Prop­erly deal­ing with expired con­tent is impor­tant. I have a few clients who reg­u­larly update their web­site and remove con­tent that is dated or obso­lete.  Usu­ally I notice the con­tent is miss­ing and send them an email along the lines of “never remove con­tent!” along with some expla­na­tion. But is just keeps hap­pen­ing, and it is hurt­ing their vis­i­tors expe­ri­ence and their web­site’s search engine ranking.

The con­cern with remov­ing expired con­tent, or not remov­ing it, is that  vis­i­tors will con­tinue to come to your web­site, directed by search engines and out­side links, and will not find what they are look­ing for.  Either what they wanted is miss­ing, or it is old and out of date.  You have just made a bad impres­sion.  Fur­ther, search engines are in the busi­ness of direct­ing vis­i­tors to use­ful con­tent.  If they detect that send­ing vis­i­tors your way isn’t help­ful they will rank you lower in their search results.  Search engines want the pages and con­tent they think you have to be sta­ble and reli­able. So what to do? (more…)

Just launched: Van­cou­ver trade­mark agents CoastalIP.com.  This excit­ing project focused on a web­site design that was search engine (SEO) friendly and user main­tained with a con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem (CMS).  The project lead was Cre­at­ing Excel­lence who gets credit for the lay­out and content.

Blender took their design and cre­ated Word­Press based web­site, our cho­sen CMS plat­form.  Care­ful atten­tion was taken to make the tem­plate adapt­able so the web­site can grow.  New pages can eas­ily be added, posts to the blog, client logos to the site footer.

The site is also designed for a tar­geted SEO cam­paign.  Spe­cific key phrases were researched and the site ensures these fea­ture promi­nently for google and other search engines to index.

CoastalIP.com is the lastest in a series of web­sites Blender has launched with Cre­at­ing Excel­lence, and we have another in pro­duc­tion.  Look­ing for­ward to many more!

Tech­nolo­gies used: Word­Press CMS, jQuery Javascript Library, HTML 5

Visit Trade­mark Agents  — coastalip.com

Site cred­its:
Lay­out,  Design, and Mar­ket­ing — creatingexcellence.ca
Build and Pro­gram­ming — Blender
Pho­tog­ra­phy — photosbykathryn.com 

SEO pro­mo­tion of your web­site must con­sider both fac­tors inside your web­site, the design of your web­site, and out­side on web­sites that refer to you.  Search engines will look at where your web­site exists in the inter­net — who is link­ing to you and how rep­utable are they.  These are called back-links.

Good qual­ity back-links require a lit­tle work, but are worth­while.  One source for back-links are web­site direc­to­ries.  They will list your web­site and a descrip­tion.  There are bet­ter types of back-links, but direc­to­ries are cheap (free) and easy.  You do, how­ever, need a lot of them. There are ser­vices that can sub­mit your site auto­mat­i­cally for a fee, and you can also pay these direc­to­ries to pri­or­i­tize your list­ing.  Just be ready with your web­site’s address, title, and description.

This VERY long list has more direc­to­ries than you could ever need.  PR refers to PageR­ank and is a mea­sure of the direc­to­ries reputation.

(more…)

Web Design Digest lists 4 rea­sons your great look­ing web­site isn’t gen­er­at­ing any heat — tar­geted land­ing pages, clear call-to-action, direct home­page, and per­sonal connection.

Top 4 Rea­sons Your Beau­ti­ful Web­site Doesn’t Convert

SEO­Moz have cre­ated a great begin­ners guide to SEO.  I rec­om­mend all my clients read this guide, espe­cially the chap­ters on grow­ing in bound links and key­word research.  This guide will help you to under­stand what I am talk­ing about…

Begin­ners Guide to SEO

Long­time client Gary Mitchell first hired Blender in 2006.  He recently wanted to update and re-brand the web­site for his core busi­ness GEM Com­mu­ni­ca­tions.  His exist­ing web­site was dated,  per­formed poorly from a Search Engine Opti­miza­tion (SEO) stand­point, and used tech­nolo­gies such as Flash which are no longer suit­able for gen­eral web­site design. Gary wanted a mod­ern web­site that would give him all the advan­tages the inter­net offers.

Our redesign stayed true to the appear­ance of the old, but com­pletely replaced the foun­da­tion and back end.  Blender rec­om­mended using the Word­Press Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tem (CMS) so that Gary could main­tain the con­tent of On Trac on his own ensur­ing his web­site was always up to date.  Word­Press offers well struc­tured web pages where search engines are con­cerned and scales well to any size website.

Another focus was an expan­sion into social media includ­ing LinkedIn, Face­book, and Twit­ter.  On Trac would have a pres­ence on all three with the web­site act­ing as a hub from which con­tent would be shared out.

The suc­cess of the re-design will be tracked using inte­grated Google Ana­lyt­ics for traf­fic mon­i­tor­ing.  Vis­i­tors can give feed­back through web­site feed­back forms, a blog post com­ment sys­tem, and  through social media integration.

Tech­nolo­gies: Word­Press, PHP, CSS, Javascript, jQuery

Visit On Trac Coaching

For search engine opti­miza­tion (SEO) an impor­tant fac­tor con­sid­ered by search engines is inbound links — links from other web­pages.  The best link is one from another web­site who does not link back to you AND has not des­ig­nated the link as ‘nofol­low’.  A nofol­low des­ig­na­tion tells search engines that the link is either paid or some­how solicited or affil­i­ated.  Often these links will hap­pen nat­u­rally over time with good con­tent, but what if you are in a hurry?   Although at first glance it would seem easy to arrange these links, in prac­tice it can be dif­fi­cult and time con­sum­ing. Espe­cially for really good links.

One way to cre­ate our links is to author con­tent on blogs or other com­mu­nity based web­sites.  One such web­site is Hub­pages where you can author your own arti­cles with out­go­ing links.  The catch is that ini­tially your out­go­ing links are nofol­low, but once you achieve a cer­tain level of cred­i­bil­ity with Hub­pages your links lose this designation.

I am now 12 days in on an SEO exper­i­ment on Hub­pages. My ‘hub­ber’ author rat­ing has passed 75/100 at which point the links in the arti­cles I wrote lost their ‘nofol­low’ des­ig­na­tion. No news yet on whether this is help­ing my web­site in terms of SEO, but it is early days. My con­cern at the moment is my hub­ber rat­ing peaked at 82 and has since dropped to 78 … must main­tain that 75 rat­ing!  To achieve my hub­ber rat­ing I wrote two arti­cles, both orig­i­nal and full of great con­tent.  I also read some other authors hubs and made some com­ments on their work.

You can find links to my Hub­pages in my Face­book and Twit­ter feeds.  Don’t want to link to Hub­pages here though!