Many local SEO’s I spoke with argued that social websites were useless for ‘real businesses’ but I didn’t care nor did I listen. I followed my gut when it told me that although the links are indeed not followed by the search engines (because they are blocked in the link code) the anchor text within those links still substantiate the meaning or definition of the content on the page it is linking to.

I kept that to myself and let the other sift through the noise. Eventually it became clear that to have a strong online social presence would indeed benefit one’s website in search – Google’s Real Time Search Results, Twitter updates and a stronger presence of Facebook Fan pages.

Web design companies in Burlington and the GTA had to change their game up to about 8 years ago when SEO came onto the scene and now SEO companies in Burlington the the GTA need to change their game again. It’s not longer about optimizing a website for the search engines but instead it’s about providing decent content and information, about different aspects of your services to a group of people who are willing to listen – your Facebook, Twitter and other social website followers.

I’ll see you all in the new year and be good!!

According to an article from the Search Engine Roundtable, 43% Of SEOs claim traffic has gone down since the Google update:

Some are reporting that the new design is sending fewer referrals and less traffic to their web site. Now, that can be a huge deal for a site that gets a lot of traffic from organic Google search results. Back then, the report came from WebmasterWorld, yes a thread but also the site said they are suffering with the new design. So I decided to see if it is widespread or specific to WebmasterWorld.

There was also a nice video post from Matt Cutts about the May Day Update in case you we’ere aware that there was one.

Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.

I wrote a complete list of Google tips to speed up your website at WebProWorld.com which is much more detailed than this post.

As we can there is a lot of proof that website speed is important for website owners and for the users of our websites and users of Google’s search service.

What do we do now? There are a few things you can do but the first job you should take care of is determining how long  your site to load, which scripts or files are being called and loaded make the neccessary changes to the areas that are causing your site to load slow.

My only question would is how much of a ranking factor is speed going to be? We need to know. If it’s not the heaviest ranking factor we can at least reduce the panic of webmasters worldwide. Let’s see if we’ll hear more about this from Google in the near future.

About a month ago I noticed some buzz in the web forums about web design and SEO companies not seeing their listing or any listings in local search results. Some people believed it was a bug while a few of us thought Google was up to something. Well they were.

As of late 2009 Google indefinitely stopped displaying the results and I think I might have a good idea why. Before I tell you my take on the issue I will quote the last part of an explanation by a Google rep. going by Joel H. said:

I’ll give the usual disclaimer that we’re constantly working on improving the user experience and results will vary over time. So, this could change in the future, but I wanted to be explicit about what we’re doing today.

The answer as to why Google isn’t displaying local results for SEO services in Burlington, Hamilton or even worldwide is very clear to me everyone – very clear.

SEO services are not just yet a real service in Google’s eyes. Simply saying you offer SEO services and submitting your local business listing to Google doesn’t mean you actually provide SEO services and it doesn’t mean you’re successful at it. There are hundreds of companies worldwide that claim they are experts at SEO. Well ‘expert’ denotes unflawed perfection at the service but every single ethical online marketer and SEO on the planet knows there are no guarantees with the service. We can do our best, apply every single skill according to every single test we’ve ever done but in the end, there is always that chance that our efforts will come to nothing. Now what? Get sued?

There are no standards for SEO there are only guidelines, suggestions and results based on testing. Things are always changing with search engines algorithm. Quite frankly saying you sell SEO services is akin to saying you know a search engines algorithm and how do we expect Google to display listings that make that claim?

If you’re a true SEO expert you’re going to find yourself bubbling on the first page of various regional searches related to SEO and in the mean time we’ll have to respect Google’s right to put user experience at the top of their priority list. Thankfully there are people promoting and supporting the idea of SEO standards and when the day those standards are concrete we will probably see the local business listings being displayed for SEO services again.

SEO Builders provides SEO consultation and web design services in Burlington, Oakville and Milton.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey spokesperson Michelle Guy:

About 50 percent of the tweets that come in have a location with them and they all have a time with them and we look for the word earthquake and several other languages as well.

This information is being aggregated based on keywords like earthquake or earth rumblings and so forth.

Stay tuned for more information about this.