Category : Search Tools
Get Details about SOPA
Over the past few weeks, the Internet has exploded with furious users. In one of the most amazing shows of the Internet community coming together, businesses across the United States have blogged, tweeted and even blacked out their websites with the single goal of stopping the bill SOPA.
People like Matt Cutts, Jimmy Wales and Craig Newark worked together to influence members of Congress enough that the bill was shelved earlier this week. However, Congress brought it back, and it is set to be voted on next week. Many business websites have publicly opposed this bill together, by organizing a blackout on January 18.
But while many businesses fight back against this bill, several others wonder—what exactly is SOPA? Not everyone has been a part of this revolution, so it’s understandable that a lot of people got left in the dark on the subject.
What is SOPA?
SOPA stands for “Stop Online Piracy Act,” and is a bill that was introduced in late 2011. Wikipedia summarizes the details quite well, and we’ve included an excerpt here:
The originally proposed bill would allow the U.S. Department of Justice, as well as copyright holders, to seek court orders against websites accused of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement.
Depending on who makes the request, the court order could include barring online advertising networks and payment facilitators such as PayPal from doing business with the allegedly infringing website, barring search engines from linking to such sites, and requiring Internet service providers to block access to such sites.
The bill would make unauthorized streaming of copyrighted content a crime, with a maximum penalty of five years in prison for 10 such infringements within six months. The bill would also give immunity to Internet services that voluntarily take action against websites dedicated to infringement. This would make copyright holders liable for damages, when they knowingly misrepresent that a website is dedicated to infringement.
Although Wikipedia is against SOPA, they provide a pretty fair representation of what it is. It’s a bill that could stifle free speech on the Internet, potentially censoring business websites that host content. It has good qualities, of course, as any bill would; supporters remind us that it will protect global intellectual property, and say that it’s needed in order to enforce copyright infringement on the Internet worldwide.
Smart Solutions’ Stance on SOPA
At this time, Smart Solutions does not support the SOPA bill in its current form, for the same reason that Internet professionals across the world don’t—it eliminates free speech on the Internet, and goes completely against the reason that the Internet was created in the first place.
Google has played a big part in this movement, and you can help them by signing their petition: End Piracy, Not Liberty.
What are your thoughts on SOPA? Let us know in the comments!
Internet Marketing Tools for Your Business
There is a wide variety of internet marketing tools for your SEO and social media needs. Some internet marketing tools are free, some are paid. So how do you pick the best internet marketing tool for your business?
At the Bend WebCAM 2011 conference, Taylor Pratt from Raven Tools presented Tools of the Trade, which covers an array of paid and free internet marketing tools. The key features of any tool should help you with the following:
- Save Time: If a paid tool saves you several hours per day, sometimes paying $150 per month might well be worth it.
- Centralize Data: Some internet marketing tools provide the ability to keep all your information in one location, in an organized manner.
- Collaborate: A good internet marketing tool would allow the ability for users to collaborate.
- Reliable: This would possibly be the most important aspect. Your internet marketing tool needs to be reliable.
There are the traditional tools that help with keyword research, content management, social media management, link management and link research. However, there are also the non-traditional tools that people need to look out for. These non-traditional tools help with microdata, monitoring, usability, and technical analysis.
Microdata
Microdata help search engines and spiders understand the information on the website. It is important to have clean code so that information can be processed quicker and better.
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Online and Social Media Monitoring
The online and social media monitoring tools help you keep track of what is being said about your business, online—good or bad. By keeping track of the positive and negative, you know what your customers like or dislike about your business, and what can be done to improve.
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Usability Testing Tools
Websites have to be user friendly and provides information within reach of visitors. If visitors do not know where to click or find it hard to navigate, it really defeats the purpose of having a website. There are some usability testing tools that help you with increasing the usability of your website.
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Technical Analysis
A good technical analysis tool would help with evaluating code, determine if a website has a search-friendly design, and helps with IA setup.
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SEO Maintenance is Ongoing
SEO is not a one-time service, but an ongoing process that businesses should monitor to maintain their organic ranks on the search engine results page (SERP). Your website is an important component of your business and is crucial for you to be found on search engines. A monthly SEO maintenance plan will ensure your business is not ignored. Here’s why:
- Search engines are constantly changing their search algorithms. A recent example is the Google Panda update. Because of the update, many popular websites that used to rank high on the SERP have dropped in ranks—some have fallen from first page of SERP to second. If you rank well for keywords now, do not be complacent. Without SEO maintenance, you might drop in ranks three months from now because of changes in search algorithms.
- Search engines tweak the SERP. When Google announced in May 2007 that they will blend search results with Universal Search, this resulted in news, images, videos and Google Local results showing on the SERP. How does this affect you? If you were previously ranked at position 3 for a certain keyword, related images and videos showing up on the SERP might result in you showing up in position 7 without SEO maintenance.
- Competitors try to and WILL outrank you. You cannot ignore your competitors, because they will not ignore you. If you rank higher than them on the SERP, you can be sure they will be working to outrank you. Ranking factors that come into play include quality of content and backlinks.
Many businesses do not have SEO maintenance because it is time consuming—keeping up with search engine trends, need to make constant SEO tweaks to website, and the importance of keeping content fresh.
Let our SEO analysts do the work for you. Contact us now to find out how we can help you with your SEO maintenance.
Straightforward Ways to Improve Page Speed (Part 2)
This continues our discussion about “page speed” and what’s needed to stay competitive in organic search rankings. If you missed first blog, go here.
Though Google said that it expects fewer than 1% of search queries to change as a result of incorporating site speed ranking to their algorithms, many site owners want to improve page speed now. Here’s three simple, straightforward ways you can.
Optimize Your Images
If your images are not optimized, they can significantly increase page load times. The problem comes when images are scaled down to fit the application rather than physically being resized. What this does is require the browser to load the full high-resolution image, when it only needs a fraction. Several free file size calculators can help you do this.
Optimize Your Files
Having clean HTML, CSS and other files can speed up your site load time. A good idea is to remove extraneous and old code from your files.
Reduce HTTP Requests
Trimming the number of components on a page can reduce the number of HTTP requests required to render a page—and in turn, shorten your page load times. Combining files using CSS Sprites is an additional way to improve page speeds.
All of the ideas above are good, but the most important strategy to keep your users and Google happy is continuing to deliver relevant content. Relevancy will always be a priority to Google; site speed a bonus.
Is Your Web Page Fast Enough? (Part 1)
That’s the question heating up blog airwaves since Google incorporated site speed as one of more than 200 signals used to determine search rankings.
To get answers, site owners are using the Google Page Speed Tool and Google Webmaster Tools > Site Performance to track the speed of their site. The tool is bringing relief to some and heartburn to others. For those of you who are experiencing the latter, let us help you interpret what the tool compares—and what comparisons would be more valuable.
The tool may report your site is slower than XX% of sites on the Internet because it’s comparing very simple pages with a few images and little or no dynamic content. More valuable comparisons are whether your pages are faster—or as fast—than your ranking competitors and comparing actual page types. For example, if you have a blog, what are the page speeds of other blogs? If you have an ecommerce store, what are the speeds of other ecommerce stores?
Another tip about learning if your page is speedy enough for search rankings, is to assume sites that have achieved first page rank in certain categories already have a page speed that is acceptable to Google. So learning how you compare to these sites is also a valuable guideline.
Read Part 2 blog that shares simple, straightforward ways to improve page speed.
Google Launches Instant Previews
On November 9th Google launched a page preview feature called “Instant Previews.” This tool offers people a way to quickly view what’s on a web page without leaving the Google search results.
With the new Instant Previews, people will likely be able to immediately spot the most promising pages among those listed in the search results. This will streamline the online search process by decreasing the need for people to bounce around from page to page until they find a satisfying result.
How It Works
In the new feature a small magnifying glass appears next to each listing:
When you click on that magnifying glass a preview of the page appears to the right of the search results:
Once you’ve clicked on a magnifying glass Instant Preview mode will be enabled, allowing you to scroll over other results to view their previews as well. As you scroll over each listing it will be highlighted with a blue background and the preview image will change to show the selected webpage:
Callouts & Tears
Within the preview images, relevant text to the search is highlighted through “callouts,” making it easier to read:
Pages can have more than one callout:
Previews might also have what Google calls a “tear,” where a page is “torn” to show the overall context of the page, but also show all the parts that are relevant to the search:
Instant Previews & Paid Ads
The Instant Preview images cover up Google’s paid ads when they appear. Is this a problem for advertisers? Google says “no.”
Google argues that if people are interested in the unpaid “editorial” results then that’s where they’ll stay searching, rather than going back and forth to the paid ads as well. In other words, previews aren’t blocking ads because if someone decides they want to focus on editorial results, they’re probably already ignoring the paid ads.
It is reported that paid ads will also get an Instant Preview feature in the future, but as of yet there is no set timeline for this.
Not a Fan?
Site-owners: Don’t like the idea of Google making previews of your pages? You can opt-out of Google’s. To do so, just make use of the nosnippets meta tag.
Web users: Don’t like the preview? Just don’t click on the magnifying glass to turn it on. If you already have, just click again to turn it off.
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