Eyeflow Owner Phil Laboon had a article published on Pittsburgh Creative’s new blog today titled “How to Build Free Back Links Using Directories”. Phil goes over how to find industry specific and geo-targeted directories.

“While this may not seem obvious to the casual search engine user the logic is actually very simple. It’s impossible to quickly build hundreds of quality back links to your site. While anyone can optimize their meta tags, title tags, or even body copy there is no quick way to get links from other sites to yours. Of course there are a lot of spam techniques (spamming blogs, reciprocal link building, bogus comments on guest books) search engines are constantly developing algorithms to catch these black hat techniques and If caught – you could face heavily penalization or evening being completely banned from search engine results.”

Read Entire Article

Here’s a Video of Phil Presenting on this Topic this Past Summer;

Popularity: 2% [?]

For more than six years, I have been assisting schools with Internet marketing and helping them overcome some common – and not-so-common- mistakes in their online strategy and execution. But recently, it seems that all types of post-secondary institutions are making some serious errors.

In the last year or so, I’ve witnessed what I consider to be unethical business methods, the problems that arise from those practices, and some other damaging but easily avoidable pitfalls. By avoiding the following mistakes, you can turn around your online marketing efforts and see an immediate impart on your bottom line.

Continue Reading.

Popularity: 2% [?]

We are pleased to announce we’ll be a part of another Pittsburgh SEO Group meeting this Friday at 2000 Technology Drive Pittsburgh, PA 15219. We’d like to thank the Pittsburgh Technology Council for the space and Neal Rabogliatti for volunteering his time to present on his SEO process.

Eyeflow Project Manager, Chris Hornak will also be leading a discussion on recent Google Updates. This will be a great opportunity for advanced SEO professionals to join in the discussion as well as beginners to ask questions and learn more about the internet marketing industry.

The last meeting in November was a big hit and we look forward to seeing some new and old faces. The seminar is free so please remember to RSVP.

Popularity: 2% [?]

It happens all the time. Someone asks their web designer or web team, “Is our site Search Engine Optimized?” The answer is usually, “Sure”, or “I’ll do it right now”. Unfortunately, their site isn’t optimized, and what needs done takes much longer than a day.
It’s disheartening, but we still come across people who think their site is optimized, when it really isn’t. So how can you tell if your site isn’t optimized? Here are a couple red flags.

Title Tags

Meta Content

If it turns out your site isn’t actually optimized, it’s time to call in a professional.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Improving Website Performance Can Help Rankings

In the world of SEO there are big things and there are small things. Title tags, quality content, and backlinks are big things. Yet, you don’t want to focus on just the big things, because there are plenty of other factors that can help your website not only rank better, but convert better.

One of these “smaller” things is the speed of your website. High-speed internet has made the internet run a million times faster than it did back in the 90’s, but it has also changed people’s expectations. Waiting 1.5 seconds for a website to load now feels awkward.

How to Check Your Website Performance

There are many ways to check your website’s load speed. Google Webmaster Tools offers a feature which shows your website’s load speed over the span of several months.

Website Performance Graph

This graph shows one common trend. Websites usually start off pretty quick, and then pick up more and more elements that slow them down. After a while it becomes a messy conglomeration of months of work. Going back to clean up scripts, remove unnecessary code / files, and compress existing code / files can help immensely.

Speeding up your site has two main benefits

•    Having a slow site can affect your rankings. GoogleBot may be a non-sentient (we hope) program, but it’s got places to be. If a page is holding it up, there is no guarantee it will get through all of it.

•    Speeding up your site can increase conversions. If your website slows down at key points in the conversion process, you could be losing countless interested visitors just because you’re making them wait too long.

If your website performance needs a tune-up either you can add it to the to-do list for your web team, or you can enlist the services of an internet marketing firm.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Google was never one to turn a deaf ear to complaints. Proof of this point is the “Latest Results” feature which was recently rolled out. This feature makes it possible to get content in Google as it happens instead of waiting for it to be indexed.

Latest Results Feature Popping up in SERPs

This update is surprisingly easy to miss. Not only does it only pop up with terms which have a fair amount of buzz surrounding them, but Google did a great job of making it fit in seamlessly with the other results.

The Latest Results section takes up about as much space as two normal results, and constantly updates with Tweets, blog posts, and articles about your search term. This is obviously designed to address the bad press Google received for being “slow” to index information about Michael Jackson’s passing.

It’s a nice feature, but it probably won’t be drawing many users away from Twitter clients or Digg. What it might do is draw in more casual web users into real-time news services.

It’s not 100% clear how these results are chosen or filtered. It seems that there has to be something in place to keep people turning the clock back to 1995 by name dropping whoever is a popular search and proceeding to talk about your product.

Many people are wondering if it is it possible to perform SEO for these results. The best way to get noticed in these results is the same way to get noticed in other Social Media venues. Provide your followers with consistent and useful updates.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Recently Phil Laboon spoke on Pittsburgh Tech Council’s techVIBE Radio on 1360 AM. You can read though his notes or listen to listen to the podcast here. (Full list of techVIBE podcasts available here: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/TechvibesCommunityCall)

• Give us your professional background

I have basically been a serial entrepreneur for as long as I can remember. Even in high school I wanted to start a business so my freshmen year I started selling pop and snack cakes to other students. I ended up getting told only recognized sports teams could “fundraise” so I founded the Baldwin Ultimate Frisbee team and kept selling snack cakes out of a portable cooler for 4 years.

After high school I figured out quickly 4 year schools weren’t for me so I went to the Pittsburgh technical institute and got my associates degree and in 2001 went straight to building my own web design/ web marketing firm. At the time I was literally knocking on doors trying to sell websites for $200-$500 a pop. I was embarrassed at the time and didn’t really share it but looking back now I’m pretty proud of it. It could be snowing, raining, or 90 degrees and I would be out around Pittsburgh selling in the days and doing the work at nights.

• Tell us all about your business

Eyeflow is very unique because we are so targeted on our core business which is organic internet marketing. Basically what we do is get sites to rank in search engines by manipulating various factors in search algorithms so the search engine feels you are the best fit for a search – i.e. free traffic. Well it’s not free because you have to pay us to write the content, build back links, etc but the search engine doesn’t charge for the traffic. Depending on when you walk in we have anywhere from 8-15 employees – We have in-house programmers and developers, link builders, content writers, project managers, and of course new client acquisitions which I handle solely.

We are probably one of the only internet marketing firms in the US that is as focused on one branch of internet marketing. People are always asking why we don’t branch out into other fields like pay per click or web design but I think the reason is there is no mystic to them. There is something about taking a small site and getting it to out rank competitors 10 times their size that just gives you this incredible feeling. Although we are dealing with larger companies every year most of the time it’s a David verses goliath situation.

As far as web design that just isn’t really our thing. Most of us have web design degrees but are more into the marketing and analytics then design and development.

Who are your competitors?

This probably sounds like a copout answer but the truth is we don’t really have one. While many companies say they do internet marketing but that’s usually just a side service for them. The larger companies in this industry are Impaqt and Elliance but both are very different then us. Impaqt is more of a full service marketing agency that also offers internet marketing and Elliance is more web design focused. As far as competitors we compete with in the search results that’s another story. Almost all the companies we compete for or searches like “Pittsburgh internet marketing” are mostly small one person shops working from home. Not that I have anything against that I did it for 3 years before I got my own space. It’s funny because Google Local recently started adding street views of their local listings and we were shocked how many of our competitors show residential addresses.

• Who are your partners?

Since we are so focused on one aspect of internet marketing we have developed relationships with many different companies ranging from media buyers like Hoffman Murtaugh to SEO software developers like Sheer SEO. If we see something we like instead of trying to copy and duplicate we just refer clients directly to the vendor. I’m a big karma guy and really do believe it all comes back in one form or another.

• How is the economy impacting your business?

We have been fortunate enough not to be impacted by the recent market. I think there are several reasons for this.

1.      We are still a relatively small company dealing with small and midsized businesses. Some clients have said they needed to take a break because of tightening budgets but for the most part if they are making money and we can prove we’re partly responsible the last thing they want to do is leave.

2.      A lot of companies are telling us they are cutting their traditional marketing and moving it towards internet because it is somewhat permanent and cheaper. If they spend some money with us to promote articles, back links, or additional pages that increases traffic (and leads) every month for years opposed to a print ad or bill board that might get exposure for a month max.

3.      We are a referral based business and the more clients we get the more referrals we get. It’s kind of like a snowball where we don’t really do much advertising but get a constant stream of calls or emails daily.

• How does your product or service help folks save money, make money, save time, etc., etc.?

In the internet marketing industry there is a huge amount of trial and error and in regards to search engines a small error could ban your site and throw away everything a company has built to date. We guide clients through the optimization process and help them based on our experience and eliminate the chances of a potential snafu

• Who’s been your biggest influence/inspiration?

I’d have to say my family. Each of us are so completely different but talented in our own ways. My dad is a union plumber works more hours then I think is humanly possible but when you talk to him you’d swear he just got done with a 2 week vacation. My Mom who is an employee is a retired Air Nation al Guard Senor Master Sergeant just doesn’t let anything get under her skin and gets the job done. While everyone in our office is freaking out she is the voice of reason keeping us on track. Lastly my brother who also worked for me for a bit is able to sit, read, and digest new information on ANY topic which is something I have never been good at. It’s weird to think one family can have such vastly different traits but it works/.

• What keeps you up at night?

This is funny question because my brain never stops. I’m always thinking of new ideas and fleshing them out in my head and the sad by product is no sleep. One of the biggest things that keeps me up is responsibilities. It’s really scary sometimes knowing that so many people rely on me. Especially because I don’t feel like what I do is work half the time. I guess it’s a blessing and a curse. Ha, I’m sure everyone that knows me well is laughing that you asked “what keeps me up at night”.

• How are you meeting the challenge?

The only way you can. Nose to the grindstone and try your best. All I can do is my best and I realized as long as I try things typically work out.

• Biggest lesson learned so far?

Never trust anything that sounds too good to be true. When I was younger I dedicated huge amounts of time to various start ups where I put in huge amount of time where I would get worthless shares or they would sell the company and I’d get nothing. I know some people think I am pretty jaded by these experiences but I think I just learned business at a young age and most people are taken back by it.

• Advice for aspiring entrepreneurs?

1.      Never get a partner unless they truly bring something to the table. When I was younger I thought I needed a partner just to help in general but I realized through some trial and error that a great partner is someone that brings a unique skill set to the table.

2.      Stay determined and keep focusing on your end goal not on short term pitfalls. I see so many businesses fail because people just don’t put forth the effort for it to succeed because of small setbacks.

• What do you do for fun outside of work?

My secret vice is video games. I went to the Pittsburgh Technical institute originally for gaming and it’s always stuck. Right now I’m really getting into Modern Warfare 2.

• Any other business/ personal passions?

I’m talking with a friend now about opening a Japanese Karaoke bar. It’s basically a place where you can rent a room and do private karaoke with your friends. We’re still in the planning stages and it may or may not happen but we’re both excited and we’re the type of people that feed off each other’s excitement. If you have ever seen “Lost in Translation” it’s very similar to that.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Recently Phil Laboon spoke at a meeting of the Pittsburgh SEO Group. Here is a transcript of his presentation.

How search has changed over the last 8 years.

Phil Laboon presentation seo

I have seen a lot of changes in 8 years of working in the search engine optimization industry. When I first started optimizing websites, I was typically dealing with very small clients that wanted huge results for not a lot of money. Many times if a client didn’t recoup their investment back in 30 days they wouldn’t continue to utilize my services even though the work I did would be permanent. This type of pressure made me become extremely efficient. It got me entrenched in the industry, learning every trick and loophole available. You see, back in 2001-2002 Google was still very clumsy and the majority of the smaller sites ranking were exploiting some type of loophole. Some of the most common tactics for tricking the search engines were:

Door way pages: This is when you have a piece of software scrape content from various sites and randomly combine content thus creating thousands of highly optimized back pages on a website in minutes.

Link Farms: Google has always been about back links but they haven’t always been great at determining the quality of back links. So people started realizing if they build hundreds of websites and inter link them Google would think a site was very popular and would rank it high within the results.

Keyword Stuffing: Probably the most widely used black hat SEO strategy in history. It was the art of stuffing keywords into your content over and over to the point where the page barely makes sense to a visitor – Or where you change the text color to blend in with the background – Or even tell the browser through code to move the content off the visible area of the screen so search engines index it but the user can’t see it.

These may seem like easy fixes but variations of these loopholes still exist to this day. Every time a search engine finds a way to counter a technique, another variation would pop up in its place and the whole process would start over. The reason that Google is often considered the best search engine is they are the quickest at finding solutions to these issues.

Where searches are going?

While I’m sure you are all interested in hearing me talk all day about the past, I’ll skip ahead and talk about the future and where I think search engines are heading.

Localized Results: One limiting factor search engines have always had is someone searching for a local service and getting results from the other side of the country. Imagine your house is flooding from a cracked water line and you search “emergency plumbing” only to find that you called a plumber in another state.

Google was the first search engine to really focus on putting local listings in the results with Google Local. You’ve probably done a Google search and noticed that a map popped up above the results showing the locations on the map. These are verified local businesses and they run off of a completely different algorithm then natural organic listings or their Pay Per Click Platform. I would suggest that any company that focuses on local business should optimize for all the new search engine local sites, as they are typically non-competitive and much easier to rank for. The reason they are easier to rank for is you don’t have huge national companies with large marketing teams filling up the results.

User Review and feedback: One trend that I think we are going to hear a lot about next year is how search engines are going to depend more on User Reviews from various community sites like Yelp, e-pinion, and their own locals. In the past, the great hurdle was spammers creating hundreds of bogus accounts and hyping up their own companies. However, with captcha technology growing and databases getting smarter it is becoming increasingly more difficult to trick the search engines. On top of that, search engines would still rely heavily on their tried and true algorithms and user reviews will be one part of a bigger equation.

Online reputation importance: One thing I haven’t noticed addressed much in the SEO industry is “online reputation importance”. Basically, what I mean by that is what comes up when someone searches your company.

It is similar to the user reviews only they are not actual review sites. They may be blogs, forums, or twitter posts. Anyone that knows search engines know that they rely heavily on “neighborhoods” and I think in the near future Google will start analyzes what other words are most commonly used when your company name is mentioned on a webpage and factor that into rankings. They are already doing this if a page links to you, but as their servers get faster I think they will analyze all pages and references.

For example:

If you are a computer company and you put a bad processor in your new line of computers and people blog / post about it everywhere, Google will see words like “overheat”, “busted”, “fried”, or even “FAIL” and effect your rankings accordingly.

Mobile marketing: When my grandmother talks about needing the internet on her phone you know it is time for search engines to take notice. The new age of smart phones and 3G are making it extremely easy for anyone to access the internet instantly at any time. In less than 1 minute you can get a 5 day weather forecast, check movie reviews, get a local restaurant suggestion, and view what roads are backed up with traffic. This is opening a whole new window for search engines as they are perfectly levered for this type of advertising.

My suggestion is for every medium sized business to brainstorm a free smart phone app. A piece of software you can offer for free to your mobile customers that they will want to utilize on a daily or weekly basis. The key is to make it as simple as possible so it doesn’t require a large amount of resources to update.

Here are some ideas our team has had:

Banks: A tool that checks if a client has X amount of cash in their bank account so they know before they go withdraw. Maybe limit it to common variables like $10, $20, $50 but not give any sensitive data in case the phone is stolen.

Restaurants: a quick app that gives you a rundown of the menu and current specials. Have a random “iphone special” where if they have the app they get a half off appetizer.

Schools: Give an interactive map of the campus with all the local hot spots emphasized or access to on campus web cams.

All of these ideas are quick and easy apps that would take a minimum budget to develop but could pull in a large amount of searches or viral marketing.

I’m now going to pass it off to Chris. He will be speaking about some of the ways Social Media is influencing search results. After Chris is finished we will open up the floor to Q&A’s and you can ask any questions you may have. Thank you.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Google Place Pages is an interesting addition to Google’s Local results that I wrote about here when it came out. We’ve been crawling all over them analyzing them and trying to figure out the best ways to utilize them for the benefit of our clients.  One of the most interesting parts of the Google Place Page is the “Web Pages” Section pictured below. Our burning question was: How does Google decide which websites appear here??

Citation, Citation, Citation

The most obvious answer is that Google chooses pages that cite the business in question in some way.  For instance, the following page which is the second result on the place page above, includes the Brand Name, a link to the corporate website, the address of the specific Starbucks in question, and a phone number for the specific Starbucks in question:

This is an almost perfect example of the kinds of pages Google gathers for it’s place pages.  The only way it could be better is if the Starbucks in question had its own website instead of the corporate website to link to.  So, our next question is which types of citations matter the most, since inevitably – as with the following example of Urban Spoon – not every page is going to include all the citations together.

Finding Important Citations

In order to find out which types of citations were most important, we gathered together a list of 33 different web pages from various Google Place Pages to find out which types of citations were included the most.  The following graph distills our findings:

As you can see, the Address and Brand name were almost always included. The phone number inclusion seemed to be relatively important.  The link and email address were less important. Great. So what combinations of citations worked the best, and which were more or less important from a ranking perspective. Good Question. Unfortunately, to get that kind of information accurately, thousands of place pages would have to be analyzed.  But just for fun, and because I figured out how to make pretty colored borders in Excel today, I’ll show you our findings for the 33 pages that we analyzed.

The data suggests that the variety of citation matters quite a bit in deciding the ranking of referring web pages  in the Google Place Pages.  I’m sure there are about a million other factors that Google takes into consideration algorithmically, but it’s good to know that if we went out there and helped our clients create excellent profiles on some of the seed sites Google seems to typically use to populate the Place Pages, we can help them control a bit of this very powerful user experience. 

Further Place Page Theories

On a purely anecdotal note, and with no actual information to back me up, it also seemed that the type of page seemed to matter as well.  Pages with fewer links on them and ones that appeared to be more than just directory pages seemed to show up higher in this section. Just a thought.

If anyone else has any thoughts, feel free to share them!

Popularity: 4% [?]

Maybe it’s because I’m a bit myopic socially, or maybe it’s because I’m so busy, but I did not realize how many hard-core social media buffs there are in Pittsburgh.  Podcamp 4 was an education in that regard all by itself.

I decided to go to Podcamp on a whim after seeing that almost all the tickets were sold out. I expected a small tech seminar with the same old info. I honestly thought it would be more of a networking opportunity than anything else.  I have never been so wrong.

I came late (as always) on Saturday and sat in on the second half of a talk given by the guys from the Wrestling Mayhem Show which centered around different podcasting technologies and opportunities as well as the kickbacks these particular lucky guys got for doing their podcasts on beer and such. (You can imagine the tasty nature of these kickbacks.)

Next up was lunch that consisted of Franktuary hot-dogs.  Franktuary has a rather large presence on Twitter which made them even more perfect caterer for this event.

Next was a really exciting presentation by Priya Narasimhan of YinzCam. She told us all about the great things she and a team of CMU students  have been doing with the Penguins to enhance fan’s experience at Pens games, and how that same technology translated gracefully into iBurgh, the first iPhone app for government interaction. It was really informative and quite motivational to hear about her success.

Last but definitely not least was a talk given by Virginia Montanez and her “butler” Mike Woycheck who run the blog Thatschurch.com, and amazing blog about ‘Burgh life that I am completely and totally hooked on.  She had a lot of interesting things to say about living a double life (since she was writing incognito for so long) and some surprisingly technical tips about taking down your blog discreetly and entirely so that  no one can bust your cover. 

I (sadly) missed Sunday’s sessions due to illness, but I’ll definitely be going back next year.

Popularity: 1% [?]