Latest Articles

WebPosition Going Forward

July 16, 2010 By Webposition SEO Team

We launched the all new, all online WebPosition Reporter on May 11th, and since then have had the opportunity to welcome customers new and old. Over the past two months we’ve received fantastic feedback from our subscribers about how we can make our product even better.

Our top request has been for a White Labeling capability, which we will be releasing later this month along with Secure Online Sharing. Secure Online Sharing will enable our customers to provide view-only access to their clients and colleagues, while keeping full editing, downloading and exporting permissions. Reports that are shared take advantage of the White Labeling feature, and will not have any mention of WebPosition on them. These two great features will be provided at no additional cost to our subscribers.

We moved WebPosition Reporter completely online for a variety of reasons. We wanted to provide a service our customers could access anytime, anywhere. A service that never required a customer to download, install, or update software. A service we could offer to more people on more platforms without requiring a complete re-write. We wanted to provide ranking report data that wouldn’t break every time a search engine changed some aspect of their results pages, as is the case with downloadable rank checking software. We wanted to provide the ability for customers to run high volumes of reports in short time-frames – minutes instead of hours or days – and do so without putting their IP address at risk. We wanted to deliver the data in a more user-friendly format that could be sorted and filtered according to a customer’s whim. We’ve been able to deliver on all of those things, and we’re very proud of the result.

We’ve provided the capability for our WP4 customers to export their historical Reporter data and import it into the new online version. Thanks to the feedback from customers who have taken advantage of the feature, we will be releasing an even more robust version of the import tool along with the White Label and Secure Online Sharing features next week.

Our focus is on improving and expanding our online product offering, and we are grateful for the opportunity to carry this torch forward.

Your Page Weight Still Matters

June 29, 2010 By Webposition SEO Team

These days, it’s easy to take it for granted that end users have high-speed Internet and can download almost any webpage in the blink of an eye.  So to attract visitors, pages get stuffed full of flashy ads, audio, video and plug-ins.  And in the rush to get the page up, efficient coding and image optimization fall by the wayside.

After all, it’s a competitive Internet out there, and that page needs its share of the traffic – now.

But consider the end user.  According to eMarketer, a page can lose 50% of its audience if it takes more than 15 seconds to download.  And many users still use dial up or don’t have access to high-speed broadband, especially in countries that are still building out their telecom infrastructures.

Even if a page loads quickly on a desktop, it may not function well on a smartphone.  According to Chetan Sharma Consulting, US data traffic exceeded voice traffic in 2009, which means that the number of users conducting searches on mobile devices is growing.  But not all users have 3G coverage to download overweight webpages.

Page weight still plays a key role in performance and user retention.  Slimming down a page can increase traffic, save hosting costs and improve page rank.  Here are some resources that can help you test your page weight to determine if a ‘less is more’ approach is necessary.

• WebSiteOptimization.com – Free webpage speed analysis
  www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze
• Webpositionadvisor.com – Free webpage size checker
  www.webpositionadvisor.com/tools/page_size_cheker.php

If your page is overweight, you don’t necessarily have to redesign your entire website.  It can be relatively easy and practical to create a low-bandwidth or mobile version, and the benefits could be well worth doing so.

Adobe Launches SEO / Flash Developer Area

April 1, 2009 By Webposition SEO Team

By Scott Goodyear

I’ve mentioned before that there are various ways that you can make your site’s flash content more search engine friendly. However by and large, it is pretty hit and miss as to what an engine actually indexes from a site’s flash content. If your site is big on flash, you might want to check out Adobe’s new Search Engine Optimization Technology Center.

If you are on Twitter, you can also keep tabs on their SEO and Flash initiatives via their FlashSEO account. And speaking of Twitter, hat tip to Andy Beal.

3 SEO Insights Listening To NPR This Morning

December 31, 2008 By Webposition SEO Team

By Scott Goodyear

I was listening to NPR this morning. They were talking about some experimental photography project that was on the web. I didn’t quite catch the name of the group, so I did a Google search on a few of the keywords that I thought they were mentioning.

Amazingly, even as I was listening to the show, Google had already indexed the NPR page that described the subject of the show. Looking a bit closer, NPR is fairly smart. Before their morning show even aired, several hours earlier, they had posted a text summary of the show.

But… while I listened to their show and read the NPR post, I tried clicking on the link to the http://www.sametime715.com/ site. The site was down. I got a Yahoo 999 error.

Trying again about 20 minutes later, I was able to get to the site, but it did not include any pictures, only the text from the site.

Obviously the site was still having some problems. A few hours later, now, I can get to the site and actually view it normally.

Interesting site/idea but not quite my cup of tea. It looks mainly like something that you would see as a photogallery on FLICKR or someone’s blog. Yet this has to be of interest to someone out there and were it running normally, it would probably gain a considerable amount of links almost immediately just from the NPR broadcast.

3 things that I learned from this NPR experience:

• Plan Ahead! Know how the engines tend to index your site.NPR may or may not keep track of how often Google visits. But if you were to check Google’s WebMaster Tools and your website’s analytics software, like WebTrends, you can compare and contrast the two in order to get a good picture of how often your site is indexed. You may even learn that there are certain pages or areas of your site that are better indexed, or getting more frequent indexing than other portions of your site. You can then plan and publish quite strategically.
• If possible, understand your hosting company and technology.If you know that your site is going to be highlighted on a major TV or radio show, or other publication, you certainly want to make sure that your site can handle a spike in traffic if it occurs. The superbowl flush may be a myth, but the Digg/Slashdot/whatever effect is real.

  You can read about how real it can be: via Inc magazine’s story on gift card reseller Plastic Jungle, a relatively unknown but awesome graphic designer’s post about getting “dug” a few times, or the story of the ever growing and popular social bloglet service Twitter and their experience with technology hampering their ability to provide scalable services.

• Are there other limitations to your account? What stories do error messages tell about your site/company?I would be willing to bet that the 715 site has no control over the error pages that their host, Yahoo, serves up for their site or at least doesn’t know that it is configurable.

  If you can, you may want to create a custom error pages to encourage users to perhaps book mark your site and return later. Give them a hint as to what they are missing. If I didn’t think that this would make a good post, I would have listened to the NPR broadcast, tried the site, got the generic error page, and never came back or tried the 715 site again. In one ear and out the other, eh? Worse yet, what if NPR had linked to the 715 site incorrectly?

  If you were on a social bookmarking site, a blog, a forum, etc. and some page from a site was mentioned, from a site you’ve never heard of, you tried the link but got to a generic error page, would you be more or less likely to return and re-try a site the link? Attention spans are short. Would you give a site a second chance if you saw one of these 404 error pages? Or something a bit better? I would bet that the odds would be better.

  I know that some are thinking, “but that is stupid, it’s just an error page”…

  When was the last time that people were blogging about your error message? Freely creating viral videos about it? Creating error page art, T-Shirts, fan clubs, and more about your site, let alone your error page? Sure this is an extreme, but it shows the underlying fact that a error page can be more than a dead end.

Now, not everyone will care about their site getting extra traffic, visitors, links, and so on. But many of us do. Not everything can be covered or planned for. But you never know planning and understanding a few things like this might help. Good luck in your online marketing efforts!

Using the Windows Hosts File To Test A Site

June 18, 2008 By Webposition SEO Team

By Scott Goodyear

In my last post I spoke a bit about Absolute Vs Relative URLs. In this post I will talk about the Windows Hosts file. If you have a site mock up that you want to put online and test out but the files are not yet ready to be deployed on the live site, you can test your site by using the Windows Hosts file.

Essentially when you type a URL into your browser’s address bar, it has to resolve the string of letters into an IP address. Because URLs tend to be unique in nature, there is only one www.marketposition.com, one www.google.com and so on, there is normally a specific IP address or IP range associated with a particular URL. Your computer also checks a local file on your system to see if there are any special instructions related to resolving a URL.

How To Edit The Hosts File

- Search on your computer for the “hosts” file.
On my computer this is located at:
C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc
this can vary depending on your system.

- Open this file up in notepad.

- Here you can add the IP address where the mock up site is hosted. And the actual URL where the site may eventually be hosted. Or you can put just about anything in. In my own case, I’ve added a few shortcuts in my hosts file so I can type in phrases like “edit”, “blog”, “payroll”, etc. and have my browser always take me to my preferred sites rather than having to type a long URL or click through a mess of nested bookmarks – geeky, I know.

More Info On The Hosts File…

This same sort of trick is often employed by libraries and schools to block access to certain sites or redirect traffic back to an internal page. If YouTube is any indication, this is not an entirely fool proof methodology. I’ve found a lot of kids posting videos on how to get around this…

Businesses use this not only to test sites that aren’t live yet, but also so that employees can type phrases into their browsers like “HR” and get to internal HR pages and so on.

Unfortunately, this is also a way that some viruses and spy ware can get on your system and try to phish for your information. So it’s not a bad idea to be aware of this file and check it once in a while for odd entries.

Introducing The Hosts File To A Colleague

If you want to have some fun with an SEO colleague in your agency… wait until they leave their desk then head over to their computer. Pull up a news page like this one and leave it up in their browser.

Click through “start–>run” then type in CMD and hit enter. Type in: ping www.google.com

Copy down the IP address that shows up. Open their hosts file and put something similar to this in:
209.85.173.99 www.yahoo.com

Save the file and perform a www.yahoo.com search.

Bring the news page back up and when they get back:

“Oh wow Bob, looks like Yahoo actually sold out to Google, it’s not just advertising… Just…wow.”

Have them perform a www.yahoo.com search.

Once they are past the “No way!” stage of your hijinx, you can get back to business and show them how to edit the hosts file so they can test a client’s site with the actual URL being used.

Absolute Vs Relative URLs

June 17, 2008 By Webposition SEO Team

By Scott Goodyear

Working on a new site? Testing code before it goes on a live server? Reading through Google Groups, John Mu talks about the pluses and minuses related to absolute vs. relative URLs. He says that as a negative absolute URLs “cannot be tested on a staging / testing server (e.g. locally) (unless you insert the links dynamically)”. I disagree with his suggestion as I’m a fan of absolute URLs and believe that there is a way around this, by using the Windows Hosts file on your PC. This first post discusses absolute vs. relative URLs in case you are not familiar with the difference.

Absolute Vs. Relative URLs

In case you are unfamiliar with absolute vs. relative URLs, a quick recap no what they are…

In the fake blog page mock up below, I have a few absolute links to sites that currently exist. When you click through the link, they work because the link exists.

Boy, I’m such a geek. I love these fan made Star Wars action figures, this At-At Stroller, and this Tie Fighter computer case mod. This stuff is really inspiring and reminds me of the awe I had as a kid, watching the original movies. The newer movies /sigh, Jar Jar Binks…need I say more?

What if I wanted to add navigation to the page such as this:

<previous post | main | next post > Boy, I’m such a geek. I love these fan made Star Wars action figures, this At-At Stroller, and this Tie Fighter computer case mod. This stuff is really inspiring and reminds me of the awe I had as a kid, watching the original movies. The newer movies /sigh, Jar Jar Binks…need I say more?

Since the domain does not exist right now, lets pretend that the site is down as I’m moving to a new hosting company, an absolute link like this one will not work to test the navigation:
<a href=”http://www.scotts-starwars-memories.com/absolute_vs_rel.html#relative”>previous
post</a>
However I could use a relative link like this:
<a href=”absolute_vs_rel.html#relative”>previous post</a>

Thus if I’m testing the html page on my local hard drive I can still click through the link and see if the navigation works because my browser will add the first half of the link based on where the web page currently exists.

On the plus side, if I move this page to live web server, it will retain all of the relative URLs and I have very little if any edits to make in order to make sure that he page works as long as it works on my local hard drive. There are some caveats, but I won’t cover all of those, only one that John hints at…

“…Relative URLs:
+ make it easy to move content around
+ make it easy to test locally and on a staging server
- are easy to break if linking to content that isn’t moved as well
(stylesheet, graphics, etc)…”

Lets say you store your graphics under the main folder of your site like this:
http://www.scotts-starwars-memories.com/somegraphic.gif

and you usually save your HTML to the same location like this:
http://www.scotts-starwars-memories.com/chewbacca.htm

Then you move the HTML to a new location like this:
http://www.scotts-starwars-memories.com/archive/chewbacca.htm

If your coding on chewbacca.htm used a lot of relative linking, you really need to plan ahead or you’ll probably break items in the code. For example maybe that relatively linked graphic on chewbacca.htm now looks for the graphic at: http://www.scotts-starwars-memories.com/archive/somegraphic.gif … but you forgot too move all of your graphic files to the new folder structure… oops now you have broken images.

As John Mu says, there probably isn’t an “absolute” answer as to when you should or should not use absolute or relative URLs. It is mainly a matter of choice. In my next post, I’ll talk a bit about how the Windows Hosts file can be used to test a web site on your staging server regardless of if you use absolute or relative URLs.

Duplicate Content Vs. Syndication

May 27, 2008 By Webposition SEO Team

By Scott Goodyear

Should you syndicate your site’s web content? If you were to start a new business you might not have a brand name that consumers and web searchers recognize. Even if you’ve been out in the market for years, maybe your local search market recognizes you, but a larger audience would not. In this post, I want to show you a quick example of duplicated content, how it’s not necessarily penalized, and why it can be a smart move to syndicate your content.

3 Resources for Your Search Marketing Tool Box.

April 8, 2008 By Webposition SEO Team

By Scott Goodyear

Often when you sign up for an email account, blog account, or other service, a “captcha” is used to verify that you are setting up a real account. In regards to blogs, it is often a great way to avoid getting tons of automated, spammy comments that do little to add to a conversation. However captchas can often be humorous in their own way.

The 3 sample captchas below ask that enter in two words. But do you SEE two words?:

Luckily, there is a refresh option to download a new image. According to recaptcha.net, the images above are scans from books where the scanning software had trouble reading the page. Obviously, in some cases, humans would have problems reading the images. Annoying for sure, but having to refresh the image might be seen as an extra security measure since a real human would have to refresh the image to get a legible image. Hacking /spamming software might instead use a brute force attack to keep pounding terms from a dictionary into the presented captcha in order to crack it. If you’ve been looking for a way to screen humans who want to post on your blog, sign up for a newsletter, etc. you might consider recaptcha as it is a free service for most applications.

Ever hit a URL and find that it is down? Wonder if it was down for everyone or just from the IP address that you are coming from? There is a great tool at, not too uncoincidentally: http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/
While I’m unsure about how they test URLs, I have found it useful in my own job. I had a customer tell me that their URL was live and that they saw it, but when I tried going there, the URL was not live. As it turns out, the site was only available from their own, intranet.

Finally, if you are monitoring some of the web 2.0 sites out there like Twitter, try using http://www.tweetscan.com/. You can have it scan Twitter for several keywords and set up an RSS feed or send an email with results. This is a great way to see what people are saying about you, your company, or topics that you are interested in.

For example, our interim CEO is stepping down as we’ve hired an ex-Googler to be the new WebTrends CEO .

As you can guess, this news is is being discussed right now. By the look of these comments, good things are being said!

Hopefully these three resources help to get the creative wheels spinning about how you can improve your site and interact with customers, and more. Good luck in your SEO efforts!

Older Posts »