that works, but any and all other suggestions are welcome. The site, if it matters, has a BDSM leaning. This should all stay legal and above-board; any SEO will comply with search engine rules, I don't want to spam, stuff like that. Help a girl out? You can also email me at heyboyhowdy@gmail.com.

Spammers III: The Takeover

Kirklander — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 09:46:08 -0800

I have a Wordpress site. In spidering the site, and coming up with the little synopsis underneath the title, Google, Bing and Yahoo all believe that it's not a personal Web site but a spammy list of prescription drugs for sale. I don't understand why. My site is described by major search engines as:

"Keftab No Prescription Mentat For Sale Buy Superman No Prescription Buy Trimox Online Buy Online Remeron Avapro No Prescription Lexapro For Sale Buy Flonase ..."

I thought maybe the GoogleAds had overtaken the search hits, so I deleted them months ago. But still with the Mentat For Sale!

Then I tried setting up Akismet controls, because my old blog comments, in my neglect, had become flooded with spam. I also turned off comments completely. I thought maybe Google had mistaken the spam comments for crucial keywords being discussed in the forums. I don't think that was it, either.

Those lists of drugs also show up in Google caches of individual post pages. But when you go to them, they're nowhere to be seen, with a message of "These terms only appear in links pointing to this page."

The creepiest thing yet is that in one cache, a Wordpress post showed up with the title intact, but the body of the post completely replaced by spam.

Could this be an insidious spam takeover that goes beyond just bad SEO on my long-gone GoogleAds, and months-long delays before Google realizes the ads are gone? How do I flush this stuff out?

Does listing every single location you service help your PageRank?

study the living world — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 13:02:14 -0800

SEOFilter: I'm no pro at this, but check out the footer here. Is this crazy strategy of any benefit when it comes to location-specific searches? One would think so, but I've never seen such an exhaustive, derivative list of pages before.

Good free keyword tracker for SEO?

fx3000 — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 07:54:45 -0800

Good free keyword tracker for SEO similar to Digital Point's Keyword Tracker? Does anyone know of or use a good free keyword tracker for SEO purposes? The one I have used semi-regularly is Keyword Tracker from Digital Point. This has worked quite well for my needs but there are problems using this tool now. For one, it requires a Google SOAP Search API which you cannot get anymore and if you had one it won't work after August 31st, 2009 when it is retired. For tracking Yahoo and MSN, the use of a PHP script is required which won't work if the server you are working with does not have PHP installed.

If there are no free apps then what tools have you used that are reasonably priced with good tracking options?

SEO Filter: My boss has asked me for a blue sky list of SEO tools. What are your favorites?

DrDreidel — Wed, 06 May 2009 09:08:24 -0800

SEO Filter: My boss has asked me for a blue sky list of SEO tools. What are your favorites? (more details inside) I work for a firm that does online marketing and PR. I started with them as an intern, but got hired to help out with our search practice. I've been apprenticing, so to speak, doing mainly organic search for the past year or so.

A lot of the work I do is keyword research, where I will take a term relevant to our client and give them insights on what people really mean when they search for this term. To do this, we subscribe to keyword discovery. This lets us plug in one main term and will return up to 1000 actual queries containing that term along with their relative popularity.

We also do optimization by page, where we will take a set of pages and find the best relevant unique keyword for each. We then pepper that keyword into the different tags and meta info on the page in an attempt to rank highly for that keyword in Google.

My boss approached me asking for a blue sky list of SEO tools, assuming no restrictions on price. As I haven't been in the industry long, I'm really not sure what to ask for. Some quick and dirty searching has led me to software called SEO Elite. Not sure if that's really for me. I also am considering a subscription to SEOmoz to learn best practices and such. So finally, my question to all of you MeFite SEOs: What paid tools make your job easier? Or, what tools do you wish you had access to but don't due to budgetary restrictions?

SEO for a product known by different names in different English-speaking countries?

AmbroseChapel — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 18:18:40 -0800

SEO for a product known by different names in different English-speaking countries? [Please assume by the way what I'm talking about white-hat SEO, not tricks, and that I know that semantic HTML, good, updated content and inbound links are key SEO factors.]

How would you deal with a situation where you're trying to optimise your website for a search term, but different English-speaking countries use different words for the same thing?

Say your company makes "scrunchies", those hairband things. Now, "scrunchie" is a made-up word. There's no official term for them.

Now imagine you're trying to sell internationally, and you find that in Canada, they're called "scroonchers", in the UK they're called "kranchies" and in Australia they're called "chuzzwazzas".

You want your product's name up there in the title, the URL, the H1 and so on, but there are four different names for your product.

Would you create separate sites for those different countries?

Would you use text like "scrunchies (aka scroonchers, etc)" into your pages?

Would you trust that Google is smart enough that all four of those terms are linked up in their magical taxonomy database and a search for one will return results for the others?

Is SEO worth paying for?

man down under — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:58:40 -0800

Is SEO worth paying for? A friend of mine is considering paying a company to improve his SEO standing. I've read about some shady practices that have been explained on Me-fi in the past, but are their any redeeming qualities of SEO techniques?

What negative or positive experiences have people had dealing with these SEO improvement businesses?

Finally, should said friend embrace these SEO wizards or run a mile?

Where is the website to test for the CMS of a website?

jacobw — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 11:50:04 -0800

I have lost my bookmark! I am trying to find a website that gives information about a typed-in URL. Once you submitted the URL, it immediately returned technical information about the site. It might have been SEO related, but the most useful feature was that it was able to tell you the CMS the site was on (assuming it was a fairly commonly used CMS.) Does anyone know the site I am referring to?

What are the repercussions of bad SEO?

jim.christian — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 06:35:40 -0800

What are the repercussions (if any) of bad Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques? One of my clients has recently been advised by a friend in her particular field of business to go with an SEO "expert". The friend has stated that since hiring the guy (who charges £2000 and guarantees first page results in 21 days - not to be confused with front page results in 21 days), he hasn't had to spend any money on Google AdWords, etc. The friend has the added benefit of having his address as part of his URL, so that's bound to help, anyway.

The client has come back to me asking for advice. She has a new rival opening up around the corner from her in a short matter of weeks and if what the SEO guy suggests works, then great. However, my spidey-sense is tingling. I know my way well around code, webmastery, servers, etc, but having read through Google's own SEO guide and comparing it with what said SEO expert has used on client's friend's site...well, it looks like he's using SEO the 'wrong' way.

And by wrong, I mean using keyword banks in title descriptors of every DIV tag, a name descriptors, etc. It looks like he's just saturating the webpages with keywords in every available invisible element. Surely such practices are frowned upon, but is what he's doing getting results? And if so, what are the repercussions of 'wrong' SEO? I'd rather have it done correctly, inline with providing sitemap files, proper meta tags, and proper use of keywords, changing relevant content for visitors, etc. But should I be playing dirty too?

I'm reluctant to provide real-life URLs, but if needed, please MeFiMail me.

Thanks

SEO impact of migrating a site to WordPress?

mireille — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 09:57:41 -0800

I want to move content from a site created in FrontPage to a WordPress-based site. What kind of SEO implications can this have? I run a marketing consultancy and have a client who has a ten-year-old site that was created in (and continues to be managed with) FrontPage 98. A decade ago it was an acceptable site but is now insufficient for my client's image. His web-based business really needs better navigation and a more polished look. My client insists on having complete control over updating the content of the site and I have finally convinced him to consider moving over to WordPress, which will solve both the aesthetic problem on my end and the control concerns on his end. My concern is this: he is pretty well-established in terms of SEO (specifically with Google) and I wonder how much it is possible to mitigate the SEO impact of such a change. I don't know if I would do the work myself or if I would farm it out, but I'm wondering what the impact might be and how to prevent loss of ranking if at all possible. Would ensuring that the existing pages (i.e., www.myclient.com/services.htm) stay in the same location have any bearing (for backlinks or any other purpose)? What if I replicate all keywords in the same places? I understand the very basics of SEO but haven't dealt with trying to move information before.

What pitfalls might I encounter? What questions am I not asking? Any help would be much appreciated!

Is it possible to search though multiple Google Local search indexes?

tracert — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 15:39:14 -0800

Is it possible to search though Google as if from multiple locations? First, let me state outright that I don't know anything about SEO. At all. I am a systems guy.

Today I found out one of our users here in the office is using several open proxies he has found in order to see what searching for certain terms looks like in different areas, for SEO reasons. For example, if his search term was "cheese", he would want to see how Google (and others) display results for "cheese" for IPs from several Canadian provinces and also several US states. While this is all well and good, connecting to open proxies like this is an unacceptable security risk, and so I have prevented that user from doing that. Unfortunately, this also means that I need to find another solution for his problem.

My questions, then, are:

1) First of all, would Google queries from, say, Ontario be substantially different from queries that originate in Alberta? What if I modify the search term from "cheese" to "Alberta cheese"? Does location matter then? What about across countries?

2) Is there a common tool that SEO people use to accomplish this task, or something similar? What are the usual things SEO professionals keep in their software toolboxes? I've been searching, but everything I turn up tends to be very sleazy looking.

Clearly I don't quite know what I'm talking about. If I'm really off the mark, I apologize, and would appreciate any constructive advice you could give. All I really want is for this user to continue to be productive and to quit being dangerous.

Does my webhost not like Google?

tropikal — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 08:54:17 -0800

How can I figure out if my webhost is blocking Google indexing? A site I manage is listed on Google but any references to it are at least several weeks old. More info inside. Also I tried getting the site into the Adsense program but Google responded that our site was down or blocked. I have had trouble with the host server over aggressively blocking IP addresses for "too many bad logins" but somehow I think this is different.

When the users get blocked ive been able to submit their IP address or range to the host and 'tada' no more problems, but with Google, I've no clue what range. Or even if it's my host, maybe its my config or just Google.

http://thebehrendbeacon.com
Its a college newspaper site using Wordpress along with the SEO plugins that seem reasonable, (All in one SEO, A sitemap generator that submits to Google and others, and some others)

The robots.txt only blocks the crawlers from, non website folders, like mail, spam settings, etc.

I have tried Google webmaster tools, when I try to verify the site (HTML), it gives me an error saying it cant find the html file, or there was a DNS error.

My webhost is Mysticdreaming.net, cheap, small time, and nearly instant support. (this is really the only problem)

Any help would be appreciated

What are external links, and what value do they provide to my site ranking?

Nixie Pixel — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 12:07:40 -0800

What are external links, and what value do they provide to my site ranking? Are they important? What are external links, and what value do they provide to my site ranking? Are they important? I understand the basics of external linking, but I'd like to know a more in depth explanation. Thanks a lot in advance! =)

Adwords and SEO tips?

AceRock — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 16:06:24 -0800

What do I need to know to start and run my company's Adwords and SEO campaigns? Recommended resources? Tips, tricks and general advice? Case studies about corporate SEO/web marketing and advertising? Words of warning? Thanks!

SEO word salad pornography?

jepler — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 19:49:39 -0800

What in the world is going on with this website (subject of a recent askme)? Have a look at these google results: site:carolscookies.com inurl:locator. Is this an indication that the website's been hacked, or is this the kind of disgusting behavior that passes for SEO these days? I tried to google the site for nutrition information to answer the original question, but my query turned up all these pages. Rather than derail the original thread, I'm asking a fresh question.

Commented Out Text Bad?

pixelnark — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 19:35:23 -0800

/* Is a lot of commented out text bad for a home page? */ When content is no longer being used on the home page, we are told to comment it out instead of removing it. Are there potential downsides to doing this besides there being a lot of extra code that must be downloaded? And besides the fact that is messy, extraneous, and somewhat unprofessional.

The content being commented out are modules that have sales which are no longer valid or current.

What are best practices for changing the directory of a Wordpress blog?

tweebiscuit — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 13:06:13 -0800

I want to move my Wordpress blog from a subdirectory on my domain to the root directory -- i.e., I want the URL of my posts to be changed from http://www.domain.com/blog/post-permalink to http://www.domain.com/permalink . What's the best way to ensure that external links don't die? Is there a way to make sure that individual posts will retain their Google PageRank? I know that some variation on a RewriteRule in the site's .htaccess file is what I'm looking for, but I'm unclear on the specifics. What are best practices for this sort of transition?

Lost in landing page hosting SEO strategies

slater — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 01:04:32 -0800

Our client (Switzerland-based, but internationally operating) currently has companyname.ch as their main site. That's where all their sites' content is hosted. We've also set up companyname.ca and companyname-keyword.com for their international operations. Those sites are just one index.html page where all links then go to "companyname.ch/page=pageid&locale=ca" for the canadian site and "companyname.ch/page=pageid&from=com" for the keyworded site. We recently moved the canadian site's hosting from our servers in Switzerland to a Canada-based host for (minute) SEO reasons. Questions follow... Questions are two-fold:
1) Is such a "landing page strategy" wise, from an SEO POV? Or should all sites have their own content without ever linking to anything at the company's main site?
2) Is it even worth having the hosting according to the domain's country-level name (eg, companyname.ca hosted in Canada is "rewarded" with better SERP by Google et al, as compared to having all of the client's sites hosted in Switzerland)?

Should we switch from domain hack to dot com?

jrholt — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 09:07:21 -0800

Should we switch from domain hack to dot com? For a year we've been blogging about concerts (posting reviews/photos) and for the last 6 months I've been learning a lot about SEO. However, our traffic is still pretty dismal. We're averaging about 120 visits/day.

One of the biggest problems is that it doesn't seem like we can get any traction on Google. Immediately after we publish a post it will rocket to the top for our keywords, but after 24 hours it's fallen away to page 3.

I'm starting to think the problem could be our domain hack. It's a .be (belgium) site that uses a subdomain, domain, ending to form a word, so essentially something like: met.afilt.er

The thing is we own the .com domain for our word, so we could switch it to metafilter [dot] com.

Will we rank higher in Google if we switch? Are .coms inherently more trusted domains? Compelling reasons for switching/staying?

Tumblr google issues

ecab — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 17:33:36 -0800

Why does my tumblr blog not show up in google search? I started a tumblr blog maybe about a month ago with some friends and have recently come to realize that it is not showing up in the google search at all, by which I mean I get absolutely no results searching for specific phrases or the title of the blog or anything similar. Nothing.

Does anyone know why this might be? What I can do about it? It appears that other tumblr blogs show up on google, but I do remember reading somewhere that tumblr as a site has bad seo or some such thing.

Should I forward relevant domain names for SEO purposes?

letahl — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 21:45:08 -0800

SEO filter: What's this about getting descriptive domain names for forwarding? I run my own website, which is basic for my business. Since I am interested in getting some traffic from Google, I have been wading my way into SEO work, and am learning. Someone suggested I get some descriptive domain names with search terms relevant to my industry in them.

To explain, my website is www.lawyerfoo.com. Under her suggestion I would get some websites like "contractattorneys.com" or "legaloutsourcing.com" (I am just throwing examples out there, doubt these are available), and then forward them to lawyerfoo. I have searched "descriptive domain name forwarding" and similar terms on Google but can't find my way to the right information.

My question is: what is she talking about, and will that help? (Even a heads up as to what I should be googling would be super appreciated).

Thanks, hivers.