Making the web work for you
This new version took us a while to release. It brings a lot of SEO and functional improvements. Some of the changes affect your site structure, so our upgrade note makes sure you are informed:
WordPress attachment URLs are redirected to file URLs - when cleaning up client websites, we often find a lof of URLs like
Keep reading FV Simpler SEO Improvements
This is the basic outline of the presentation I made at ReBar Toronto. Alec moderated and we fielded a lot of questions together about Google+ and Facebook after the presentation. Alas, we only have detailed notes from the opening presentation.
The first rule of tweeting the right way is to actually have something to say. No one can accuse you of spam if you share something that’s of real value to them. You should always remember that. If you are tweeting about something which you wrote or posted to your own website, make sure you would want to read it first before starting to promote it to other people.
Keep reading How To Do Social Media Right: Tweet and Get Retweeted
Every week Quora will mail you questions and answers which you might be interested in. In my inbox just arrived Aaron Wall's answer to the question "What's the most awesome SEO material I can lay my hands on?" Aaron and I go back a long way and I'm always interested in what he has to say about SEO, so I clicked through.
I was astonished at how facile and amorphous Aaron's answer was, apart from the first sentence (which is a very important distinction). Enough to comment on it and write this post.
Keep reading Quora SEO: Best single resource to learn SEO
SEO and social web conferences organized by SEOmoz and Distilled gained high reputation as major events in web search industry, and Foliovision is glad to take part once again. London Search Love 2011 was slightly rebranded, but that should not confuse you – linkbuilding and social media still play the key role!
Keep reading SearchLove Conference London 2011 - Day One
Every web marketer using social media on a daily basis needs a social media client. You simply can’t log in and out of dozen different Twitter or Facebook accounts manually several times a day. So the concern is not ‘if,’ but ‘which?’
Originally built as a social video sharing service by French entrepreneur Loic Le Meuron, Seesmic purchased Twitter client Twhirl soon after its inception and set its route as an ambitious social media client. After acquiring Ping.fm a year ago, Seesmic’s creators decided to try to climb to the leading position on the social media management market, and the slightly overblown statements on their site try to persuade visitors that they’ve already succeeded. So, what is Seesmic? A good solution for social media management? Maybe. Will it “take your online brand to the next level?” Not so sure about that.
Keep reading Seesmic Social Media Client – Social Cluttering Done Right
Keep reading Review: Distilled & SEOmoz Expert Training London Day Two
As an owner of both SEOmoz Basic SEO Training DVD and the SEOmoz Advanced Training DVD, I knew that the speakers knew their stuff and they looked like a fun crowd to boot. So I decided to attend the SEO Expert Training live conference in London on October 19 and 20.
Definitely yes, but…
Let’s start with the program which Distilled and SEOmoz organised for us. In a word, superb. The program included dedicated sessions on:
For the most part this partial list of topics is a dreamlist of issues which I’d like to hear about in depth.
Keep reading Review: Distilled & SEOmoz Expert Training London Day One
One of the leading experts in search engine marketing offers another interesting piece for you. Recently, we have reviewed their two-disc video labeled Basics. That was a good starter for their next release. SEOmoz Advanced SEO Training Series DVD is hidden in four discs, asking for almost 12 hours of your time. Eight gentlemen and three ladies will guide you in sixteen different chapters through the world of expert SEO.
This time there are no introductions, we go straight to the action. I have to say most of the speakers are experienced and know how to tell the message to the audience. Especially Rand and Stephan grab your attention immediately. Unfortunately, two or three speakers will remind you boring hours spent with old professors on college (especially Duncan Morris), some others (Danny Sullivan) are trying to act like on TV show so much that it’s on the edge of being annoying.
Keep reading Review: SEOmoz Advanced SEO Training DVD
One of our Typepad to WordPress clients would really like to rank higher with her nice new WordPress weblog. She is hosted at Bluehost.com. Her IP number is 66.147.242.185. I ran a quick check to find out what other websites are on that IP.
Here is just a partial list of her neighbours:
Keep reading WordPress SEO and Dedicated IP's
We've just had to move another client's old site to a new one.
There are lots of inbound links but the page URL structure has completely changed for the better.
The client wants to rank right away.
What do we do?
301 the old site is the traditional answer.
Not so fast says Eric Ward who is one of the masters of link building, having built links by hand for longer than almost anyone else on the internet and for more large corporate clients than any individual I know (there are some SEO companies working fairly stealth with portfolios of almost 100 big names):
I wouldn't 301 it yet. First I'd run a backlink analysis on the old site and then visit each site linking to the old site, and for those that look exceptionally trustworthy and legit, ask them personally for a hand edit to change the link from the old site to the new site.
Painful.
Slow.
Tedious.Effective.
Frankly for a website with thousands of backlinks, that's just not a realistic option. Well for Walt Disney or some of Eric's other clients perhaps it is. But what should the rest of us do?
Keep reading How to move an old website to a new site address and retain Google rankings
We've been properly labelling and tagging our images for years. Some of our websites get most of their visitors from Google Images.
Google Images is the greatest SEO reserve left in the world. Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts let the cat out of the bag in 2006 and told the whole world about optimising for Google images. But it's hard work optimising images for Google Images and most webmasters still can't be bothered. There's still gold - or at least visitors - in those hills.
As Chris didn't cover the technical details in-depth, here's a step by step guide for optimising your images for Google images.
Most websites publish their images like this:
<img src="https://foliovision.com/images/192a/986943.jpg" alt="image">Where's the problem? Missing height and width, meaningless directory name, meaningless file name, generic alt tag.
Here's what a properly formatted image should look like:
Keep reading SEO Images: Optimising for Google Images
Just discovered an amazing bookmarklet from Aussie company Western Civilization, one of the original creators of CSS editing software. StyleMaster was always a little bit buggy processor intensive, expensive and complicated for me so I learned how to code CSS from scratch. I still think that's the best way to write CSS. But the modern web is getting so complicated that we really need a better way to look at web pages to be able to figure out how they are put together. Well WestCiv has really hit the ball out of the park with this one. They have a cross browser compatible javascript bookmarklet that will let you click and see all the CSS and structure for any element on a page. The bookmarklet, appropriately enough, is called Xray.
Keep reading Xray Eyes for CSS
He talks about the same old tired question of ecommerce websites badly organised for SEO with:
All true, but old news. Spender suggests Web 2.0 has just made it worse. Perhaps. But the real value in the entry are in the two following screen shots.
The first is a tabbed web interface of a good looking Web 2.0 ecommerce site.
Keep reading Web 2.0 Product Pages Done Right
There are lots of ways to build incoming links.
For a small window of time (about six months until April of this year) sponsoring WordPress themes was a great way to get varied links from lots of different independent websites.
Of course these links wouldn't be going on top PR sites generally (custom themes) and you don't have control of the theme of the site.
On the other hand, you do have control over the anchor text, which is already not bad.
And previously it was quite inexpensive - you would pay about $40 or $50/link on a two sponsored link theme and around $70 to $100 for a single sponsored link theme.
Things have changed - most theme developers are pushing three sponsored links and are trying to get $100 or more per link.
With the inflation and feeding frenzy, a lot more lousy developers have thrown their hats into the ring, so there is an oversaturation of themes.
The developers all talk a good game of how they promote the theme on sites such as:
Unfortunately on all or most of these high PR authority sites, your sponsored link will be nowhere to seen. Just a link to download the theme and some jpegs of the theme.
The developers will also try to shout and scream about 450 downloads, 1037 downloads for past themes. But for link building number of downloads accomplishes nothing for you.
What you are interested in is the number of sites which use the theme and include the sponsored links. For the purposes of sponsored links, a single is much better as the end user is less likely to rip out the links. By the same token it would also be better if the links were discreetly nested and not in electric green (where they are likely to attract the attention of the site owner and his visitors and finally get ripped out). An exception could be made if your site is likely to go viral and has a very wide appeal. In that case, clicks from sponsored links might actually contribute to your business. For my regional websites, we are not looking for random clicks. It will never generate any business for my clients and the more discreet the sponsored links the better.
Keep reading How to Sponsor a WordPress Theme Successfully | How to audit a theme sponsorship
