Web6s Blog: Design, SEO & more!

Web6S is a web design and SEO company based in Niagara Falls, ON. We specialize in custom, one-off websites that generate results, dazzle the eyes and infotain the masses. Here you will be able to read some of our opinions, reviews, rants and much more. Don't be afraid to comment. We love communication and feedback.

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How Search Engines Work - Google is a Restaurant

A good friend and business aquintance of mine once explained to me how search engines are like restaurants and here is why. 

The following story follows three people: 

1. The Customer - you

2. The restaurant owner - Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc

3. The Chef(s) - website owners/operators

The customer (you) is hungry for knowledge/entertainment/information and so you decide that you are going to check out available restaurants. You have many choices but for this story we will use the Google restaurant, the Yahoo restaurant and the Bing restaurant. For the sake of expedition, let's say you chose to go to the famed Google restaurant. 

So you arrive at the Google restaurant and there is the owner (Google) ready to seat you and take your order. "I'll have search engine optimization in Niagara please". This is what you are craving today. "Coming right up" Google replies. Now the owner runs to the back of the kitchen to tell his many chefs what the latest customer has just ordered. 

Remember, the chefs are all of the websites out there who are capable of delivering this particular meal. Google now asks them "who can deliver the best meal for my customer?". Naturally everyone raises their hands (or all of us who want to be ranked under this particular search, or meal if you will). Google then takes note of everyone who tossed their perverbial chef hat in the ring and begins to analyze each chefs meal. They look at the chefs cooking history. They look at the presenattion of the chefs meal. They do a quick taste test of the chefs hearty content soup. The list goes on. In the end, the chefs meals have now been ranked and presented to the customer one by one. Google has put their best meals at the front of the line. 

The customer now samples the meals. He will not sample all of them but odds are he will sample at least a few until he has found one that suits his tastes. Throughout this, Google has been keenly observing the customer, watching which meals were passed upon and which ones were paletable. With each passing meal, Google has takes note.

The winning meal (or meals) now have a bit of authority for the next customer who comes in to order "search engine optimization in Niagara". The busy Google restaurant does this millions of times per day with millions of different meals. 

During the course of the restaurants operations,  various chefs come and go. Sometimes the new chefs prove themselves and take work away from previously good chefs. Other chefs quickly drop out and others fade away into the back alley behind the restaurant. The important takeaway though is that Google will continously go through this process (testing their chefs and seeing whos meal is the latest and greatest) and will present the best meals to their customer. If they do not do this and the customer has a bad experience then the next time they are hungry they may go to the Yahoo restaurant or the Bing restaurant. The Google restaurant does not want to see this happen. 

If this whole little anicdote went over your head then here is the final food for thought. As the chef, you don't impress the restaurant owner (Google) by giving them what they want. You impress the restaurant owner by giving them what their customer wants.

[web6s-blog]

Product - Category Name Bug in WordPress

If you have ever built an ecommerce website using WordPress than you might have seen the tricky first product-category name bug. e have developed a quick dirty hack to making first product names appear properly (Wp e-Commerce). The rest of the Web6S team said I should impart my Wordpress knowledge to the massesand reveal my secrets. So here goes nothing. 

The problem: When clicking on a product category and navigating to it's respective list of products,  the first product in the list would display the category name rather than the name of the product. After doing some research I foud a few answers.   1. Some found that the problem was in the page.php file in your theme folder. You can read about it at the beginning of this post: http://gasolicious.com/commerce-product-category-pages/

There are different places that you will find the post title in different themes, so it may take some looking around. That post covers some of them.

2. Since I was working with the Thematic theme, I found a solution where I could alter the post title. It was in functions.php - by putting in something like this: http://getshopped.org/forums/topic/thematic-fix-product-title-displayed-instead-of-category-title/ This repair method though would take a bit of tweaking since the fix deals with the opposite problem (trying to get the category name to display instead of the product title). Needless to say, this was not the fix for me.

3. Some found the solution by calling the product title twice in either: wpsc-products_page, wpsc-list_view where the product loop starts.  For example turning this line: <?php while (wpsc_have_products()) : wpsc_the_product(); ?> into this: <?php while (wpsc_have_products()) : wpsc_the_product(); wpsc_the_product_title();?> That calls wpsc_the_product_title() once, then it get's called again when you call it to display the title.

4.  Another solutions for some was removing this line of code;  remove_filter('the_title','wpsc_the_category_title'); from: wpsc-includes/theme.functions.php

Well, to be honest, none of these solutions worked for me. I soon found myself resorting to an ugly hack that is a comprimize, but it gets the job done. Since the first product still linked it's correct product page, I just took the permalink of that title, stripped it down to the title portion and removed the dash. Voilla! Here is the code that I put in wpsc-products_page.php, it's place right befor calling the title: 

<h2 class="prodtitle entry-title">    <?php if(get_option('hide_name_link') == 1) : ?>       <?php       echo wpsc_the_product_title();       ?>    <?php else: ?>       <a class="wpsc_product_title" href="<?php echo wpsc_the_product_permalink(); ?>">       <?php       // cut the url into an array of strings separated by a "/" then remove "-"       $link_line = explode("/", wpsc_the_product_permalink());       $title = str_replace("terrain", "", str_replace("-", " ", $link_line[5]));       echo $title;       ?></a>  <?php endif; ?> </h2> 

Hope this helps anyone who is experience similar problems with their WP eccomerce webiste. 

[web6s-blog]

Quick SEO

Ha! Does not exist. Sorry for the misleading title but it might have grabbed your attention. Overnight SEO success is something I get plagued with almost every day!

How do we get to the top of SERPS?

My friends site was ranking overnight.

But XYZ Consulting said they would guarantee I get to the top. 

In a perfect world, everybody would rank in the top spots for their desired terms and it would happen overnight. Long and the short of it is that true SEO takes persistence and patience. Many times I have come across other SEOs promising “instant SEO”. They use cheap tricks for quick results (honeymoon effect) and disregard long term success.

Number of links vs quality of content vs site/social stats etc. SEO is not a versus game (especially more so these days with the ways search engines are playing with their algorithms). SEO is a cumulative effort and content should be at the forefront (it is King afterall). If you put the time in to build a solid website layout with even more solid content then links and other goodies will follow organically. That’s not to say you can’t help them along.

The rockstar SEO’s of the world develop many tactics for their overall SEO strategy that involve covering all the bases. They even implement these tactics sometime simultaneously and seamlessly. This is why they are the rockstars. Others have to set up schedules and adhere to them to cover all their bases. The bases need to be covered though. Using a single tactic or two might do the job but long term success depends on a well balanced SEO diet. 

Take the time and do it right. Research, implement and tweak once you have results. Repeat. 

[web6s-blog]

What not to do on Facebook

The Facebook page for Condescending Corporate Brand Page is a hilarious satire of what not to do on Facebook. 

Have a chuckle and learn more here.

[web6s-blog]

What to blog about?

What should I blog about? This is the question that has plagued many business owners and evern SEOs/coywriters for a very long time. I recently talked to some fellow business people about this topic. Some expressed their concerns about not creating "good" material. In the end, this made them scared to put out anything. 

Many people do not stop to think that a blog can give you a chance to be real with your aidience. Writing something that your audience might like to read should not be like pulling teeth. Keep things within the context of your business/indsutry and write from the heart. I believe that people can tell when you have written something just for the sake of writing it and they can also tell when something came out forced. If you put out anything, it should for the sake of communicating with your audience. Give them something that will help them and don't be afraid to keep it light. 

Hemmingway once said that he wrote 1 masterpiece for every 91 pages of shit. Not everything will be a gem but the ones that are can have a tremendous impact on your business. Persistence is the name of the game.

[web6s-blog]

The Volatility of Search

For our first blog entry, we would like to bring up a touchy subject. The dreaded search engine ranks. With recent updates from major search engines like Google, a lot of changes have come about from SEO's. 

We have noticed lately a great deal of volatility in the search engine ranking world with client sites battling for top spots and being pushed around day in and day out. The question that all SEO's need to ask now is "Why?"

Could it be that other websites vying for the golden positions have their own SEO's who have been making similar changes and tweaks?  Maybe it is a direct result of the changes to search algorithms. There is also the "honeymoon effect" as put by rainbodesign. The list could go on and on. 

Some things to consider is if your site is targeting the correct keywords. We have met clients who saw themselves drop on keyword phrases that they were not even targeting. You also should consider the crawl-ability of your site. If you have made changes that don't allow bots to successfully crawl your site, you might as well take it down. For new websites, low link popularity is a big consideration and finding quality links can be a full time job. Whatever the case may be, always remember that proper SEO takes time. There are no overnight repairs and any SEO who tells you otherwise, or guarantees you rank for that matter, should be taken with a grain of salt. Learn the foundations of SEO and be persistence with your efforts and more importantly, patient with results.