Back in May, Google was awarded a patent for a new methodology in rankings. Everyone understands how important links are and prior to this new patent, a link was a link (in theory). The new patent puts more emphasis on the psychology behind web users.

Google’s new “Reasonable Surfer” patent in it’s most basic sense tries to determine what a links a user would be most likely to click on. This new patent allows links to carry more weight than others. Eric Enge over at Search Engine Land explains how this will change the SEO landscape.

This new patent is a very easy concept to understand. What would a visitor be most likely to click on when landing on a page?

The real question that needs to be asked, how do we influence users and funnel them into important pages?”

Here are some very basic things that you should consider with this new patent:

• Pages that you want to rank should be linked within the homepage. I’m not just talking about the main navigation. Create a bulleted list of your most important content. When a user lands on your site, what do you want them to see first? Make it easier.
• Utilize unique sub navigation that is specific to the content with links that are relevant. Create a list of related pages and related content.
• Use more images with keyword rich captions. Embed links within the captions if appropriate.
• Start utilizing bold links more often. Add color to your links.

This new patent is definitely a good thing. Google has built their brand on having a good user experience. People trust Google search results. This new patent tries to look at how users think and is really enriches the user experience. It’s clear they have been looking at these types of things for a long time, but now its out in the open.

There are some advantages of being at an agency and one of those advantages is seeing things across multiple sites. Recently there have been some changes over at Google including things like the Caffeine update. This past month we saw some traffic decreases across the majority of our clients. From a two second glance, you couldn’t really see what was going on besides the search traffic decreasing compared to the previous month. We went through and checked rankings and across the board those had either improved or stayed the same. We’re just checking the head of the tail primarily and haven’t gone back through to check the longer tail terms at this point. There came to be some immediate questions about the drop in traffic:

1. Were there less searches in April to cause the decrease in traffic?
2. If my rankings on the head of the tail keywords didn’t decrease, where was my decrease from?

There are some interesting studies about the long tail and that potentially 80% of a website’s traffic can come from the long tail. If these terms were effected, that could be the source of these decreases we’re seeing. We’re in the process of going through our client’s site to see how these were effected and dig deeper. Rand over at SEOMOZ did a great post on the “May Day Update“. I’ve embedded the video below, it is definitely worth a look, especially if you’re trying to figure out what happened to your site(s). Here are a few things Rand had to say in the post:

How do you know if you were affected? Well, start by checking your search referral traffic between April 28th and May 3rd; do you see a drop? If so, is the change in the number of referrals, or the number of pages getting traffic?  A drop in traffic to your big terms isn’t likely May Day, but a drop in pages getting search referrals (long tail traffic) could be. If you monitor rankings for a handful of obscure tail terms (which you should do specifically for this reason), did your rankings suddenly plummet? Did your indexation or crawl stats change suddenly (you can use Webmaster Tools, site: searches, etc. to check)? These could indicate you were hit by the update.

Let us know what kind of things you’re seeing with this update!

The Google Webmaster Central Blog recently announced new features to the ever expanding Webmaster Tools data. The new features are set to allow webmasters to track the top searched queries that drive traffic to the site along with the following data being reported on each of the searched queries:

• Impressions
• Clicks
• Click Through Rate (CTR)
• Average Position

In addition to the new data that is now available, you can “star” a query so that you will be able to track those queries over time:

Overall, these are very good additions to the data that is already available. You are able to get a better picture of how your site is performing with this new data that is now available.

You can read more about these features over at the Google Webmaster Central Blog: Top Search Queries is now Search Queries with Average Position and Stars

We’ve done a couple posts about Google taking the speed of a website into consideration when ranking it. This week Google officially posted on their blog about site speed.

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.

Google also gives some resources to go along with their post on site speed for site owners or webmasters to utilize:

• Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
• YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
• WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance plus an optimization checklist.
• In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below. We’ve also blogged about site performance.

Site speed is just another trust metric that Google is adding to the long list of ranking factors. It makes sense to add it and I think it has played a part for a long time. If a site can’t load, or loads very slow, the crawler that is trying to index the site will leave. It also makes the user question why the site is taking so long if it is visibly lagging.

Google Webmaster Tools created a quiz based on the most commonly asked questions they receive. The quiz will be available until January 27 at 9pm EST.

By taking this quiz and comparing your answers with the answers they will publish at a later date, you should be able to gauge your understanding of Google Webmaster Tools and some SEO basics.

Go take the quiz and remember to print your answers so you can compare them to the real answers when they publish them.

SOURCE: Google Webmaster Tools blog

For the second year, The Karcher Group is getting naked…on the web!
On April 9th, TKG.com will be stripped of all CSS to show support for CSS Naked Day! Also participating is http://websense.thekarchergroup.com and our very own SEO Blog.

CSS Naked day was created to

promote Web standards, which includes proper use of (x)html, semantic markup, a good hierarchy structure, and of course, a good ‘ol play on words. It’s time to show off your <body>

Visit http://naked.dustindiaz.com to learn more about CSS Naked Day!

Thanks to our awesome TKG design & development team, The SEO Blog has a fantastic new look!

Contributors to the cause include:

graphic design intern, Aaron Van Dyke
web developer, Colin Brimfield
web programmer, Kyle Stanley

Now that the dust has settled since the domain switch 9 months ago, it’s time to shake things up again with a new look for TKG.com – in addition to our new look, we also implemented new & optimized URLs (which required lots and lots of custom redirects, thanks again to our IT team).

Back in December, we launched our updated custom CMS which allows our web marketing team make on-the-fly page additions, content changes, image updates, and all other kinds of cool things.

Another highlight includes our Web design portfolio that incorporates new Flash elements.

Coming soon – a brand new domain for our SEO seminars!

The SEO world is buzzing about the recent news that Google, Yahoo and Adobe have teamed up to make Flash file format content easier to find, index & rank. Google’s blog states that:

In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines. They needed to make extra effort to ensure that their content was also presented in another way that search engines could find.

Google’s Webmaster Central Blog provides detailed Flash Indexing Q/A along with several comments that provide informative information as well.

As for Yahoo!, they will have the same capability once they update their technology…I’m hearing it should be soon.

Without the proper site migration plan in place, terrible things could happen to your website. More importantly, without the proper 301 redirects in place, you’re most likely going to face these 5 BIG issues that arise when changing domain names:

1. Loss of Search Engine Rankings – you can run the risk of dropping out of the SERPs all-together; not fun!

2. Loss of Link Popularity – the old domain’s link popularity will be gone & you’ll have to start all over again…this is going to take awhile

3. Loss of Traffic - unless 100% of visitors to your site comes from direct traffic and they all know you’ve changed your domain name, you could lose tons of traffic from Search Engine’s (because you’re no longer ranking for anything), from direct traffic & link referrals because the old domain links are now dead and not redirecting to the new domain.

4. Loss of Conversions/Sales – this includes emails, phone calls, contact forms, online sales, newsletter sign-ups, document downloads, quote requests, etc.

5. Loss of Your Site’s Online Visibility - if your site can’t be found in the Search Engine’s, can’t be found by following a link on another site and can’t be seen by typing the old domain (since this is what people are used to) in the address bar – you’ve officially lost your online visibility

*If you learn nothing else from this entire blog:, please take away this important piece of advice: You MUST implement 301 redirects from the old domain to the new domain or else you’ll lose EVERYTHING & have to start from scratch…