Sanns, LLC Website and Consulting

Search Engine Optimization and Changes

You have a website. Great! But do people find you? And if so, how? (Use analytics!)

A large portion of traffic to many website come from a referral by search engines. How do search engines know what to return when you do a search? That’s the trillion dollar question for many web developers and site owners.

Google and Bing — the major players in the search engine field — each uses their own algorithms. (Bing now provides the search results for Yahoo!) Yahoo! started as a web directory (Yahoo is an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle” and started as “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web” after founders Jerry Yang and David Filo). The web quickly grew too big to manually catalog and place into directories, which is where Google came in. At this point, most search engines looked at keyword (the search term) density, which can be easily manipulated. Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed a method for using backlinks (links from one website to another) as votes of sorts. The more links to a website, the more popular that website was deemed to be. This in essence was the start of Google and why Google dominated. Google has since added many other factors to their algorithm (estimated at over 200) such as authority, context, page load speed, original content and more. You can find a comprehensive list here.

The factors each search engine uses are proprietary, though some have stated what some of the factors are. But if the factors are known, can web owners manipulate the website to rank higher? Yes and it even has a name: Black Hat SEO. When backlinks were a highly weighted factor, people created link farms — pages with nothing but links. Then Google created the concept of authority — is the page legit and who is linking to the page? The SEO field became a game of cat and mouse.

So, the search engines are consequently and frequently tweaking their algorithms to prevent abuse. Google recently announced the roll-out of Penguin 3.0, the latest algorithm which filters out poor quality sites. Changes are summarized here.

My take: look at what Google (or Bing) is trying to do. People use Google (or Bing or Yahoo!) because the results provided are relevant to the user’s search. If you use good content on your site, you will attract the users you seek. If you start playing games to attract customers (bad backlinks, keyword stuffing, unnatural copy), you will forever be playing cat and mouse with the search engines. And you may get banned, which they do to egregious violators. Really, just use good practices (such as proper page titles), make normal copy and if you have good content, the search engines will find out and rank you highly. They want to. And you won’t have to worry when Google rolls out the next version of Penguin or Panda.

Want an effective website? Contact us to discuss it.

WordCamp Philadelphia 2014

This past Saturday, I attended the (mostly) annual WordCamp in Philly. This year, it was held at The University of the Arts on South Broad Street. While the facility had some challenges, the Camp as always is well organized by Brad Williams and Doug Stewart. Four tracks were presented (user, power user, developer and designer).

The first session I attended involved a checklist and review of things to remember when developing a WordPress site. Excellent session presented by Courtney Robertson. While I have developed many WordPress sites, it is always nice to see how others do it, better ways to do it and what I might be neglecting.

The second session was Preventive Development and Maintenance. Very quick presentation but made me think about doing certain things differently, mostly to save myself from headaches down the road.

The third session was about giving great support, presented by three “Happiness Engineers” from AutoMattic (the for-profit arm of WordPress). I learned a lot about how AutoMattic does their customer service, though in hindsight I’m not sure how that would apply to my practice. They are doing customer service en masse by email/chat. I give more personalized service by phone. It is clear that AutoMattic does a great job with customer service.

Session number four was the annual WordPress security session. Every year, the presentation is different as the threats out there on the interwebs change. The “bad guys” come up with new and more complex tricks, which gets harder to fight. As I’ve said before about security, if someone wants to hack your site, they probably will find a way (see RSA [the security people!] or eBay). Security is about diligence, smarts and denying the hackers the consistent use of the hacked platform. Tony Perez of Sucuri presented this year (it’s usually his colleague Dre Armeda) and their presentation is always insightful and entertaining.

Following lunch, I attended the keynote by Helen Hou-Sandi. She spoke about her company’s ability to allow her to work on WordPress core full time.

The next session was an excellent talk by Vicki Boykis about effective blogging. She took a very different view of what makes an effective blogger, which I will incorporate into what I do (minus the really nice art).

For session six, I decided to go to a more technical talk about custom fields. Custom fields are how you can customize the data types entered into the CMS to categorize the output. Excellent session.

The last session of the day was by Doug Yuen talking about speeding up your WordPress site. While I already knew some of the tips he gave, you can always learn more.

Thanks again to the organizers, all the sponsors, speakers and fellow attendees for an excellent conference.

Prepare for the “Dot What?” Onslaught!

Domain names are about to undergo a significant modification that you need to be aware of. Historically, there have only been a limited number of top level domains (TLDs). TLDs are the very last part of a domain name. You are probably familiar with .com (originally intended for multinational companies), .net (for networks), .org (for non-profit organizations), .edu (for educational institutions), .gov (for government agencies), and maybe even .mil (for the military). Each country has a TLD, originally intended for companies operating within that country, such as .us (for the United States), .ca (Canada), .uk (United Kingdom) and .mx (Mexico). As the number of names taken within each TLD increased, others were created such as .biz and .info to allow for more names. These new ones never caught on as well as the originals. A “real” business has a .com address, not a .biz one.

We now transition from the limited TLD era to the wild west of TLDs. Starting next week, ICANN (the folks who control names and registrars) will allow the use of other approved names — including those in non-Latin alphabets such as Arabic and Chinese. So get ready for .bike, .guru, .singles, .sexy, .tips, .recipes and more over the next month or so. Around 2,000 applications have been submitted for consideration. Many large companies were essentially forced to apply for their own names to protect them (imagine someone else registering websites with .pepsi as the TLD?).

Want to register your own name or company name as a TLD? It will cost you. The application fee is US$185,000. Decimal dust for the Googles of the world, but a house for many.

Will these new names stick? .com is still the gold standard and .biz has not taken off. Will people accept match.singles as a domain name? Will people even recognize it as a domain name (let alone software which converts .com text to a link)? Should ICANN have expanded use of second level domain names instead?

The wild west is here. And it starts next week.

Websites for Dummies?

At this point, it is no secret that the website rollout for the National Health Insurance Exchange has been nothing short of a disaster. I’m utterly amazed at how poor a job was done to develop that website. Why they did not use Drupal as a platform is beyond me. Many government agencies — including the White House website — are running on a Drupal platform. Drupal is stable, scalable, secure and handles data extremely well.

I had a chuckle when I saw the picture below of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius being handed a copy of Websites for Dummies. It is difficult to expect a high level administrator to understand all the technicalities of developing a website. That is why non-technical people hire competent people to explain what needs to be done (and to understand the requirements of the client). Clearly, that failed in this case.

I specialize in helping non-technical clients understand in plain english how I can help them — once I understand their goals. If you are not technical and want to get your business or firm online, please contact me to discuss.

sebelius

Don’t Make These Mistakes on Your E-commerce Website

After six years of heavy use, my computer’s monitor is giving me signs that its end is near. As I usually do, I searched online for the best monitor that meets my needs and then searched for the best price. In this case (for a Dell Ultrasharp Monitor), Amazon had the second lowest price I could find. The lowest price was $33 cheaper from an online store I will keep nameless. Normally, I would take the lowest price. However, this online store made several mistakes in their website design and presentation that caused me not to order from them. Here’s what they did and what you shouldn’t do:

No “About Us” page. The monitor costs a few hundred dollars. I know nothing about this company and an About Us page would be helpful in giving me a comfort level in sending them a few hundred dollars and expecting a brand new monitor be delivered. I am not looking for a used or refurbished monitor.
Poor product description. They had pictures and a detailed description of the monitor copied directly from Dell (a poor differentiator in search). Unfortunately, the one key item I wanted to know about was whether the monitor (for a low price) was new or a refurb.
Diversity of product offerings which seems illogical. The domain for the store included “pet store” in its name. I’m buying a monitor. Those two items don’t logically go together. Other store categories include kitchen, baby and beauty. I see no nexus among all these products. We expect Amazon to sell everything in the universe. Perhaps an About Us page would have helped addressed my puzzlement, but there was none.
The home page only contains “latest products.” There was no text introducing themselves to visitors.
The physical address on their contact us page could not be found in either Google or Bing. The city they claim to be located in is within driving distance of my office. I could have gone there to buy the product. But if Google and Bing do not know the address, how do I know it is real?
A reverse lookup of their phone number only returned their own contact page. Usually, that would return other sites.
A Whois record that is anonymous and recent. As a last ditch effort to get the “warm and fuzzies” about this company, I performed a lookup on their domain name registration. What I found is that they used a contact protection services to keep their contact anonymous and that their domain name was only registered in July 2013. I could not confirm their address or phone number. Further, it was only registered for a year. While not conclusive, these are not signals that the company wants to be known and plans to be in business for a while. Most search engines would highly discount this in their results.
No online reviews of their site and no links to them on any other site. I know they’re new, but surely they’ve done something notable or tried to get inbound links. Being invisible on the internet is not a good strategy. I found them via an ad they purchased on Google’s shopping arm. Buying an ad does not confer legitimacy.

So is all this conclusive the company is a scam? No. Ecommerce is about relationships, and they have not done much to build one. The internet is notorious for scams. As someone once said, the internet allows someone to be everyone and nowhere at the same time. There are too many red flags on this one, so I took a pass. Maybe they are legit, but they lost a sale.

If you’re looking for an ecommerce website, contact me to discuss.

Anthony Weiner and Any Publicity…

There’s an old maxim that any publicity is good publicity. I think Anthony Weiner’s recent attempt to “resurrect” his political career by running for New York City Mayor proves that maxim does not always hold true. The reason for his disgrace in the first place was a “sexting” scandal which forced him to resign his seat in Congress.

His renewed political career started off well, with a contrite apology and explanation. Unfortunately, he neglected to tell the public that he didn’t get his sexting problem under control until well after his resignation. Things then headed downhill after that revelation with shouting matches with reporters and members of the public. Weiner was in the news quite frequently but for all the wrong reasons.

The end result was a distant finish in the Democratic Party primary and what might be some irreparable family problems (he didn’t thank his wife or child in his concession speech). And as a parting gift, he was photographed leaving his campaign headquarters flipping the bird to reporters.

If you need assistance with the operation of your company, please contact us.

Using one of these Passwords?

Better rethink your password strategy if you’re like most people. Do you use the same passwords for all your websites? Do you use one of these top 20 passwords of alltime:

123456
12345
123456789
Password
iloveyou
princess
rockyou
1234567
12345678
abc123
Nicole
Daniel
babygirl
monkey
Jessica
Lovely
michael
Ashley
654321
Qwerty

Using a common password opens you up to a “Rainbow List” attack. A rainbow list is nothing more than a brute force way of using thousands of common passwords tries to break yours. 82% of passwords are found on rainbow lists. Don’t be common or predictable. Use a combination of character types: upper case letters, lower case letters, numbers and special characters.

Analysis of stolen password files (i.e. the ones recently posted from Sony or Gawker) show some interesting trends. 93% of all passwords are between 6 and 10 characters long. Only 4% of passwords use three or more character types and only 1% use special characters.

If you use the same password for all of your sites, you risk one site being compromised and your password being used on your bank account, for instance. Only about 8% of passwords found across stolen sites were unique, so 92% of people used the same password repeatedly.

Your best bet is to use a password manager…and not the one in your browser, which is not secure. Services such as keepass, lastpass and 1Password can help generate strong, random passwords and then manage their use. Some are free and some have interfaces with smartphones.

Should you have any further questions, please contact us.