10 Tips for Designing a Web Page That Looks Great and Ranks High

Here are some of the best SEO techniques for Web design that will maximize the impact of your website.

1. SEO-Friendly URL

You need to make sure that the URL of your site is SEO-friendly. Only use keywords that are relevant to your business and relate to it in some way. Avoid using long URLs, and if possible separate terms using hyphens. The URL should give people an idea about your business.

2. Optimized Images

To get a better rank in the search results, optimize your images along with the text on your website. Avoid using large images on your website. Keep the image size from 30 to 100 KB with a resolution of 72 dpi.

Large images make your site load slower. When you are creating an alt image text, make sure that you use keywords in graphics, header images, logo images, and buttons on each page.

3. Responsive Web Design

Designing for multiple devices, aka responsive design, is what Google recommends. This type of design allows your website to perform optimally on multiple devices. From an SEO perspective, a responsive website has a single URL for both the mobile and the main site, which means that you will have to drive links to a single URL instead of two. This is an easy way to increase your external backlink count.

4. Quick Navigation

When you design your website, make sure the navigation is not difficult. Let users experience an easier navigation when they land on your website so that they can easily find what they are looking for. Place the navigation bar either at the top or along the left margin of the page.

5. Be Careful With JavaScripts

When you are designing your website, make sure that you do not use JavaScripts for your entire site design. Search engines crawl through websites to index them, thus excessive use of JavaScripts will cause crawling issues.

Another disadvantage is that JavaScripts do not work smoothly on mobile devices. You need to make sure the website is simple and easy to read for both users and search engines.

6. Fast Page Load Time

Page load time is an important aspect from a website visitor's perspective. Consumers are busy and do not like waiting for a page to load. Mobile users on an average only wait for five seconds for the page to load, whereas desktop users wait only for three seconds for the page to load.

To reduce the page load time, make sure you are minimizing Javascripts, enabling compression, using small images, and browser caching.

7. Creating Sitemaps

Sitemaps have always been a part of best Web design practices. But, since the time when search engines first adopted sitemaps, they have become even more important. A sitemap, along with offering easy navigation and better search engine visibility benefits, informs the crawlers immediately about any change on your website so that the page is indexed faster. From an SEO point of view, we suggest you to do away with a conventional sitemap and create an XML sitemap.

Read this Google Webmaster Help article on how to manage your sitemap.

8. Relevant Keywords

Definitely, using the right keywords is important, but do not overuse them. This will make your page spammy. You can use the Google Keyword Planner to find out what your customers are looking for.

9. Anatomy of Page - The Visual Hierarchy

To fully capitalize on the assets discussed above, it is important for you to understand the page structure. The correct positioning of text, images, and call to actions on the page is important not just from an SEO perspective but for user engagement level as well. A large number of people visiting your website and staying on it just because it is neat and interactive will definitely going to get you into Google's good book.

A good visual hierarchy will help you in separating out important elements from the less important ones.

Here are our recommendations:

• Have a clear head identifying your company's name
• Use the top quarter to communicate your key products/services/features
• An image slider helps in making the page more lively
• Place the navigation bar at a place where users can easily locate

10. Social Media Integration

We all know the power of social media networks and how high they rank in search engine results. While designing your website, you can add social media buttons for your accounts on Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

(Orignal Article)

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Wikimedia Blames ‘Right to Be Forgotten’ for Missing Links

In the wake of the "Right to be Forgotten" ruling in Europe, the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization that operates online encyclopedia Wikipedia, says it has received multiple notices of intent to remove Wikipedia content from European search results.

In fact, in a blog post, Wikimedia says Google has received more than 91,000 removal requests involving more than 328,000 links as of July 18 and more than 50 percent of the URLs processed have been removed.

And, as of August 6, Wikimedia says the notices affect more than 50 links directing readers to Wikipedia sites.

Within some of the notices, Google assures Wikimedia that the pages on the list have not been blocked entirely and will continue to appear to individuals that are not included under the "European data protection law requests."

Wikimedia notes it only knows about these removals because the search engine company sent notices to Wikimedia and because there is no legal obligation to send such notices it is possible other search engines may have removed additional links without Wikimedia's knowledge.

In another post, Lila Tretikov, executive director of Wikimedia, says the organization will beposting notices for each indefinite removal of Wikipedia search results.

Wikimedia has made its opposition to the ruling clear. The post says the European court "abandoned its responsibility to protect one of the most important and universal rights: the right to seek, receive and impart information."

As a result, Wikimedia says, "accurate search results are vanishing in Europe with no public explanation, no real proof, no judicial review and no appeals process. The result is an internet riddled with memory holes -- places where inconvenient information simply disappears."

In comments on the Wikipedia blog, some Wikipedia contributors have expressed their own opposition to Wikimedia's stance.

"Once again, this is a decision that impacts the search engine algorithm which is not some impartial mathematical representation of the truth but is already heavily manipulated by many big commercial and state actors from around the world (from record labels to law enforcement)," writes one.

Another says Wikimedia's statement lacks the European perspective.

"This is by no means a sign of censorship, but rather one of compliance to European law," the commenter writes. "I would expect the Wikimedia Foundation to respect the law. Instead you announce that you have put up a pillory-style page you consider an act of transparency, listing all those cases that you have become aware of, which...runs the risk of being against the same said law. I think this is rather disappointing because it demonstrates the deep divide between the U.S. and Europe on these issues."

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Google Targets Local With Latest Algorithm Update

Recently, Google introduced a new algorithm change aimed at improving local search results. Here's a look at the changes and how marketers can make the algorithm work for their businesses.

Last month we discussed Google's move to integrate many of its local listing elements into "Google My Business" in my column: Google My Business - A Step Forward or Lipstick on a Pig? One month later, the single-location small business business platform seems to be working well. However, legacy accounts with multiple locations have not all been transitioned to the new platform. For the ones that have been transitioned, we are experiencing issues related to responding to reviews, as well as a few other anomalies. We look forward to Google completing the transition and will keep you updated on enhancements.

Now, I am note sure if the timing is related to the upgrades in "Google My Business;" but, Google also pushed a new algorithm change squarely aimed at improving local search results recently. Based on observations of local listings (yes, I used to read the phone book for fun) and specific listings have under management, it appears one of the major enhancements effects the relevancy of the listings for neighboring towns surrounding a particular location.

Forever, Google has been receiving criticism from marketers that their listing algorithm priority focused too much on a straight mileage proximity calculations. This adversely affects businesses located on the "outskirts" of towns or ones that service multiple towns from one location.

There are a few clues emerging in how Google may be achieving this. Clue number one, a greater tie of "communities served" information from the local listing information to the website of the listing owner.

In the following example, you will notice that the seven-pack contains a listings for plumber not physically located in Danbury (Renz Plumbing & Heating).

Upon review of Renz's website, we observe a footer that contains communities served information that matches many of the new geographies that this listing is appearing in that are outside of the "home" town.

Interestingly, this listing is now appearing in a number of additional geographies and it is optimizing better than businesses that are physically located in many of the queried town names. For example, Danbury has more than 100 plumbers and yet now listings are optimizing for businesses located in surrounding areas/towns.

Clue number two: It would appear that including "communities served" information directly into the "introduction" section on the Google+ pages has begun to have a greater influence on listings appearing in geography-based keyword searches outside of the specific town designated for a listing. I conducted a designed experiment that included town names inserted in the website footer (tactic listed above) and inserting a slightly different list into the Google+ page. Towns listed only on the Google + also have relevance and these listings are now appearing for queries in neighboring towns.

Which works better? It is way too early to state definitively, as the listings seem to still be "Google Dancing" and changing position once or twice each 24-hour period. However, it looks like information contained on the website has been tied much more strongly as an optimization signal to the local listing.

So what do all of Google's recent moves mean? I would say that Google is more actively providing attention to the local space. First by streamlining and simplifying the process for local businesses to "get on Google" and second by improving the user experience in the form of improved relevancy of listings for businesses that service but are not located within a given town.

For marketers, now is a good time to go in and review how your listings have been impacted by the algorithm change and begin optimizing based on the early signals of change, including the ones mentioned above. Happy optimizing.

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15 Ways to Approach SEO in the Worst Possible Way

When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), many website owners are still approaching the process incorrectly even with the vast amount of online info describing the right techniques. Here is a list of the worst possible forms of SEO marketing that are still being used today by some.

1. You think that Microsites with Duplicate Content are Still Effective

This used to be a common form of SEO used by website owners to help their websites climb search engine rankings. However, Google penalizes sites containing duplicate content, so now is a good time to stop using this antiquated tactic.  Building numerous sites targeting the same keyword is an inefficient use of your time. Focus on one domain and make that domain the best you can. Make it a hub for your brand.

2. You think that Spinning an Article 50 Times Classifies as Marketing

Years ago,  spinning an article many times so that it delivered the same message but with different words used to be effective and acceptable SEO. The intelligence level of Google’s web crawlers have now increased to the point where this now classifies as duplicate content. Poor thin content with no substance will only hurt you. The user experience is also very horrible.

3. You still Approach Search Engine Optimization with a Quantity vs. Quality Mindset

Trying to acquire a thousand links is not what SEO is all about these days. Instead, engage in quality SEO methods such as delivering high quality content to readers once a week instead of mediocre content each day, social media, email marketing and blog marketing. It's not the mad science project it once was. These days less is more when it comes to search engine optimization.

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How to Eventually Become a Millionaire Using Your SEO Knowledge

There are many types of SEO services you can offer and running your own websites might even be more profitable.

With a wide range of clients you get asked to offer your expertise in many forms, but which ones are the most lucrative?

Here are a few potential career choices for an SEO expert to make.

Teaching SEO

Gathering up-to-date SEO knowledge can be a daunting task that requires a lot of time and effort. If this isn't your daily business you can easily lose touch.

Working with outdated SEO information can even ruin you. SEO is also a hard profession to learn because it involves so many other fields of expertise.

A good teacher is hard to find. Companies should pay top dollar for somebody that can help their team stay up-to-date for both the technical guidelines and possibilities and everything involved in link building.

For a single training of about 4 hours you can easily ask between $600 and $1,200. Most companies require at least four of these to get some grasp of the things involved in SEO.

An advanced SEO expert can teach to in-house teams, freelancers, online courses, and SEM agencies.

SEO Consultancy

An SEO consultant doesn't only teach, but he also provides clear instructions for in-house teams to execute. He checks their execution and directs all the involved tasks and specialized people.

Most SEO consultants are mainly technical consultants that work with website builders. A good SEO consultant should also be able offer strategic guidance that is focused on the ROI of unpaid search traffic.

Selecting the right keyword combinations, determining what texts need to be added to which pages, setting the guidelines for copywriters, monitoring results, and setting up link building are all the tasks of a good consultant.

At this time $150 an hour is a good rate for a broad SEO expert. Most consultants make even more money by selling their consultancy as a fixed fee. Just make sure the client's expectations are clear.

Products and Services

Most companies that rely heavily on search traffic have their own teams for the day-to-day SEO tasks. Setting up teams for certain services can often be challenging and there are many tasks they gladly outsource.

An elaborate keyword research offers valuable marketing information. When you really want to get to know your audience and when it involves recovering search volume trends, competition levels and conversion rates it can easily take two days to create.

Some expensive tools can make keyword research somewhat easier, but a client normally doesn't have access to these. You can easily ask $2,000 for good keyword research.

With unpaid search traffic comes a lot of copywriting. This will often be billed on a per page basis. These so called landing pages can be added for each individual keyword. Depending on the quality and length of a page, prices range between $20 and $60.

When a client works with some outdated CMS that's inflexible for SEO purposes, it's often smarter to build them a new site or additional section in WordPress, osCommerce or other simple open source platforms. These already take many SEO aspects into account and little customization should be needed.

Creating a website in WordPress can range from $5,000 to $500,000. A lucrative business if you use cheap labor.

Link building involves a strategic part, but also requires a lot of manual labor. Getting in touch with all those other website owners and convincing them to link to a website is very time consuming.

It can easily take an online marketer a day a week to make partnerships and acquire links. Something many companies gladly outsource at $60 an hour. Because link building requires a continuing growth as the competition is active, a fixed monthly amount (often $1,000 a month and up) is probably the industry standard.

Conversion optimization comes in many forms and service types. I haven't seen that much industry standardization, but because taking conclusions out of all the available data requires a lot of expertise, an hourly rate of $150 is quite common.

All these services seldom come as a one-time thing. That is why many SEM agencies like to sell them in packages. A mix of copywriting, link building and monitoring starts at $1,000 a month, even for SMEs. If that is too expensive, they should rather do everything themselves.

Revenue Share

All the previous examples show that SEO is often time consuming and expensive for a client. Therefore offering a share of their revenue from SEO traffic allows them to keep the cost within limits and ensures very motivated SEO firms.

For the SEO firm it is often smartest to keep a mix of low initial fees and a revenue share percentage that in many cases earns more than a fixed fee. The risk of under achieving should be limited and the influence on the revenue should be large (whatever metric is used).

Depending on the margins on a product a 5% fee on all revenue from unpaid search is not uncommon. I've even worked with a conversion attribution model where 50% of all direct and indirect sales from unpaid search got paid.

Having Your Own Websites

Working for clients is fun, but using your expertise in industries where product fulfillment is easy or where great affiliate programs (or other business models) exist is often much more lucrative. The greatest advantage of working without clients is the freedom and control you have over the perfect SEO situation.

Link building becomes a lot easier when you don't represent some big brand and when you can easily start many websites within the same industry. Finding the right industry where the competition still leaves a lot of gaps in their SEO approach and where margins are high is the only hard part of having your own websites.

From Steady Income to Millionaire

When you need a steady income to get by, start out with the services at the beginning of this article. Once you've made sure you can pay the rent for some time to come, having your own websites is the only chance to become a millionaire from your SEO knowledge.

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Fake Googlebot Activity up 61% [Report]

Just in time for the annual security conferences of Black Hat and Defcon in Las Vegas, Nevada, Incapusla Security has released their latest report on the state of Googlebot (and it's evil malicious twin). The news isn't good for those of us who spend our days staring at website statistics.

Malicious activity is up 61 percent, and one in every 24 visits is a fake bot. More than 34 percent are used for DDoS attacks, hacking, scraping, spamming, or other malicious activities.

So what does this mean for you?

Methodology

Incapsula studied:

...over 400 million search engine visits to 10,000 sites, resulting in over 2.19 billion page crawls over a 30 day period.

Information about Googlebot impostors (a.k.a., Fake Googlebots) comes from inspection of more than 50 million Googlebot impostor visits, as well as findings from our 'DDoS Threat Landscape' report, published earlier this year.

Incapsula's Findings

When Incapsula looked at the standard Googlebot, there were some interesting discoveries.

First of note is that Googlebot crawls more pages than all other search engines combined at 60.5 percent.

What they found when analyzing these visits was also a bit unexpected.

• Yahoo has dropped out of the top five crawlers or engines.
• Majestic 12 Bot, or Majestic SEO's bot webcrawler, has taken fourth place.
• Google doesn't play favorites.
• There is virtually no correlation between site size and
  • Crawl frequency.
  • Crawl rates.
  • Crawl depth.
  • SEO performance.

We know Google is the largest generator of bot visits to your site, that these visits are triggered by something other than site activity and SEO performance, and that they "listen" to the little guy.

All in all, pretty good. But it isn't Google we're troubled by; it's his "evil" twins we need to be cautious about (there may be many – some of them quite perfectly done).

User-Agents

The way we tell what bots are visiting our sites is to look up the user agent or calling cards, in our log files. When we see the corresponding user agent we know the visits came from what OS, computer type and what browser. For example, a user agent might look like this:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.9; rv:30.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/30.0

This information can tell us someone used Mozilla/Firefox 30 on a MacIntosh with Mavericks OS. It can also tell spiders, programs and bots. It is also how we validate who is running around on our sites.

Impersonating Google – a Bot's life

In their review, Incapsula found that "over 4% of bots operating with Googlebot's HTTP(S) user-agent are not who they claim to be." And the big winner was Brazil, which had a bad Googlebot rate at almost 14 percent.

Bad Bots

Why would anyone care about sending out a fake Googlebot?

Well, it's sort of like having a fake ID when you're 18. Sometimes you just want to hang out, most of the time it means something your mother wouldn't like is going on.

Not All Bots Are Bad

You will want to keep in mind that not all bots are bad bots with nefarious intent. A fake bot doesn't always have malicious intent. Some are used for just using the Googlebot to view your site as Google would and then putting that data to work in objects like tools.

So before you block a bot, check its behaviors out. Is it simply crawling? Is it sending itself over and over (DOS (Denial of Service attack)), randomized (could be penetration testing for holes to exploit)?

Once you determine that it is a bad bot you will want to block their access. Be careful however you could wind up blocking Google, so make sure what you block is bot specific.

How Do You Know When You're Getting Faked Visits?

One of the key indicators for most site owners that there are issues afoot are the countries of origin in your Analytics organic traffic.

A normal distribution of the top six countries likely to visit your U.S. site is on the right, the one with fake Googlebot on the left. Now, if you target countries in the left side, it's perfectly normal for you to have these in your distribution. If not, you're mostly likely having an issue.

If you see this, make sure to check your server logs and the user agents and see if you have an attack underway. If so, and you don't have access to the servers, make sure to talk to the company that does, so they can block this for you.

Identifying Bad Bots Isn't Too Hard

The good news is that mostof the time it isn't that difficult to identify the bad bot – once that is done, you can block it and keep it off your site.

That is ifyou have the power, rights, and access. Most site owners don't and must rely on their hosting company, which is why it is so important you pick one that is security readied and knowledgeable.

If you do have access, you can take these steps to verify the bot activity is actually occurring and then use this same information to block them.

How to Identify the Bad Bot?

Identifying bad bots can be tricky; some are very sophisticated, especially the ones mimicking Google. Here are some steps you can take to verify their presence.

Beating the Bot

From Incapsula and their study:

Step 1: Looking at Header Data

In this case, even though the bots were using Google's own user-agent, the rest of the header data was very "un-Google like". This was enough to raise the "red flag", but not to issue a blocking decision because our algorithms account for scenarios where Google deviates from the usual header structure.

Step 2: IP and ASN verification

Next on our checklist was the IP and ASN verification process. Here we looked for a couple of things, including the identity of the owners of the IPs and the ASNs that are producing the now suspicious traffic.

In this case, neither the IPs nor the ASN belonged to Google. So, by cross-verifying this information with the already dubious headers, the system was able to determine – with a high degree of certainty – that it was dealing with potentially dangerous impostors.

Step 3: Behavior Monitoring

However, "potentially dangerous" doesn't always equal "malicious". For example, we know that some SEO tools will try to pass themselves off as Googlebot to gain a "Google-like" perspective of a site's content and link profile.

This is why the next thing we look for is the visitors' behavior, in an attempt to uncover their intent. Clues to such intent often come from the request itself, as it gets profiled by our WAF. In this case, the sheer rate of visits was enough to complete the picture, immediately pointing toa DDoS attack and raising the automated anti-DDoS defenses.

Step 4: IP Reputation and New Low-Level Signature

Although this wasn't our first encounter with fake Googlebots, this specific signature variant wasn't part of our existing database. Even as the attack was being mitigated, our system used the collected data to create a new Low-Level Signature which was then added to our 10M+ pool of signatures and propagated across our network to protect all Incapsula clients.

As a result, the next time these bots will come to visit, they will be immediately blocked. Moreover, the reputation of the attacking IPs was also recorded and added to a different database, where we keep data about all potentially dangerous IPs.

Simply put, you must be aware that user-agents can be fake, IPs can be spoofed, headers can be re-modeled and so on. And so, to provide reliable identification, you need to cross-verify various tell-tale signs to uncover the visitors' true identity and intentions.

Summary

Keep an eye on your organic traffic, especially countries of origin. When something is afoot, make sure to get in there and deal with your bot's intentions. Just be careful not to keep the good guys at bay.

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