Pittsburgh SEO – SEM – SEA | Internet Marketing and Website Design | Blackball Online

12 Steps To SEO

Our tongue in cheek look at how to SEO your website… Maybe

SEO Step 1
We admitted we were powerless over Google, that our rankings had become unmanageable.

SEO Step 2
Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore our rankings and our sanity.

SEO Step 3
Made a decision to turn our website over to the care of a proven Pittsburgh Search Engine Optimization specialist.

SEO Step 4
Searched fearlessly for such a Pittsburgh SEO specialist and found one.

SEO Step 5
Admitted to Google, ourselves, and our SEO the exact nature of our wrongdoings.

SEO Step 6
Were entirely ready for our SEO to remove our site’s shortcomings.

SEO Step 7
Humbly asked Google for a reconsideration.

SEO Step 8
Made a list of all webmaster guidelines we had violated and became willing to conform and make amends to them ALL.

SEO Step 9
Made such amends to all webmaster guidelines except when to do so would injure them or others. (or our rankings)

SEO Step 10
Continued to check rankings and Webmaster tools for any subsequent indiscretions.

SEO Step 11
Sought through prayer, meditation, and a ton of reading, to improve our understanding of Google as we know it, praying only for understating and that our SEO could carry it out.

SEO Step 12
Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, our business grew from receiving top rankings. We then tried to carry this message to other small business owners and to continually practice theses SEO principles in all our affairs.

I told you this was tongue in cheek… Sort Of

SEO, Speed, and the ridiculous Internet Exploder

Google now puts a heavier premium on speed. I suspect it cared before but now with Instant, speed is a major factor. As a Pittsburgh SEO company and web design firm, we are always looking for ways to boost rankings for our clients. To increase speed, we’ve already covered the need for a strong web host in a previous post so now it’s time for the browsers to step up to the plate. When the browsers support innovative and less cumbersome markup, the speed rises and resource usage falls.

CSS3 (cascading style sheets v.3) offer an even more diverse set of styling selectors to speed the crawl and load times of your site. CSS3 also allows for graphic manipulation and generation without the images. http://www.css3.info/ is an awesome site for testing css3 selector compatibilities for your browser and we thought we’d share our findings with you.

Microsoft has been ignorant to the user for long enough now. (Never mind the developers.) The weak link has always been IE. IE9 is now a Beta release and has been for some time. A complete rewrite and standards compliance are the only things that will sell me.

Because the everyday user gets this prepackaged and spoon fed to them and because of the enormous war chest M$ have acquired peddling this crap (Vista, IE…)  we will have to live with IE inadequacies for some time I fear. Microsoft doesn’t force users to update their browsers and it should. This would eliminate the need to provide backward compatibility to all the old non compliant browser versions of IE out there.

On to the statistics:

Results from FireFox 3.6.10

From the 41 selectors 41 have passed, 0 are buggy and 0 are unsupported (Passed 574 out of 574 tests)

Results from Google Chrome 6.0.472.63

From the 41 selectors 41 have passed, 0 are buggy and 0 are unsupported (Passed 574 out of 574 tests)

Results from IE8

From the 41 selectors 20 have passed, 1 are buggy and 20 are unsupported (Passed 345 out of 574 tests)

Results from IE9 beta

From the 41 selectors 41 have passed, 0 are buggy and 0 are unsupported (Passed 574 out of 574 tests)

Results from IE9

From the 41 selectors 41 have passed, 0 are buggy and 0 are unsupported (Passed 574 out of 574 tests)

I haven’t even bothered to test IE7 and I think you can see why from the results of IE8.

This is very promising from an SEO and web developers standpoint. IE9 seems to pass all of the CSS3 selector tests. If it finally gets on board with the W3C standards for rendering you’ll hear a collective sigh from all the developers who toil to produce workarounds and patches for IE. Rendering has always been an issue with IE.

****UPDATE****

As seen above IE9 passes all tests with its official release. Microsoft must have finally felt the pinch of losing so much of it's browser users to Firefox, Opera, and the others. better late than never. No data on the rendering issues that previously existed and drove developers batty for years and I think this is good news. I did a Google search on "IE9 rendering issues and got old posts so I think this issue is fixed.

I'll leave you with a quote from a friend. "Microsoft is an ad agency that just happens to push software." I wonder how many billable hours have been spent fixing something that should have been right all along?

Blackball Online Marketing is a Pittsburgh Web Design and SEO Company.

Search Engines are Brand Blind

By marketing your services or goods via the Web, Search Engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo do not care if you’re GE or Joe’s Electrical Service on the corner of Main Street, USA. What matters to the Search Engines is whose site has the best content tailored to their particular target market. The Search Engines see the content and text you’ve provided for your particular offerings, not the brand name, or how big you are.

Let me pass on to you a story: Mr. Patrick Cray has a small electrical contracting and HVAC business, South Hills Electric Heating and Cooling. He built his business on being trustworthy and quality workmanship. He wants to keep the ball rolling but doesn’t have the ad budget to spend on billboards, TV spots, etc like his bigger competitors.

This dilemma was solved by successfully delving into something unknown to him at the time which was Search Engine Optimization or SEO. For Mr. Cray, this was something he was a bit skeptical of in the beginning, but the cost for marketing his business using SEO to compete was well within his comfort range and worth a shot. SEO is now and continues to be the main driver of his business. He’s found a successful recipe for promoting his business that’s very cost-effective, flexible, and puts him in complete control.

Mr. Cray has also integrated Social Media into his SEO strategy to build on his current SEO success.

So, if you’re looking for an electrician or a heating and cooling specialist  Online in the Pittsburgh area or in your particular part of the city and surrounding area there’s a real good chance Mr. Cray’s South Hills Electric Heating and Cooling company will be consistently on the first page, if not on top – and it’s been that way for the past year or so for him.

When they say the Internet has leveled the playing field for the small to very small businesses they were not kidding.  Mr. Cray is now a believer; he’s got the calls for service to prove it – courtesy of a well executed SEO strategy made just for him.

If you have some questions you’d like to bounce off us about how SEO can help your business just drop us a line. We’re Blackball Online Marketing and SEO and we’re on the Internet.