Question by : How to know if Seo work is help my site ( traffic is seasonal so hard to judge)?
Due to seasonal traffic increases I want to know if my seo is doing the work I am paying them for ( link building) I want to is there any other way to judge there work other than traffic increase. How long it take to see results. I was riped off before by seo firm and don’t want the same to happen again

Best answer:

Answer by Jane E
If you want to know if the company is building links, you can check for yourself by using yahoo site explorer to see the links pointing back to your site. Bear in mind that some links will take a while to get indexed, so will not appear.

The second way you can see is to get them to send you a spreadsheet with all the links they have built, and you can go and check them to see if they exist.

Also, are they building links to increase ranking for a particular keyword? If so, you can use rank-tracking software to see how your site is positioned in google for a particular keyword, a package such as this http://www.link-assistant.com/rank-tracker/ enables you to see how your site´s position in google varies over time for multiple keywords.

Finally, I recommend you contract a local service that can give you references for previous work done, that you can go and speak to in person. It will be more expensive, but you will get results, and you can go to their office and shout at them if they do it wrong. Plus, they will be able to explain to you exactly what they are doing, and set some decent metrics for your seo campaign.

SEO is a complicated and confusing business, and there are a lot of sharks out there, so if you take your business seriously you should invest the time and resources to find a good agency.

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You thought they were gone. Those pesky, annoying, experience-destroying things. Yes, I’m talking about iFrames.

Popular a decade ago, they’ve made a few appearances in the past several years. The once-popular Digg, for instance, turned to them to implement its DiggBar.

But now they’re back.

As detailed by Brent Csutoras on Search Engine Land, the company responsible for bringing them back is popular social discovery service StumbleUpon:

…on all content pages within StumbleUpon, you have a single button saying ‘Stumble This’, which when clicked takes you to an iframed version of the content.

Not only are they now iframing all content from the site, but if your logged into StumbleUpon, they are not even offering a way to remove the iframed toolbar, leaving you in stuck in the iframed version of the site. If you are not logged in, then there is an option to click X in the right side of the toolbar to remove it.

Csutoras observes that there hasn’t yet been an uproar about StumbleUpon’s change, despite the fact that iFrames have caused so much angst before. In the case of the DiggBar, to placate angry users, Digg founder Kevin Rose was forced to backtrack and admitted, “Framing content with an iFrame is bad for the Internet.”

Is the lack of widespread anger here an indication that StumbleUpon’s relevance has declined? Perhaps, even though unique visitors are apparently way up year-over-year. But regardless, there are more than a few publishers who still get a meaningful amount of traffic and link love from StumbleUpon. And they can’t be too happy about this.

At the end of the day, you have to hand it to the iFrame. While it does have uses, it has arguably been one of the most abused ‘features’ of HTML. But you can count on companies ignoring internet history and using it in the worst ways imaginable.

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Question by whhhhaaaazzzzuuuuuppppppp: WCAG 2.0 guidelines make better search engine optimisation?
Do the WCAG 2.0 guidelines make your website better optimised for search engines?

Best answer:

Answer by makersonline
It won’t hurt. In particular ‘Provide text alternatives for any non-text content’ will help as this will enable search engines to index non-text based content such as images and Flash which will help with search engine optimisation. Generally, these guidelines are geared towards helping people not search spiders and so largely they are irrelevant – but if the time is taken to ensure that the content is accessible by all people, then it’s very likely that it will be accessible by search engines too.

Know better? Leave your own answer in the comments!

More small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have seen a quarterly reduction in sales volumes than large companies, research finds.

According to insolvency trade body R3, 29 per cent of smaller businesses saw shrinking revenues in Q4 compared to Q3, with just 6 per cent of large businesses reporting the same.

The research also finds that more than one third (34 per cent) of SMEs are experiencing decreased profits on the quarter compared to 19 per cent of big businesses.

R3 president Frances Coulson says, ‘The government has created a number of schemes to support SMEs as they are vital to the health of the economy, but they need more help to survive this difficult economic environment.

‘It is clear that many SMEs are not financially robust enough to withstand the economic pressure. Either more support is needed in 2012 to enable a real recovery, or some businesses will inevitably fail rather than continue to limp along, damaging competition.’

Across the board, fewer businesses (58 per cent) report seeing ‘signs of distress’ than the last quarter (68 per cent) and significantly less than December 2010 (77 per cent).

The report also finds that businesses able to make and receive online payments are faring better than those that can’t. Some 39 per cent of those that can’t use online payments are experiencing decreased profits, compared to 25 per cent of those that can.

Furthermore, 34 per cent of those who can’t use online payments have seen a reduction in sales volumes, compared to only 19 per cent who can.

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The UK manufacturing sector started 2012 on a positive footing with a key sector index rising to an eight-month high.

The seasonally adjusted Markit/CIPS UK Manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index climbed to 52.1 in January, from a revised reading of 49.7 in December.

Contributing to the performance was output expanding at the fastest pace since last March, new orders rising following a period of contraction and payroll numbers stabilising. Cost pressures continued to ease, as average input prices fell for the third straight month.

Manufacturing production also expanded for the second successive month, supported by growth of new orders and the clearance of backlogs of work.

Foreign demand rose for the second month running in January, amid reports of improved order inflows from clients in Brazil, China, the Middle East and the US. However, the rate of increase was only moderate and less marked than one month earlier.

Average input prices declined for the third successive month in January, with the rate of deflation the steepest since June 2009. Manufacturers reported lower costs for commodities, metals, packaging, paper, plastics and timber.

Rob Dobson, senior economist at Markit says, ‘January saw manufacturing kick-start back into life, with output expanding at the fastest pace since March 2011 and new orders rising for the first time in seven months.

‘Growth is nowhere near the surging highs of 12 months ago, but this is nonetheless a vast improvement on the 0.9 per cent reduction in output seen at the end of last year.’

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The rapid growth of mobile technology and its adoption throughout society has arguably been a boon to both employers and employees. When put in capable hands, a smart phone can be an incredible promoter of productivity.

But that doesn’t mean that smart phones are perfect. There’s a reason, after all, that many corporate workers given Blackberries coined the term ‘Crackberry.’

In short, one of the most attractive features of smart phones (24/7 connectivity and communication) is one of its greatest downsides. Information overload is a real threat, and employees are, in many cases, effectively always on the job.

Thanks to legislation signed into law last month, smart phones could now put employers in Brazil in a tough spot. As reported by Mobiledia, the “legislation in Brazil asserts company e-mails to workers equal direct orders from employers [and] labor attorneys say this makes it possible for workers answering e-mails after hours to ask for overtime pay.”

That, obviously, is probably not music to the ears of company executives and human resources departments, and it’s not an issue limited to Brazil. As Mobiledia notes, companies like Deutsche Telekom are trying to cut back on after-hours communication, and some, like Volkswagen, are going so far as to turn off email for employees entirely after the work day is done.

If more companies change their email policies in a similar fashion, it could have profound implications for email marketers. As ExactTarget’s RJ Taylor observes, B2B marketers could see lower engagement for emails sent during non-work hours, while B2C marketers could see lower engagement for emails sent during working hours. For consumers who opt to have a work smart phone and a person smart phone, email marketers could find themselves grappling with a “context” problem.

In the end, to maintain successful campaigns that convert, email marketers may have to get much more sophisticated about segmenting work versus non-work emails, and spend more time evaluating ideal timing for delivery based on this segmentation. In some cases, Taylor suggests, hitting an individual with a message may require a non-email solution.

Savvy email marketers could of course deal with this, and they already look closely at segmentation and timing, but having less flexibility due to employer-imposed restrictions on employee email use would certainly make email marketing more ‘interesting’ for many companies.

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