There is no doubt that Google is the top search engine in the world and it sends the most traffic compared to other search engines. When you are trying to rank for a certain key phrase or keyword Google can sometimes make it hard for a person doing SEO to find the real rank of a phrase. To be fair Google does it for a reason, it wants to show the best results to me based on where I am. This makes perfect sense, except when I want to know what the best results are for people in the United States.

To overcome some of this country bias that Google has there are a couple things you can do:

1. If you are using Google Chrome open an incognito mode window to do your searches on Google.com. If you are like me and logged in to Gmail, Reader and now Google+ your searches are going to be personalized. By switching to an incognito mode window you get a more generic search experience.
2. Google will still customize your Google.com search based on your IP address. Being being from Canada and searching Google.com I still get search results that differ from a US based searcher. To overcome this you can add an extra query string to the Google.com search address. Just enter your search in Google.com and after it is returned add &gl=us to the end on the address bar and hit enter. This should return the results that are for the geographic location of the United States. This accepts other two letter country codes, so you can check other countries as well. Some of my favourites are:
   • &gl=us – United States
   • &gl=ca – Canada (althought I get this one automatically usually)
   • &gl=uk – United Kingdom
   • &gl=au – Australia
3. You can also use a web proxy. My favourite is HideMyAss.com. Easy to use and if you select the advance options you can select a server from the United States. Occasionally though I have seen Google still return the Canadian search results, so it is not perfect either and you still might need to use the &gl=us for US based results.
4. If you are going to need US or another countries search results a lot, you can get a subscription to HideMyAss.com VPN service. That way you appear like you are from the country you want to be from and you can save a lot of time doing your search engine results look up. There are other benefits as well being from Canada and using a VPN in the US, but that is another topic.

Here are some of the different search results just for my name. LeeRobertson.com is my personal blog in case you were wondering.

It is important to know that there are different search results depending on where you live. Depending on what market you want to rank in. Something to keep in mind as you work on your SEO.

I realized that I have taken quite a break from updating my blog and thought I should get back into writing here more often. A lot has happened since I have been updating here regularly. Many of you have discovered how much better using Google Chrome is as a web browser. I was reluctant to switch to Chrome after it first came out, mainly because some of the extensions I loved in Firefox simply were not available for Chrome.

One of the Firefox addons I used regularly was SEO for Firefox and I still will start up Firefox for that alone, but I have discovered (well many months ago already) the SEO Site Tools extension for Google Chrome and it is one of the best tools I have come across.

Not only can you get some great information about a site while you are browsing it, the best part of SEO Site Tools is how it integrates with Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics. With the SEO Site Tools Google Chrome extension Google Webmaster Tools has become even more useful. My favourite is how it adds the links from the Webmaster Tools Search Queries page to Google Insight for Search. This one feature alone has helped me come up with new ideas for keywords for websites and helped tremendously to to help target existing keywords.

If you do SEO for your website at all and want to improve and make your SEO work more focused try the SEO Site Tools extension for Chrome. It has become a tool I use everyday.

A video overview of SEO Site Tools.

Having a fast website has officially become more important this past week with Google’s announcement that they are now using site speed in web search ranking. I have always tried to make fast loading websites it is another factor that webmasters should pay more attention too if they want to not only improve their website visitors experience but also to improve their search engine rankings.

The Google blog post gives some good suggestions for tools to examine your websites speed but here are some common sense tips that can help you speed up your website quickly.

• Remove extra widgets and gadgets – Things like the Twitter widget, MyBlogLog, Google FriendConnect and even Google Adsense can all slow down a website.
• Combine your CSS files into one file – If you use WordPress this can get tricky depending on the number of plugins you use.
• Compress your CSS file – Check out CSS Compressor to help you remove extra space and optimize your code.
• Combine Javascript into one external file – This can get difficult if you are using WordPress or another CMS, but it can be done.
• Compress Javascript files – Like compressing your CSS file. It helps remove extra space and comments to compress your Javascript.Javascript Compressor
• Use Google Javascript Libraries – Google hosts several popular Javascript libraries that website can link to and load. This can improve your website speed since your visitor could possibly already have that file cached making your load time much faster. If you use WordPress check out the Use Google Libraries plugin to make it easy to start using the Google versions of those Javascript libraries. Thanks to Douglas Karr for that WordPress tip.
• Speed Up Your Website with GZIP Compression – I have talked about GZIP compression before to speed up your website. Not all hosts offer the ability to enable GZIP compression, but if you can it can make a drastic improvement on the speed of your website.
• Reliable web hosting – A fast and reliable web host is critical to server your site fast. If you are just starting out it can be expensive to get your own dedicated server to make sure your site is served fast. I do recommend you take a look at either iWeb or Hostgator for shared hosting accounts. Price wise they are competitive and I have been pleased with how fast they have been.

I am still in the process of doing some of these tips here on the LGR website as well. I have had GZIP compression enabled for a while and it has made a significant difference in the speed of the website. If you can only do one thing try to enable GZIP compression. Since I am using Wordress to power this website I have been slow to combine CSS and Javascript files and compress them. I do plan on doing more of that. Perhaps there is a WordPress plugin that can help to combine them and compress them on the fly. If I find one I will let you know.

Not sure where to start to speed up your website? Let me give you a hand. I can do a website speed audit to give you more ideas on how to speed up your website. Feel free to contact me and I will be happy to look over your website.

Want to know what other websites someone else owns or works on? Thanks to SpyOnWeb you can get a pretty good idea of what other websites someone owns or is involved with. Just enter the URL of the website you want to know about and SpyOnWeb will return the other website names that are associated with that address. SpyOnWeb does more than just look up the sites that are on the same IP address though, it will look for sites that have the same AdSense publisher id and the same Google Analytics ID. This gives you a much better idea of what other sites a person is involved in.

This service is similar to another one I talked about at one time called You Get Signal. You Get Signal only returns the other websites that are on the same IP address though. If the persons website is on shared web hosting then there is no guarantee that the other websites are theirs or belong to someone else. The fact that SpyOnWeb checks not just for IP addresses but also Google AdSense and Analytics ID’s give it a better percentage that the sites it returns will be have something to do with the same person.

There is a lot of information you can find with a tool like this and while it can be fun to see what other websites people have, it may not be totally accurate as well. For example, some of the sites that it returns for me are not my personal websites, but my clients websites. Yes I do have something to do with the site, but it is not my website. There were also some websites returned that are no longer mine or on my server. Overall it can be a useful tool, especially if you are wondering what else your competition might be up too. Remember to play nice though. Like Search Engine Journal says:

I don’t advise though to use this tool for any malicious purposes.

I read about this service thanks to a post over at Search Engine Journal.

As great as WordPress is for search engine optimization there are ways of making it better. I have a list of several WordPress SEO plugins that I like to install and use on the WordPress sites I work on but it is always nice to have a list of SEO plugins that are available. Thankfully Mashable has put together a great post of 20 of the Best SEO Plugins for WordPress. Many of the plugins I like to use are on the list including the All in One SEO Pack and Google XML Sitemaps. There are also a few that I have not heard of but will have to give a try and see how they work.

One of the plugins that caught my eye was Simple Tags. When I started this blog I was on Blogger and was using FTP publishing to publish it to my server. Blogger offered labels and when I switched the blog to WordPress the labels where switched over to categories. Over time and with the closing of Epiblogger the number of categories have grown. I hope to clean up the number of categories at some point this year and start using categories and tags. I have not been looking forward to that task, but perhaps Simple Tags will help me accomplish it. Does anyone have experience with Simple Tags and how well it auto generates tags for posts?

If you are interested in WordPress SEO take a look at the post and some of the plugins they talk about and try some of them out if you want to improve your WordPress blog search engine optimization.

I had a phone conversation the other day with a gentleman that was interested in having some search engine optimization done to improve the ranking of his website. He runs a local business here in Regina and has had a website for a couple of years. After talking to him about his website for a little while and then looking at his website I noticed a couple of things that stood out right away.

No Updates

I asked the gentleman how often they have updated the site. Can you guess his reply? Never. This company had the site created just over two years ago, but there was not one update done on the site since then.

Hidden Text

I thought I would look at the code for the site while I was there and when I got to the bottom of the code I noticed an extra <div> with a class of “hidden”. Looking at the site you could not see this text but it was clearly visible to anyone looking at the code and it would be clearly visible to any search engines. I asked this gentleman if he know what the hidden text was at the bottom of the code. He said their web designer added that to help the rank in the search engines.

No Links

I was almost afraid to do a site: and link: check in Google for the site. To my surprise the site was still listed in Google, but a link check only showed five links pointing back at the site. I was actually a little surprised that they had that many.

As we talked some more this gentleman asked me how much I would charge to get him to number one in Google. I said that I could not guarantee a number one placement in Google but I would be happy to write up a quote for him. He asked what the ballpark might be. I think I shocked him a little bit, because his reply was “That is more than I paid for the site!” He told me not to bother writing up the quote.

If you have a website and you never update it, have hidden text and no links pointing to your website it is unlikely that the search engines are going to rank you high. Don’t be like this guy. Remember you get what you pay for. Paying for a cheap website will get you a cheap website. You need to constantly be working on your site to help it rank well. I made a quick list in my Website Promotion is a Social Activity post if you need some ideas.

To finish this story off, I was curious about how he found me but I forgot to ask while I was on the phone with him. I was scanning through my logs today and one search query from Google Canada caught my eye. The query: Regina SEO. I got a good chuckle from that.

There have been a lot of little things that I have done when I decided to integrate my blog into my main website. Doing a redirection from the old blog address of www.blog.lgr.ca to the new address www.lgr.ca/blog/ was a priority. That has helped users that have already bookmarked or linked to the posts on the old URL’s find the new locations. Eventually it should help PageRank flow to the new locations as well. While I have not always submitted a Google Sitemap to the Google Webmaster Tools in this occasion I wanted to let Google know as quickly as possible about the new location of the content.

Creating Google Sitemaps is not necessarily a difficult task, but if you have a large website or a blog that is updated often the last thing you want to do is to update your Google Sitemap everyday manually. Sure there are some online Google Sitemap generators that can create the file for you. Some have limits on the number of pages they will allow, some use Python scripts, and some you can download and run on your computer to create the file. All of them will take time away from you doing what is most important to you. Things like running your business, creating more great content, spending time with family etc.

One of the reasons I choose to move my website into WordPress was to automate some of the things that take time and take me away from running my business. WordPress has a plugin system that makes it easy to extend WordPress to do more. In this case to simplify the creation of a Google Sitemap all you need to do is install the Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress. With a few clicks you can have WordPress create your own Google Sitemaps file for you to upload to Google Webmaster Tools. The plugin automatically regenerates the sitemap if you modify or publish a new post and you can spend your time doing other things.

The Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress is one of the plugins I often install for clients that use WordPress and it has been a great help in getting the new LGR Internet Solutions website and blog indexed in Google with the move from the blogs previous URL. I recommend using the Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress if you have a WordPress website and you are using Google Webmaster Tools it takes care of creating your Google Sitemap for you and allows you to focus on what is important.

It seems like I have been posting a lot about link building lately. I don’t know why, perhaps it is the constant dumb emails I have been getting for link exchanges but recently I got not just emails for dumb link exchanges, I have even gotten dumb comments. You are probably thinking “Lee you deserve it, you keep telling people that leaving comments is a good way of getting links”. Sure leaving comments is a good way of getting links and building traffic, but remember I also have said that you should leave good comments that help contribute to the conversation so it does not get marked as spam.

Here is the comment I got on my post about using Google Alerts to help build links.

Hello if you would like to exchange links, please go to http://www. somewebsite.com /pages/linkexchange/form.html it is a small form, once you fill it in you will get a new inbound link instantly.

The funny thing is, in the log files it looked like they used Google Alerts to find out about that post and then came and spammed my blog looking for a link exchange. If they had actually read the post and added something decent to the comments they could have earned a link. Instead they spammed my blog, got marked as spam with Akismet and the comment and link were deleted.

I appreciate the comments I get here on the blog. I have learnt new things, found new and interesting websites and have found new blogs that I have subscribed to. If all you are out to do in commenting is to push your own website for a link like that then you will fail. You need to give something first before getting. I appreciate the people who comment regularly and I remove the nofollow for regular commentators as a reward for their time. People just have to learn how to play nice.

I am curious, what is the dumbest comment you have gotten on your blog?

I don’t follow a lot of politics. I have enough trouble following the politics in Canada but when an opportunity comes along like the one created by all the talk of Joe the Plumber in the race for the United States Presidency I take notice. Perhaps what made me take notice more is a post by Eric Ward entitled “Joe The Plumber and Link Building Best Practices“. Why did I find Eric’s post interesting? Well I found the post interesting because it is always nice to feel affirmed in the things that I write here. His advice was to use Google Alerts to search for sites that are talking about Joe the Plumber and to look for an opportunity to contribute. That advice from a “link building expert” sounds a lot like the advice I talked about on how you can use Google Alerts to help build links.

The best part for me was this:

Before you jump me about nofollow and linkjuice, I know this type of link is not going to help your rank. I’m not after rank. I’m after the traffic flow. Publicity driven link building.

So what are you waiting for? Do you want to get some publicity out of the Joe the Plumber frenzy that the U.S. campaign has started? Don’t forget to leave good comments so they don’t get marked as spam.

I talked a little while ago about how link building is dead. The whole point of the post was that the method some people and businesses go about building links is, to be blunt, stupid. Shortly after I created that post there was a great post over at SearchEngineLand entitled “Conversation With An Idiot Link Broker“. In that post Danny Sullivan exposes the way some people go about creating links to their website. That is exactly the kind of stupidity I was talking about.

One of the best ways I have found to create quality links back to a site is to participate in the conversations on people’s blogs the hardest part is finding blogs to take part in. This is where Google Alerts comes in handy. You can create an alert for a topic you are interested in and Google Alerts will send you an email when it discovers a blog that has created a post on that topic. All you need to do then is visit the blog post and leave a comment.

It is important to not leave spammy comments otherwise your comment will probably not be approved and your work will be for not. Take the time to actually read the post, and contribute to the conversation that is taking place on the blog. There have been several blogs that I have found using Google Alerts that I now regularly participate on and I also get regular visitors from as well.

Some of you might be saying to yourself “but Lee most blogs use nofollow on comments so I don’t get any Google juice by doing this.” If your sole purpose on building links to your website is to get some magical Google PageRank juice then don’t even bother. Creating quality links that will bring real people to come and visit your website or blog is of much higher value than some magical Google PageRank juice. Remember you should be building your website or blog for your users not for search engines, so work on getting links and visitors.

This is just one of the tools I use regularly to keep in touch with what others are saying on topics I am interested in on the web. What are some tools you use to help your commenting and building links back to your website or blog?