One page website SEO

A colleague, a client and a friend Jo Williams recently asked me a question about one page websites, specifically “Is it bad for SEO to have a one page website?”. I wanted to share my response with you in hopes that the answer helps you in selecting your next website implementation. Let’s first take a look at what I mean by a single page website.

One page website and what it looks like

One page website is a website that utilizes jQuery(AJAX) technology to move you around without re-loading the page. As a result we all website pages in a single scrolling browser window. See the example above by clicking on the image.

One page website example

Now we know that one page website can be a cool way to execute a small business or an agency website. But do single page websites play well with SEO? Let’s look at an example of a Calgary-based web design and online marketing agency Redline Interactive.

Redline has a one page website featuring its work samlpes and contact information. Pretty much all you need to know about an agency. Until recently the company had been competing for the term “Calgary web design”, among other key phrases. They outperformed the competition in Calgary and, I’d assume, were getting a lot of traffic from Google. A quick “site:” lookup on Google shows that the site has two pages: Homepage, Contact Us page and an indexed PDF file on why hire Redline (there are other URLs indexed but they’re not for consumer eyes).

So far it looks like a great example of a one page website ranking #1 in Google. The biggest reason for such performance was that they engaged in extensive link building efforts. Quick MajesticSEO lookup tells us that they had been doing link building heavily late last year. My apologies for cutting the image short. I just wanted to make sure that I can scale it properly for this post.

As you can see, in November 2010 they got over 6,000 links, which was clearly the main contributing factor to its high rankings. Then, as the graph shows, their link building efforts decreased significantly. As a result, they dropped to the second page of Google for the same term, now sitting in between #11 and #15 in Google.ca organic results.

One page website SEO example takeaways

By the way, by showing the example I don’t mean to disrespect Redline or pick on them. They, in fact, do a great web development and online marketing work. The company just happened to provide an example of one page website for the purposes of this article. Let’s now look at what we can learn from this example.

1. All link building activity was focused on linking back to a single page on the website.
2. This single page website was not being updated that often, being a static one.
3. Link building was probably a single contributor to higher rankings, no new content was produced.

My logical conclusion, and it’s just my educated guess, is “don’t put all your eggs in one basket” when it comes to SEO. This example proves that link building activity does affect rankings. But links, although important, not the only factor Google looks at when it ranks websites.

One page website SEO recommendations

So, given all of that, here’s what I told Jo and what I’m sharing with you now.

1. One page website is a great idea. It looks cool, it smells cool, it feels cool. It IS cool! So, if you are an agency or a creativity powered small business, one page website is a great way to execute your web presence.
2. However, make sure that you have new content created regularly. This can be done by installing a blog inside a directory like yourwebsite.com/blog/. This is my recommendation as opposed to doing a sub-domain like blog.yourwebsite.com.
3. When link building you should link general keywords like “calgary marketing agency” to a homepage, but use more specific keywords to link to your blog posts.
4. This will allow you to both build links AND expand your website with new content through regular content addition.

Valuable update (September 10, 2011): after a few of your comments on Twitter and Facebook I decided to add a bit more relevant links to this post. Here’s what others say about one page websites and their relationships with SEO:

• “The SEO effects of a one page website” discussion at Cre8tiveForums
• “Single Page Website SEO” blog post at Permanently Uncached
• “Repercussions of a single page website” discussion at SEOchat Forum
• “SEO for One Page Websites” Q&A at SEOmoz

I hope this makes sense. Please let me know if it doesn’t. And don’t be shy, I greatly appreciate your +1s, shares and comments below the articles.

Can I train you or your team to be better at SEO?

20 best SEO blogs analyzed

A while ago I’ve shared a number of SEO blogs you should follow to stay up to date on the latest developments in SEO industry. Then, I’ve created a list of top SEO Twitter accounts that fulfills a similar function. This time I wanted to find more details about top blogs. This will allow you and me to see what we should strive for looking at the 20 best SEO blogs analyzed.

I looked up the first page of Google for “top SEO blogs” and “best SEO blogs”. I got two great sites where Rand Fishkin and Danny Sullivan shared their top 10 blogs in SEO. I also got a couple of bigger lists here and here. Then I merged the lists and made my own 20 best SEO blogs analyzed.

This resulted in an extensive spreadsheet that features a number of website characteristics. And I decided to share the list with you. You can use this list to:

• Start following these great SEO blogs
• Play with the columns to see what matters and what doesn’t
• Check the bottom line numbers for top SEO blogs
• See what factors (DMOZ list, domain age, etc.) work for each site

Can I train you or your team to get higher rankings?

Off-page SEO factors affecting rankings

Last week I discussed on-page SEO factors affecting rankings. I reviewed the top 5 websites competing for “calgary web design” and their on-page SEO elements. Then I summarized the key findings from this short study. This week I’d like to talk about off-page SEO factors affecting website rankings as these tend to be more important.

This time I’ll keep looking at the top 5 websites competing for the same key phrase “calgary web design”. Let’s first look at how the websites stack up against each other using Open Site Explorer (OSE) tool by SEOmoz.

Off-page SEO: Page authority by SEOmoz

Page authority is an overall score for a homepage in the case. Based on the OSE tool Wedge IM is in the lead. If you recall, this website has had #1 position in Google for the term “calgary web design”. The Wedge IM lead in this table tells us that Google does rank this website according to its Page Authority score. Three out of 4 other websites are following close behind with the exception of MediumRare, which ranks significantly lower on Page Authority by SEOmoz. The next logical question is: What are the key factors that contributed to a high PA score?

Off-page SEO: PA score and key factors

As you can see in the image above, there are 3 factors that has put Wedge IM in the lead here:

• Followed linking root domains: The number of root domains that have at least one followed link to a page or domain. In other words, this is the count of all followed links from unique websites / domains that lead to Wedge IM homepage.
• Total linking root domains: The number of root domains that link to a page or domain. Just like above but including the no-follow links too.
• Linking C Blocks: A number of linking C blocks indicates link diversity. A significantly lower than “total linking root domains” number tells us that links are coming from same servers, and therefore indicating that links inventory is not diverse. In this case 579 is NOT significantly lower than 747.

Before we go further, here’s more on C blocks from itrogers.

It is not necessarily the case that the two are owned by the same company, but are related. Google uses these C blocks to determine likelihood of relationships if any.  Google would tend to assume that these two sites are related, since they are on IPs right next to each other. It would be even more so if they were on the same IP.

Links from the same C block aren’t necessarily bad. Just make sure ALL of your links aren’t from the same C block. If you own several sites it’s natural to link to your others. Google just lowers the value of these links so that people who own several domains don’t have an automatic advantage over others due to excessive linking. Basically, the more C blocks the better. 100 links from 10 C blocks probably won’t rank as well as a site with 100 links from 35 C blocks. I hope this helps!

You will notice the three measures above are significantly higher than those of the other four competitors. On the table above you will also see that there are other link measures on which competition outperforms Wedge IM in but apparently those are of less value according to SEOmoz algorithms.

Off-page SEO: Quick takeaways

So, what did we learn and what do we need to do to outperform our competition on off-page SEO factors. Here’s two important takeaways.

1. Links from different websites is better than many links from the same website. If you regularly comment on 2-3 blogs / forums, consider adding more blogs / forums to your network.
2. Having a large total links inventory is good (the more votes the better), however make sure that at least half of those links are followed links (no rel=”nofollow” specified). One of the best ways to get Followed links is guest posting on other blogs.

There’s definitely more off-page SEO factors that play a role in website rankings, but it is worth simplifying to: the more quality links you have, the better you rank. I’ll go into ways to gain those quality links in the future posts.

On-page + off-page SEO results summary

Now that we’ve gone through key on-page and off-page SEO factors affecting rankings, let’s summarize the points to see if WooRank and OSE tool by SEOmoz combined score gives us any relevant results we can compare with Google Rank.

You can see that #1 and #4 are matching what Google ranks and this website review of top 5 sites competing for “calgary web design”. Variations, although insignificant, do exist with results 2, 3, and 5.

Again, I do realize that this is a very simplified picture of off-page SEO factors affecting rankings, but keeping it simple helps keep sane when it comes to SEO. I hope you find it useful. Feel free to drop a comment here and let me know if you have questions.

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On-page SEO factors affecting rankings (Part 2)

Yesterday I started looking at on-page SEO factors affecting rankings for top 5 performers on Google.ca for “calgary web design”. Today we’ll look at the contenders and their on-page SEO elements in more details.

On-page SEO review for top 5 listings

#1: Calgary Web Design | SEO | Web Designer

Now let’s look at on-page SEO for WedgeIM in more details:

• WooRank score: 54.2, http://www.woorank.com/en/www/wedgeim.com
• Descriptive meta title: This “Calgary Web Design | SEO | Web Designer” title contains high traffic keywords that the company targets. It does describe what company does though. This title raises a question: is this a company or a freelancer. There’s nothing wrong with either but I prefer to be clear on that from the beginning.
• Promise in meta description: This description offers a promise of no-hassle answers, clean design and easy-to-navigate sites, as well as asks the user to give them a call. I’d include a phone number in this description. There’s enough space left for it too.
• Site links: This is the only website that has site links in Google listing. Site links are granted by Google to show a list of most popular pages on the website. This shows that the site is well trafficked. According to WooRank it gets over 1000 visits per month. It’s not a lot but considering the key phrase “Calgary web design”, it’s enough to get site links from Google.
• Landing page: This is where we land after clicking on the search listing. Are we in the right place? Based on latest website design showcase, we are in the right place. Good! Does this page look like a web design shop? At first it looks like a modern Web 2.0 web design with an image scroller and bold calls to action. However, looking at more details, it appears that the website is based on a Joomla website template with a few things unfinished.
• Headings: H1 tag is one of the most important elements on a webpage. It appears that H1 is missing here. According to WooRank the page has 5 H2′s and 8 H3′s, which is not so bad, but all H2′s are the same “Making beautiful websites since 2004…”. Not the best way to do it.
• Image alts: Also, according to WooRank, the page has 26 images and 18 of them are missing alt tags. Adding unique alt tags to those 18 images might help the company to solidify its #1 position :)
• Address / email  / phone number: The page has contact details of the company spelled out in text on the page. This is exactly what you would want to do to be considered more credible according to Google, especially if you’re running a local business.
• Canonical issue: This page is missing canonical tag (has a www. vs. non-www issue). As a result Google views the URL with www. and without as two separate websites with exactly the same content. This raises a duplicate-content issue, which is bad. The fact that the website still ranks #1 interesting.

#2: Web Design Calgary & iPhone Apps by Mediumrare Inc.

And on-page SEO for Mediumrare in more details:

• WooRank score: 51.2, http://www.woorank.com/en/www/mrare.ca
• Descriptive title: The page title “Web Design Calgary & iPhone Apps by Mediumrare Inc.” sounds pretty descriptive to me. It identifies the keyword, the service and the company. Best one so far.
• Promise in description: This description is a humble (can compete…) overview of services the company offers. It invites the user to make the next step and check the portfolio. No promise made, but clean and within the character constraints.
• Landing page: This page is about creativity. It can be seen the headline and the graphics. To me this one looks as a very clean and unique website design showing that the company is in fact a web design agency.
• Headings: This page has 1 H1 and 8 H2′s. That’s what I like to see. However, H1′s text is “mediumrare” and like embedded into  the logo on the page. Ideally, I’d like to see H1 showcasing a target key phrase for the page (i.e. Calgary web design by Mediumrare Inc.” or something like that.
• Image alts: 2 out of 2 image alts are missing. Adding those in and planing a key phrase in there should help the company make this page more relevant to its target search term.
• Canonical issue: No canonical issue here. All great! Google views the www. version and no-www version as one page.
• Contact info spelled out: This one also has the contact details spelled out in text. Google like to see things like that!

#3: Calgary web design – Apis Design

Here’s on-page SEO for Apis Design in more details:

• WooRank score: 61.8, http://www.woorank.com/en/www/apis.ca. That’s the top scored site according to WooRank. Let’s see what we have here.
• Descriptive title: The title is descriptive, includes the key phrase and the company name. I’m not sure if adding “inc.” at the end would make any difference though.
• Promise in description: Describes the service being offered, has the keyword phrase mentioned and promises “we build websites that work”. Adding a recommendation for next step could make this description more actionable. Like, “get a free quote today” or “call us today (and list a number)”.
• Landing page: The page showcases a visual scroller of featured website projects as well as shows strong calls-to-action such as “improve communication” and “reach the masses”. This website is custom-built, no templates involved, a good sign of a true web design agency. Their websites might be more expensive, but they will be unique, professional and, according to the promise, they will work.
• Headings: The page has no H1, 3 H2′s and 7 H4′s. Not the best case. As mentioned above, I like to see at least 1 H1 per page containing a target key phrase. In addition, H2′s do not contain any text. In this case, they’re just images. I’d highly recommend adding the text to these H2. It won’t be a big deal if it’s left as is, but there might be a good opportunity in adding text.
• Image alts: out of 7 images, 1 is missing alt attribute. Not a big deal, but for the sake of consistency I’d recommend specifying an alt attribute here.
• Canonical issue: no issues here. We’re great!

#4: Calgary Web Design – Web Design Calgary – Calgary Web Design

Now on-page SEO for Calgary Web Design Network in more details:

• WooRank score: 50.2, http://www.woorank.com/en/www/calgarywebdesign.ca
• Descriptive title: Although it contains the keyword and appears relevant this title looks like plain keyword stuffing. It does not identify the company.
• Promise in description: The description identifies the company as well as the key phrase, which is actually the same in a lot of cases. Its description is a bit too long to fit into the Google snippet so the user only sees the initial portion of it. It outlines the service, but does not more to the next step. I’d recommend shortening the description and adding a call-to-action.
• Landing page: The page does not really look visually relevant to the query “calgary web design”. Although it displays various computer related images, there’s nothing that says “a web design agency”.
• Headings: According to WooRank all major headings are missing. Adding headings to the page will likely increase its relevance for focus key terms.
• Image alts: 6 out of 38 images on the page are missing alt attributes.
• Canonical issue: Just like WedgeIM this site may have duplicate content issues and, as a results, may be devalued in rankings.

#5: Calgary Web Design, SEO, E-Commerce, Graphic Designers & More | Web Candy – Calgary Web Design and Web Development

Let’s look at on-page SEO for Web Candy in more details:

• WooRank score: 53.7, http://www.woorank.com/en/www/webcandy.ca
• Descriptive title: This title is descriptive and includes the company name. However, it also looks a bit keyword-stuffed. There are many opinions on the length limit for meta-titles. My personal take is that 70 characters (including spaces) is enough space to tell your audience about the focus of your company and mention your company’s name. Also, with so many different things in the title, the value of each key phrase is diffused.
• Promise in description: With the length of over 150 characters this description does describe the business, but puts it a bit more for search engines than for people. There’s a clear promise “Your best source for Calgary Web Designers” but it gets truncated due to character limitation and the potential customer does not see it.
• Landing page: This landing page is relevant to the search query and actually very useful. It’s got a functional display area that tells you about the company’s services. It’s got a sitemap-like menu of things the company does, which allows users to see all in one place, and very well-organized.
• Headings: The page is missing H1, it’s got one H2 and one H3, which appears very weird. Adding at least a H1 to this page and ensuring it contains target terms will likely help the company be more relevant for their target search queries.
• Image alts: no image alt attributes are missing. That’s great!
• Canonical issue: no problem here either!

What is SEO? Answers from Google and Bing

I get a lot of questions like “What are the key SEO elements?”. These are simple intro questions that don’t require a very detailed answer, yet I created an SEO process that every new site should follow. Of course, feel free to take a look at that process, but also make sure you review the following guides from Google and Bing themselves. The irony is that they tell you what they like to see in proper website SEO and most of the time we ignore those simple things.

What is SEO according to Google

This Google Help section answers in simple words what SEO is and what are the key elements of the website that you should pay attention to. Also, make sure you download the PDF version of the SEO guide and print it out. The document also goes into things to look out for and unfair business practices by your competition and other weird sites you spot while searching Google.

What is SEO according to Bing

This Bing SEO guide goes into key elements of website optimization. Bing tells you directly what it wants to see in a well optimized pages and what your site needs to be like to perform well on its Search Engines Results Pages (SERPs). Some time ago I’ve written an article on the importance of optimizing your website for Bing search engine. The document in this post is actually telling you what you should do to your website to make sure it ranks well for selected key phrases.

As you can see, it’s not rocket science and the information is readily available from search engines themselves. Of course, they’re not disclosing their algorithms, otherwise they would be out of business :). Search engines are not there to change algorithms and prevent you from ranking. Remember, the goal of search engines is to ensure it displays relevant results for every search query. So all you need to do is to follow their simple guidelines, make great content that is worth sharing, +1-ing and linking to.

Quick update August 31, 2011: Here’s Google’s Matt Cutts talking about this 20-pages document trying to answer the question if SEO will be here in 20 years:

As always, I hope this help you answer some of your questions regarding SEO. This will both allow you to save money by not paying for simple things AND will help you and me speak the same language if you ever need any help. Feel free to +1 this article if you found it useful.

Key elements of SEO analytics

A good friend of mine has recently asked me about key website analytics areas he should pay attention to. My head started spinning as the question was tooooo general. My response was that it depends on what you want to track and what your goals are. When we narrowed it down to SEO purposes, I briefly explained the key areas. I’m not saying that these are the only areas. After all, it all depends on your goals. Here’s what my answer was…

What you track on regular campaign basis depends on what your goals are. Generally speaking, there are three main areas of SEO analytics I look at on campaign basis: change in rankings, change in organic search traffic and change in conversions this month.

Change in rankings

At the onset of a campaign we choose a number of keywords we will work with in the following weeks and months. We need to able to track how we process on each key phrase from month to month. There’s a number of products available to track your SEO rankings including: SEScout, SEO rank monitor, Authority Labs and of course good old Google Analytics (GA). Here’s a good article going in details of how to track SEO rankings with Google Analytics by Yoast. I personally prefer having things in one place so I use GA.

Change in organic search traffic

There are three types of traffic you get to your website: direct, referrer, and traffic from search engines. Further, traffic from search engines can be segmented by different search engines and divided into paid and organic. For SEO purposes we’re concerned with organic traffic. The question here should be “Did we increase organic traffic to the website comparing to last month?”. This can be easily tracked by checking Google Analytics > Traffic Sources > Keywords. If you’re running PPC campaigns, then you’d want to segment the organic search traffic out.

Change in conversions

The ultimate goal of most SEO campaigns should be to increases conversions resulting from organic traffic, not the rankings or even traffic itself. So, I recommend creating conversion goals at the onset of the campaign. Once this is done, then it’s easy to track the change in number of conversions. Depending on your product or services your conversion can be “quote requested”, “product ordered” or “user path completed”. Usually a conversion results in some kind of “form submitted” on your website. Here, the question is “How did we do on conversions comparing to last month?”.

Whatever tools you choose to track your SEO analytics and the progress of your campaigns, make sure you go for positive change in the number of conversions, not change in rankings. Let me know if you feel that there are other important areas of SEO analytics.

Google Plus and its SEO effects

My take is that Google+ is not a new social network. We have an existing network already, G+ and Facebook are just tools we choose to use to connect, share with and expand our existing networks.

IMHO, Google just took the most important components of social interaction on the web (removing all the unnecessary things) and created this easy to use, simple tool such as G+. And for this I have immense respect for the team at Google.

Having G+ account helps from SEO standpoint in the following simple ways:

1. As a rule of thumb, if you want to have a close relationship with a search engine, use its products. G+ is Google’s product, so as Reader, Alterts, Gmail, etc. Having a G+ account ensures that Google has the most complete info about you, your brand, business. This helps Google understand who you are and rank higher for relevant searches.
2. With G+ you get a new search property that ranks high in Google because it’s G’s product. Therefore having a Google Plus profile helps your “branded search” too. Please note that currently your Google Profile redirects to your G+ Profile if you have one.

Currently my G+ profile does not rank #1 in Google for my branded search. But my assumpion is that it will. So, the recommendation is to ensure your Google+ profile is clean, informative and points people to all the right places (other things you control, i.e. your website or blog).

Here’s a few important things to get your Google Plus profile right for SEO.

• Description of your business (which helps Google understand you and you to rank higher for relevant terms). therefore ensure your description includes your keywords too.
• Link to your site / blog, etc. Every G+ profile has a list of related links to your brand / business. Each of those links lead to your other properties transfering a certain amount of “Google Juice”!
• Keeping your posts up to date and public ensures that your G+ profile produces content on regular basis. Google loves content.

Valuable update: Just noticed a good presentation on the subject of Google+ and its effects on SEO and wanted to share it with you. It’s a rather lengthy one but fun and provides good details.