The Maine SEO Blog

Earlier this week, flyte relaunched a new site for Acadia Center for English Immersion - courses for learning English as a second language. After a redesign, SEO, Web marketing, and finally relaunch…I must say, it’s a beautiful website.

As far as the SEO portion was concerned, I had my first experience with internationally optimizing. It soon became clear that folks who want to learn English as a foreign language aren’t altogether familiar with Maine. How bizarre.

What did we do? We quickly found out that international searchers look for things like “english courses USA” or “learn english united states”. At the same time, it was important to not forget local search, as some students do come from the New England area.

So, if you’re in need of English lessons - be it to master English as a second language or simply to remaster it as a first language - look no further than Acadia Center for English Immersion! Check out Acadia Center on Twitter and Facebook too. And if you need help optimizing on an international level, look no further than flyte.

Nicki Hicks
Maine SEO

There’s been a lot of talk of late about PageRank sculpting as it relates to nofollow tags. Why? Because the way PageRank works changed just over a year ago and now they’re telling us.

PageRank has always flowed like this to pages from links that are not nofollowed (affectionately known as dofollow).

When you add a nofollow tag to a link, you stop PageRank from flowing. This result remains unchanged; but now, you’re not adding any benefit to the other (dofollow) links on the page. They still pass the same percentage of PageRank, as if all the links were dofollow:

What does this mean? Nofollow isn’t as strong as it once was. You can’t use it to PageRank sculpt.

Should you stop nofollowing? No, I don’t think so. To those pages like your Search page, Contact page, and perhaps Privacy Policy, I think nofollows are still a great idea. They are pages where you wouldn’t necessarily need PageRank to flow.

There’s a lesson to learn here. If you don’t trust a website enough (or just don’t want to pass the PageRank) to dofollow a link, you probably shouldn’t be linking in the first place.

The right way to PageRank sculpt? An intuitive site architecture - for both searchers and search engines.

Nicki Hicks
Sculpting is an art

I realized how lately I’ve been writing a lot about topics that, while related to SEO, aren’t necessarily discussing what I would call more traditional optimizing techniques. The reason? It’s not just about SEO anymore.

Yes, you should optimize your site. But going are the days where that is enough. Not only is SEO an ongoing process, but so are other types of web marketing outlets - and those are exactly the places you need to invest your time in order to even hope to succeed in the search engines.

Video

Let’s not beat around the bush. It’s all about YouTube. Sure there are a ton of other video outlets, but YouTube is the best out there. With its easy-to-use interface, it also provides easy-to-embed options (AKA no code knowledge necessary).

Better yet, views from your site or blog add to the total views on YouTube. Why does that matter? The more views a video has, the higher it will rank in Google’s search - and with universal search, that’s just one more way to rank. Not to mention, it’s an easy way to optimize for smart phones.

Photos and Images

Can you say alt tags? Search engines can read, but they can’t see very well. So we have to help them out a little. But when you do it right, and create great keyword rich descriptions for them, images are another way to rank in the search engines.

Social Media

Pretty shortly, if you’re not using any sort of social media outlet for your business, you’re going to be behind the game. Not only is social media a great way to share links and increase buzz, but it also humanizes your business and can almost be used as a PR medium. Plus, while it would really only affect searches for your company name, your social media profiles typically rank extremely well.

Here are some of my quick guides to where you should be, why you should be there, and what to do once you’re there:

• Facebook: Why it’s for your business
• LinkedIn: How to leverage your account
• Twitter
  - A guide to get started
  - What you should tweet about for business

Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking is great way to make things go hot. While there’s no SEO power to sites like Digg, Sphinn, Delicious, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc., the traffic you get from just being “sphunn”, “stumbled”, “dugg”, or the like is entirely worth it.

Nicki Hicks
How are you working toward better online visibility?

Dear Confused,

Although you can perform SEO at any point before or after the launch of a Web site, I can think of three good reasons why it’s better to start with SEO:

1. It’s less expensive. A good keyword analysis (an important part of a healthy breakfast an SEO package) will drive your content and your copy; if you do it after the site is built, you’re in effect doing the work twice.
2. It’s market research. A keyword analysis may uncover some opportunities that you hadn’t thought of yet; new topics to cover, even new services to offer.
3. It will help focus your social media strategy. You can take your optimal keywords and start working them into your tweets, your Facebook fan page, your YouTube videos and your LinkedIn profile…all things you can be working on while your Web designer builds out your new site.

There is some parts of SEO that can’t be performed until after the site is launched, specifically a link building campaign. Obviously, other sites, blogs and directories won’t want to link to a coming soon page; they’ll be looking for something of value if they’re going to be linking to you.

Rich Brooks
SEO for Small Businesses

In a matter of days, I will be able to changes my Facebook URL from www.facebook.com/people/Nicki-Hicks/172700110 to quite possibly www.facebook.com/nickihicks (Update: I snagged www.facebook.com/nickihicks) or even www.facebook.com/nicki if I get really lucky! My company will be able to change its URL from www.facebook.com/pages/Portland-ME/flyte-new-media/26696935640 to www.facebook.com/flytenewmedia.

So…what’s the big deal?

The biggest bonus: sharing your URL with friends and family. Up until now, a random number code has been a difficult and not-so-easy-way to remember profiles. With vanity URLs, Facebook simply says “people will have an easy-to-remember way to find you”; the official blog also says:

We expect to offer even more ways to use your Facebook username in the future.

Facebook, you tease us.

No, seriously. What’s the big deal? (Nerd Version)

I think it brings up a long-lived argument about the importance of keywords in URLs.

When clients ask if they should get a keyword rich domain, I always say yes. If you already have one, however, it isn’t worth porting and redirecting your current site over. However, if you’re picking a new one, then why not make it keyword rich?

As far as the URL goes, same story. If you’ve got a page with an old, not very keyword rich URL, stick with it. It’s probably built up enough equity that there’s really no reason to change it. But, if you’re working on a new page, make sure that one would make the keyword gods sing! What’s more, if you use a great CMS, your URLS are auto-generated and therefore auto-awesome.

The thing is…as a searcher, seeing a keyword rich URL (notice I did not say keyword stuffed) gives me a little more confidence in clicking than one full of random characters (!@#$%^&*).

For search engines, SEOs still go back and forth whether keyword rich domains do better than non-keyword rich domains. As far as I’m concerned, whatever difference there may be, it isn’t a significant one. So pick one if you can, but don’t worry if you can’t.

Bringing things full circle (or back to Facebook, at least)

Securing vanity URLs may not do more than be cool and help your family avoid carpal tunnel by typing less keystrokes, but then again…it will most definitely help search visibility for your name - or even better - your company’s. The clock is ticking, you’d better grab your username.

Nicki Hicks
And here, I thought we were friends!