Texas SEO Company Blog

Historically, it’s been very difficult for webmasters - in Texas or anywhere else - to use .pdf documents in their web pages. About the extent that they could be used was as graphic images in conjunction with alt tags. That’s now changed.

Google has announced that it can now index scanned documents. That’s good news for Texas webmasters.

You’ll have to check out the examples for yourself, but it appears that Google does a pretty good job of overcoming the obstacles to reading digital images. Now the question is, How can webmasters take advantage of this new ability to get their websites ranked for their key terms?

If you have a book that you’ve written and you’d like to scan a few of the pages to offer your site visitors a chance to preview its contents before buying, those pages can be indexed in the search engines and you could get traffic from the search engines directly to those pages. Virtually any kind of print text can be scanned: Paperbacks, trade paperbacks, text books, magazines, reference books, etc.

Texas webmasters, scan those documents and get your website indexed!

Hosting companies come in all shapes and sizes. Colors too. You’ll find some hosting companies that provide great service, but technically they are still dinosaurs. You’ll also find hosting companies that use state-of-the-art advanced hardware and software but their customer service isn’t so good. Thankfully, you don’t need a lot of customer service.

One of the primary considerations for a website owner is the type of server that your website sits on. I usually recommend that clients stay away from Windows servers. They are typically less expensive than web hosts that provide UNIX or LINUX servers, but don’t make a decision on price alone. The benefits of a LINUX server, especially if you are going to do some blogging, are tremendous.

First, Windows servers have a very difficult time interacting with WordPress, the most popular blogging software. You may not think that’s an issue, especially if you don’t plan to have a blog. But what if you decide you want a blog some time in the future. Wouldn’t you rather have a server that is compatible with your software?

Secondly, and this is even more egregious an issue than WordPress, Windows servers are loaded with code. All Microsoft products are. Because Windows servers have a ton of code wrapped up in them, it makes it difficult for the search engines to find the content they are looking for so that your website can get ranked well. When the search engines have to search and search through code to crawl a web page they may not find the parts of your website you want them to find in order to rank well for your key terms. That’s why I recommend LINUX over Windows any day.

The four leading search engines are always trying to improve their offerings and each one has a unique yet somewhat similar tool to help webmasters make the most of their SEO efforts. These tools are designed to help you see what is popular or what is “up and coming” in the search engines, which is useful if you want to know what people are searching for right now. You can then use that information to play off of the popular searches and SEO your website or blog to meet that demand.

Starting with the most popular search engine, Google, and working our way down, here are four tools the search engines provide to help you with your Texas SEO:

• Google Hot Trends - Lists the top 100 search trends at Google.
• Yahoo Buzz Index - An overview of what is popular at Yahoo. Unlike Google’s Hot Trends, Yahoo Buzz is organized by broad categories.
• Xtreme Movers - This is MSN Live’s list, but it isn’t a most popular searches list. It’s a list of the searches that are rising the fastest. Keep in mind that the lower down the list of popularity an item is, the higher percentage of growth it is likely to see with any movement. I’m a little leerie of this one.
• Interesting Queries - Updated weekly, this is Ask.com’s version of the most popular searches. Like the Yahoo! Buzz index, Interesting Queries is organized by categories.

The best way to make good use of Texas SEO from these lists is to find a hot topic that is at least a little bit related to your niche and blog about it, or create a static web page about it. Be sure to relate it to the state of Texas or your local geographic area, if possible.

For instance, if you are a fashion designer in Quinlan, Texas you might want to write a little piece on your blog about one of the latest fashion trends. Google Hot Trends has “abercrombie and fitch” at 81 on the top 100 list. You could write something about Abercrombie and Fitch on your fashion blog and say something like “The last place on earth you’d expect to see an Abercrombie and Fitch fashion show is in Quinlan, Texas ….”

Texas SEO is all about regionalizing or localizing your SEO efforts to reach the audience you want to reach at home. Do all that you can to maximize your opportunities. The search engine tools are there to help you.

Google Webmaster Central, a few days ago, posted that PageRank sculpting is a waste of time. Today there’s a post over at Search Engine Optimization Journal saying that PageRank sculpting might actually work if your site is big enough. But he’s really repeating what Rand Fishkin said. Who’s right?

I’m going to fall on the side of Webmaster Central. I think for most of us it’s a low pay off activity and you shouldn’t bother.

If you don’t know what PageRank sculpting is, here’s a quick definition: Use nofollow tags in your links to keep search engines from crawling pages that you don’t want crawled for the purpose of cutting off PageRank distribution to those pages and sending it to other pages where you want it to go. The reason webmasters like Rand Fishkin say to do this is because search engines evenly distribute PageRank authority to linked-to sites rather than send the complete PR checkbook to every site being linked to. For instance, if you have a PR 7 web page linking to a PR 5 and A PR 3 then both of those pages being linked to will get a PR 3.5 link credit. If you nofollow one of the links then the other page will get a PR 7 link credit. Perform this equation several times for several pages and you can see that in high numbers you can transfer pretty decent PageRank credits to the pages you want it to go to, but the problem is two-fold:

• Time spent nofollowing your links
• The number of pages on your website

It takes time to go in and add that nofollow tag. For most of us, the pay off is so low that the time spent isn’t worth it. Secondly, most small business websites have so few pages that spending time on such a low pay out activity is worthless. And that’s why webmasters at Google Webmaster Central say don’t both with PageRank Sculpting. I say there are other SEO activities you can spend your time working on.

You are likely losing traffic, and valuable inbound link juice, if you have any 404 error pages on your website. These are pages that can’t be found by the search engines or by human visitors to your website. Whenever a visitor tries to visit one of these pages they’ll get a 404 error page “not found” message. Many users will just go away and not come back. You lose traffic.

But you also lose valuable links because you could have other websites linking to those pages. These are pages the search engines aren’t crawling and therefore you aren’t getting credit for inbound links to those pages. That translates into less link juice and a lower search ranking for your important keywords.

How do you fix it?

First, you need to find out which pages have this problem. Sign into Webmaster Central and click on the website you want to check. Click on “Diagnostics”. Next, click on “Web crawl” then on “Not found”. You’ll see a list of pages on your site that deliver 404 error pages. You’ll see a number of pages that is a hyperlink (on the right side of the page). Click one and you’ll see the web pages that link in to that error page.

You can fix traffic issues by redirecting those pages to another page on your website. But you’ll also want to notify webmasters linking in to your site that you have other pages they can link to. This should fix those inbound links and you’ll get credit for those.