The SEO Project Details

The Last Door contracted Longevity Graphics 2 years ago to help with organic SEO, Paid Advertising optimization, and landing page creation/onsite conversion optimization.

The goal of the original contract was to increase traffic by 200%. We were able to blow that goal out of the water with a 500% increase. Needless to say, Last Door is very happy with the results, and we look forward to continuing working with them on their online presence and organic SEO results.

See below for the amazing SEO review provided by Last Door

About the Last Door

The Last Door is a non-profit organization that has been working with youth, families and adults for almost 30 years.

“The provision of the therapeutic environments where individuals and families experiencing addiction can gain support and guidance to restore themselves to mental, spiritual, physical and emotional health.”

Here is the SEO review:

“To Whom It May Concern,

I am writing a letter of reference for Longevity Graphics, they have managed Last Door Recovery Society’s SEO Optimization and Google Ad Words/Organics Account for two years for a website we had designed 5 years ago from a different web designer. Their services have been professional, efficient, productive and beneficial to the organization.

Since the website www.lastdoor.org was optimized for Google and Bing, the number of unique hits to the website rose 500%. Last Door is listed on page one for our target market in Google Organics, while our paid Google Ads are receiving maximum exposure with “call to action” per click.

Last Door intends on renewing its annual monthly maintenance contract with Longevity Graphics and has requested a quote from them to redesign our entire website due to their creative solutions for optimal web traffic. Last Door Recovery Society operates residential treatment programs for individuals with substance abuse issues for 30 years and relies on the internet for informing the public of our services to ensure our programs are utilized every day.

Giuseppe Ganci
Director of Community Development
Last Door Recovery Society”

Thanks again Guiseppe for your kind words!

We are excited to announce that we have a new team member. Ryan Jaeger, a third year student at Simon Fraser University, is Longevity’s first data analyst. Ryan specializes in working with information and creating quality back links for clients. We sat down with Ryan and asked him a few questions about himself. Here is the interview:

B: Hi Ryan, how are you doing today?

R: Hi Ben, I’m doing great. I am having a lot of fun during my first day at work.

Fantastic! The first question I have on my sheet is: what degree are you currently working towards?

R: Right now I am studying environmental sciences at Simon Fraser University. I am pretty passionate about the environment, and I am planning on helping restore ecosystems as a career.

B: What draws you to working in marketing and with data?

R: I have always been a very organized and focused person. Something that I have found I can do better than most people is just put my head down and work on a task, sometimes for twelve hours at a time. It’s kind of strange but I like getting immersed in a task, even if it is something monotonous like entering data.

B: What is your favorite part of marketing?

R: I find back linking relaxing, and I do a lot of it. Having quality back links for a site is paramount for any page that hopes to rank in Google search results.

B: Describe your personality

R: I’m not really sure what to say *laughs – I guess you could consider me fairly outgoing. I’m pretty playful and am usually having fun with whatever I do.

B: What are your hobbies

R: I like to be outside; hiking in North Vancouver is something I really enjoy. I also love skiing and will go whenever I get the chance.

 B: Thanks a lot Ryan, I’ll let you get back to your work- Welcome to the team!

What is the hummingbird update?

So, what is the Hummingbird update? The Hummingbird update is Google’s newest attempt to streamline their search engine and create a more user friendly service. Hummingbird is designed to yield more precise search results, and give users a more “natural” search experience.

Google named the algorithm “Hummingbird” because it is “precise and fast. The Hummingbird update focuses on user intent rather than the previous system of matching keywords.

Danny Sullivan wrote on this change in his article: FAQ: All About the New Google “Hummingbird” Algorithm: “Hummingbird is paying more attention to each word in the query, ensuring that the whole query-the whole sentence or conversation or meaning-is taken into account, rather than particular words. The goal is that pages matching the meaning do better, rather than pages matching a few words”

Google is clearly trying to create a more natural feeling to the search engine. In contrast with the mechanical keyword based style of the previous operating systems, Hummingbird attempts to truly understand what the user is searching for.

Hummingbird was only announced last week, but sources state that the update was put into effect in between late August and early September. It is being touted as the most significant change to Google’s search engine since 2001; It isn’t so much as update, as it is an entirely new algorithm that Google has chosen to implement.

From the same article Danny Sullivan explained the nature of the change using this analogy: “Think of a car built in the 1950’s. It might have a great engine, but it might also be an engine that lacks things like fuel injection or is unable to use unleaded fuel. When Google switched to Hummingbird, it’s as if it dropped the old engine out of the car and put in a new one. It also did this so quickly that no one really noticed the switch”.

 What does this mean for business owners?

David Amerland, author of “Google Semantic Search” says: “From a strategy point of view this opens the horizon for companies and webmasters considerably. From a practical perspective, they need to identify the USP of each business and become authoritative within it is now a key criteria for continued SEO success. The comparison element that has been integrated suggests that semantic mark-up may begin to confer an advantage now when it comes to helping index information in products and services.”

What this means is that quality rises to the top. To stay competitive In today’s online environment, business owners need to position themselves as people who have the answers to the questions being asked. Quality “likable”, “sharable” and “tweetable” content needs to be created and shared across networks.

What is the hummingbird update? It is Google’s new algorithm: “hummingbird” has made the leap from being a keyword oriented system, to turning google into a program that understands semantic language. Business owners will need to keep the new changes in mind when implementing SEO and building their brands online.

 What is SEO?

Clients who have not done SEO before often have no idea what the term means or what the acronym even stands for. In this post, I will explain what SEO is and why it’s important for any business or organization online.

SEO (search engine optimization) is the optimization of your website with the goal of ranking higher in search engines such as Google and Bing. Your site’s placement in the search engine results is called its natural or organic rank and it is free. This is in contrast to PPC (SEM), which is a sponsored ad. There are two main methods of improving your site’s rank in search engine results: on-page optimization and off-page factors such as inbound links.

On-page optimization

When an SEO professional talks about on-page optimization, they mean that each page is easy for the search engines to crawl (meaning the site loads quickly and does not have an excess of needless code) and that each page is clearly indicating to the search engines what it is about and what terms it should rank for. On-page optimization involves doing extensive research to determine what phrases each page should attempt to rank for and then ensuring that every ranking factor within each page is optimized to support the chosen keyword phrases.

The most important factor for optimizing a page is its content. Every page should have a good amount of unique, quality content that is relevant and useful to the visitors of your site. Everything else that is done for SEO in the back-end (coding) is intended to support the content by sending the search engines the right signals. Search engines ‘listen’ to certain bits of code for hints about the subject matter of a page and SEO is done to make it clearer that the content is talking about a certain topic.

Off-page optimization

Off-page optimization is usually much more difficult than on-page, but it is crucial for any site trying to rank in a competitive market. Incoming links from other sites are the focus of off-page optimization, as search engines see links from other sites as votes of confidence. Having links from credible and relevant sites to your own website can boost your site’s reputation and increase its ranking within the search engines.

Link building has become a potentially dangerous endeavour due to several recent updates from Google, however. It’s very important to be discriminating about which sites you seek links from. Quantity is not better than quality; in fact a large amount of poor-quality links can result in a penalty to your site’s ranking. The best way to build links is to provide high-quality content on your site that visitors will naturally want to share with others. There are strategies that go beyond this, but that’s for another blog post!

Why You Need SEO

The main advantage of SEO is that it has long-term results and your natural ranking in the search engines is free. If you have an existing website that is ranking but not as high as you would like, improving your SEO is the only way to get yourself on the first page of search results. If you have the time to devote to creating great content for your site, SEO can be relatively inexpensive for you.

Basic SEO is straight-forward and can probably be done by any moderately tech-savvy individual once they’ve been educated on the ranking factors. However, basic SEO is not going to help you compete with the companies on the first page of the search results that have hired professionals to do SEO for them. The more competitive your industry is, the more difficult it will be to outrank your competitors. If you want to compete, you will need to use advanced SEO strategies such as the ones we use to help our clients outrank their competition.

If you do not have the time to invest in learning SEO, keeping up to date, or doing the actual implementation on your website, we offer a variety of SEO packages for businesses of all sizes. We also offer SEO consulting to businesses that want to bring their SEO in-house but are inexperienced and do not know how to get the most from SEO.

Negative SEO! What’s that you ask? Well, thanks to our friends at Google and the constant updates to the algorithms, Penguin in particular,  some unethical companies and slime balls are using tactics to hurt their competitors. Google rolled out the first Penguin update back in April 2012. The update was aimed at decreasing search engine rankings of websites that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines by using now declared black-hat SEO techniques, such as keyword stuffing, cloaking, participating in link schemes, deliberate creation of duplicate content, and other strategies. The guiding principle for the update was to PENALIZE WEBSITES using manipulative techniques to achieve high rankings.

Generally Google’s algorithms reward websites for doing a good job of providing relevant, useful content for the visitors, or so they say. As far as the SEO community knows, this was the first time that Google began to penalize sites for attempting to manipulate the search engines with shady tactics.

So the big question is, what is stopping people from implementing some of these manipulative tactics on your website? Not too much! Thus we have negative SEO. It’s becoming a reality in the online world, and it’s something that businesses should be aware of, particularly in regards to backlinks to your website.

Over 11 years in the industry, I have had the privilege to work with amazing business owners with high business standards and integrity. We haven’t had to worry too much about this as we have implemented SEO tactics based on Google’s recommendations, and have received some great results. Unfortunately, I recently met a new client that has fallen victim to some bad link backs.

Let’s see what Matt Cutt’s has to say about this here

So what can be done about this? I have done a ton of reading and consulting with other SEO professionals who have had success with overcoming negative SEO.

Here are the steps that we recommend:

1. Use these three tools to complete your link mining. Webmaster Tools, Moz Open Site Explorer, and MajesticSEO. These tools will help you to determine which websites are linking to your website.
2. Organize the link backs into a spreadsheet, removing duplicate entries.
3. Things to look for: low page rank links (3 or less), low domain authority (30 or less), links that are not relevant to your product, service, or geographical region, and finally, spammy anchor text links.
4. Contact all of the websites that you would like to have your link removed from. Yes, this seems daunting, but it is necessary. This tool helps to speed things up: Rmoov
5. Then you wait. Wait. And wait some more. Give it about a month for website owners to respond. You should see a 5-10% response rate.
6. After you have attempted to have the links removed on your own, you can then submit the remainder of your list to the Webmaster Tools disavow tool. Google requires that you attempt to have the links removed first before using this tool.

Yes this is a tedious task. And yes it is necessary if you have been hit with a some negative SEO. Hopefully in the future, Google will release an update that prevents negative SEO from happening. Our recommendation is to run your business with ethical business standards and hopefully this won’t happen to you. If you are one of the unlucky business owners who is affected by negative SEO, then consult an SEO professional to help you. Trying to clean it up yourself and abusing the disavow tool could potentially hurt your site more.

On May 22^nd, 2013, Google rolled out the Penguin 2.0 update to their search engine algorithm. Like Penguin 1.0, the update focuses on penalizing unnatural linking strategies. One difference with Penguin 2.0, however, is that it analyzes the backlinks of the internal pages as well as the home page, whereas Penguin 1.0 only analyzed the backlinks to the home page. This detail was only recently revealed by Matt Cutts when he spoke about the update on his blog. It is, effectively, a more in-depth version of Penguin 1.0, and it can cause the same problems for sites that have had black-hat or grey-hat link-building done in the past.

Penguin 2.0 basically looks for unnatural links from low-quality sites and devalues your site based on what it determines to be a black-hat link profile. It makes the assumption that you or someone working on your behalf participated in unnatural link-building strategies, such as paying for links or ‘advertorials’ (paid editorials that link back to your site). Maybe you didn’t do this unnatural link-building yourself, but a competitor has built poor-quality links to your site with the intention of getting your site penalized. This is negative SEO, and it has the same repercussions.

For more information about the Penguin 2.0 updates, check out this link.

Identifying it

So how do you know if this update has affected your website? Check your analytics data (from Google Analytics or any similar service that tracks your traffic) and look for a drop in your site traffic in late May. If you see a sudden and dramatic drop in traffic that can’t be explained by a usual seasonal trend or other logical coincidence, you’ve probably been hit by Penguin 2.0.

It’s also a good idea to examine the backlinks of your site using a site exploring tool such as those offered by SEO Moz or Majestic SEO. Using these tools, you can view the domains that link to your site, the page rank and domain rank of those domains, and the anchor text used in the links. With this information you can figure out if your link profile has the signs of an unnatural, spammy link-building strategy – backlinks from paid directories, links with exact match anchor text (keyword stuffed anchors), and high link accrual velocity (gaining backlinks in large chunks very quickly).

This can be a tedious and time-consuming process, especially for those unfamiliar with SEO and the tools that are used to analyze websites. If you don’t have the time or you find it too confusing, Longevity Graphics can help you figure out if your site has been hit by Penguin 2.0.

What to do

If it’s clear that you have a large amount of crummy backlinks, how do you proceed? The solution is straight-forward, but not necessarily easy or quick. Working from the list of your backlinks, you will need to identify the links that are hurting your rankings and deal with each accordingly. In cases where you have control over the link, like on a directory that provided you with a login to update your business profile, you should be able to delete the link altogether or alter the anchor text if that is the issue. When you do not have direct control over the link, you will have to reach out to the webmaster of the site on which your link appears and request to have your link removed.

There are sites and tools available to help you with categorizing and sorting through your backlinks. Some will even have template letters to help you with sending out link removal requests. https://www.rmoov.com/index.php https://www.removeem.com/.

Not all webmasters will be cooperative and some will even try to exploit you by asking you to pay them to remove your link. In these cases, you can consider using Google’s link disavow tool as a last resort. The tool allows you to suggest that certain links not be counted toward your site’s ranking. Matt Cutts has warned that the Disavow Tool should not be used by most sites and should only be used to clean up a “small fraction” of links after you have made multiple link removal requests on your own. He seems to be suggesting that abusing the tool could result in an additional penalty of some kind to your site.

Hopefully you will have been successful in removing the offending backlinks from your link profile. Either way, you should move forward by focusing on creating new links that follow Google’s quality guidelines and avoid unnatural link-building practices. See here for a useful link explaining what one should not do when doing link-building. Google recommends that you seek out natural links by providing useful content such as infographics or guest posts on relevant, high-quality sites.

If your livelihood has been threatened because this recent update has diminished your site’s traffic, we can help you get back on track. Recovery from Penguin 2.0 is a big job, but we are professional SEOs with a variety of experience that can help to boost your site’s rankings and recover from penalties.

As a student, I was extremely grateful to receive an internship at Longevity Graphics. Knowing that marketing and design are the fields I wish to work in, they gladly welcomed me. My first internship took place last summer, and I am happy to say that I have come back for the second year!

When I first came to Longevity Graphics, right away, I was accepted into their team. The atmosphere and the knowledge of the office made it easier to learn new things. Coming into the office, I was surely not as experienced as others. But soon enough, thanks to their help, I feel I have become much more knowledgeable about marketing and design.

Here are some of the things I have learned:

1. While designing projects for customers, keep key ideas of what they suggested in mind. Your job is to create their visualization, not your own.
2. Make tons of different drafts for the customer to choose from.
3. While on the phone, don’t be afraid to ask for what you want.
4. While making your first campaign on Google Ad words, make sure it is perfect. If it’s not perfect, you might mess up future campaigns.
5. Save everything. Twice even.
6. Don’t be afraid to ask questions.

Working at Longevity Graphics has been a great opportunity and I am very grateful for the experience.

Thank you Longevity, you guys are the best!

Day 1 at Mozcon 2012

It’s been a couple of years since I have been at Mozcon; 3 exactly. Wow, has it grown! I am always excited to be apart of the community at SEOmoz. Shout out to Charlene from SEOmoz for helping me out with my hotel issue. Alright,let’s get to the good stuff…today was a full day of great speakers.
Here’s my top 3 picks for today:

Paddy Moogan | Distilled

Paddy spoke on 35 Ways To Get Links. He talked about many simple and some in-depth strategies to get external link backs to your website. This is why I love coming to conferences. Sometimes I get so stuck in routine that I forget about some of these really simple strategies that work. If anyone has done link building in-house or for a client, you will relate to my love hate relationship with link building.

Wil Reynolds | SEER Interactive
Wil talked about Real Company Sh*t (RCS). Loved it! Loved it! Loved! To sum it up, Will talked about the difference in real content that was meaningful and genuine vs link building schemes that give what we do (SEO) a bad name. I absolutely agree with Wil in regards to being inspired by companies that stand for something and the marketability of these companies.

Rand Fishkin | SEOmoz
I always love what Rand has to say. Rand kicked off the conference today and talked about the future of SEOmoz tool set. Not only that, but Rand added value through out the day with some great questions for the rest of the speakers.

All and all, I am never disappointed when I attend an SEOmoz conference. More to come tomorrow.

Lindsay Viscount
Owner/Creative Director
[email protected]

Looking to drive more traffic to your website? We all are, aren’t we? Ever hear of Google Adwords? Most business owners have either heard of it or have even tried it out themselves. Google offers a free $100 coupon for first time business owners and even offers to help you setup the account. Sounds good, right? Business owners beware!

I have been setting up Google Adwords accounts for business owners for over 10 years and have learned from experience the best ways to optimize your Google Adwords account to get the most return on your ad spend. I charge all of my clients a fee to setup their Google Adwords accounts up because it’s takes time to setup the campaign correctly the first time. This saves our clients money in management fees in the long run. Management time is much easier and time effective.

Frequently clients hear about the Free $100 coupon for Google Adwords which includes a  Google specialist assisting them on setting up their accounts for free. They often ask why I charge a setup fee when they can get Google to do it for them. Here is a little case study that we recently did to test Google’s free account setup.

CASE STUDY

A local Ranch in BC providing horseback trail rides to BC residents approached us to setup their Google Adwords account up. We contacted Google Adwords free account services to help with the setup. The Google specialist was very pleasant to deal with and set the whole campaign up for us in about 20 minutes. After the campaign was setup, this is what we found.

1. The campaign was setup to geographically target all of the United States (not BC)
2. There was only one ad group setup
3. All of the keywords were included in the one ad group (this will lower the quality score)
4. The keywords selected included horseback vacations (which the client does not provide)
5. The ad copy was again promoting horseback riding vacations
6. The ads were being pointed to a generic landing page instead of the landing page specific to horseback trail rides

If we were to let the campaign go live the way that it had been setup by the Google Adwords specialist, my client would have been wasting their money, and the end result in their mind would be that, “Google Adwords does not work“.

WHAT WE DID

We modified the campaign to target local searchers using keywords that described the service being offered. We created multiple ad groups of unique keyword phrases so that we could target the ad copy to the search query. We sent traffic to the landing page describing the horseback trail rides. Within the first 2 days of the campaign that WE created going live, our client is already receiving requests for their services.

We are a fully certified Google Adwords agency and take the time to get to know our clients, the services that they provide, their target audience and their competition. We take pride in helping our clients grow their businesses and are only happy when our clients are happy.

If you are considering implementing a Google Adwords campaign, please contact us first for a free consultation so that we can help you save money in the long run and build your business with strategic internet advertising planning.

Lindsay Viscount, Owner / Creative Director
[email protected]

When I was in school, I learned that having my websites’ code be 100% W3C standards compliant wasn’t just something to brag about, it was something to be ashamed of failing at. It’s an attitude that I’ve maintained while working at Longevity Graphics, which has lead to some pretty frustrating days. Some of our clients’ sites use CMS’s such as WordPress, Drupal, or Perch that have their own code structure that is not compliant with W3C standards. Even social media applications such as the Facebook ‘like’ button and Google Plus buttons don’t validate!

It got me wondering whether validation is truly crucial. Specifically, I wondered how important W3C validation is for SEO. I did some research, and while I found some contrasting views, W3C validation does not seem to be an important factor for SEO – with some caveats.

Out of curiosity, I used the W3C validator to check Google’s home page for errors. The result was 34 errors and 3 warnings. It shouldn’t be surprising, however, as Matt Cutts himself has said explicitly that W3C validation does not offer a ‘boost’ to the ranking of any site (see Matt Cutts’ explanation here). If you don’t want to watch the video, I can paraphrase: Google cares more about loading times, browser compatibility, usability, and content than validation for the sake of validation. This should be enough to end any debate, but there are a few things to bear in mind even if 100% W3C validation is not a factor in itself for SEO.

The first thing to remember is that many of the factors that W3C validation is based on are also important to SEO. For instance, the use of alt tags on images is mandatory for validation and it’s also important to use relevant keywords in alt tags for SEO. So while W3C validation is not directly beneficial to SEO, there are a lot of overlapping standards. Having clean code should also help to increase load time, which is a ranking factor for Google. Improving load time will enhance the crawlability of the site (especially important for large, deep sites such as online stores with dozens or hundreds of product pages). Smaller files and cleaner code will help you to reduce the fatigue of search engines while crawling your site, so they will be less likely to time out and not index deeply nested pages.

The bottom line is that the W3C validation points out a lot of issues that, when fixed, help to keep the code clean and easier for crawlers to index. A couple of validation errors on a page is not the end of the world. However, we should take as many steps as possible to increase the crawlability of the site to ensure that all content is being indexed.