LEBSEO Design

North Africa Facebook Demographics [Infographic]

Wissam Dandan — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 12:48:44 +0000

After the great success of our Middle East Facebook Demographics, We received multiple request asking about North Africa Facebook data and especially Egypt.

As you can see below, It’s a fact that the Middle East and North Africa has the lowest Female Population on Social Media.

Appreciate Tweets and +1′s.

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Middle East Facebook Demographics [Infographic]

Wissam Dandan — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 12:35:10 +0000

We dug a little deeper To find out more about the average Middle Eastern Facebook user. After crunching the numbers and comparing the Middle East data, this is what we found. Appreciate Tweets and +1′s.

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A/B Testing: See What Works Best

Wissam Dandan — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 18:38:43 +0000

It can be difficult to work with a site that is already built and receiving traffic. It can often seem impossible to know if the site is fully optimized for ease of visitor navigation, nor what moves could be made to make the site better. After all, once a web page is up, most webmasters loathe taking it down for the purpose of retooling. This is where A/B testing can come in handy. With this, you can actually have two different versions of the same page up. Perhaps with different graphics or layouts, and then use the information gained through page hits to figure out which one generates the most traffic or has the longest page views. Based on this method, you can continually optimize your website for maximum value and power.

The easiest way to do this, as with many other things on the Information Superhighway, is through Google. Google has a free application called Google Website Optimizer (GWO), which allows webmasters to employ A/B testing. Before you embark on this process, be sure to do/think about the following things:

Pick a page you wish to test. It needs to be an interactive page or a page that requires the visitor to click on something.
Choose the conversion page, or the page that the visitor will reach when clicking through.
Create the alternate versions of the control page, which is the first page that will be tested.
You can control the percentage of site traffic that gets sent to the experimental new page, but if you don’t direct at least a medium amount of traffic to it, it will take much longer to determine the results.

Once you’ve got your test pages up and ready, it’s time to put those pages to the test with the following steps.

Open GWO and select “create new experiment.”
Type in the URL of the first page as your initial test page.
Then, type in the URL of the second test page.
Lastly, type in the URL of the conversion page.

Once GWO has confirms that all of the above links work, it will validate your test. Once you are sure that everything is correct, click “Start Experiment,” which will allow you to set the final points of the test, like how much site traffic will be diverted to the test page. Once you’ve done that, click “Get Started.” This is when GWO will start compiling statistics to help you design your site to be the best that it can be.

A/B testing is a simple and effective way to experiment with organizing information on your site to improve your visitors’ experience. Keep in mind that it’s best to only test one variable at a time when conducting A/B testing to ensure that you know what variables are affecting the site’s traffic. When used correctly, A/B testing can help you ensure that you are ahead of the design curve and maintain visitors on your page.

Brian Flores is a SEO and blogger for InMotion Hosting, one of the top providers of virtual private server in the United States. He works with a team of awesome writers to post useful tutorials on WebHostingHelpGuy. You can follow him on Twitter @WHHG_InMotion or @BrianAFlores

Official Daytona Beach SEO & Internet Marketing Meetup

Wissam Dandan — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 14:56:24 +0000

The Official Daytona Beach SEO & Internet Marketing Meetup Group for Daytona Beach business owners and online marketing executives.

Our group offers insight into search engine marketing services from search engine optimization, pay per click advertising, and tons more.

Our group is open to anyone interested in learning about marketing online and growing their search engine traffic. Companies throughout Daytona Beach are encouraged to attend.

A Quick ECommerce SEO Site Audit

Wissam Dandan — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 15:14:27 +0000

At First, let me explain what is a “SEO website Audit”. A Site Audit its a 30 to a 50 page report where it gives you a detailed snapshot in time of how your site is performing in the search engines. Currently we provide these SEO Audits on the final client meeting where we spend good amount of time going over with the stakeholders, where we make sure the client understands it and knows what kinda actions need to be taken and why. Below is a brief Audit that include important aspect of the site visibility and structure

Check the # of the Indexed Pages

Use the “site: ” command in Google and in Bing

Examples:

Make note of the data.

What does this data mean?

These metrics indicate that your domain if it is being properly indexed by Google and Bing. This is important information to know because the indexation the major search engines strongly correlates to the amount of traffic the search engines send to your website.

Solutions:

Create a Sitemap.xml and a HTML Sitemap and Submit it to Google/Bing Webmaster tools
Internal Linking

Look For Duplicate Content

To find if your site is experience a duplicate content issues, these queries might help you identify URLs where your content is duplicated.

Phrase test: So for example, if a site contains a phrase such as “Beirut is the capital and largest city of Lebanon” copy it and search on Google (including the quotes). What will happen now is Google will find all the pages that includes exactly this phrase and skim threw your results and find potential copied content.
AllIntitle Command: AllIntitle is a Google advanced search operator where Google will restrict the results to those with all of the query words in the title. One example you can use, is use homepage title tag and insert it in Google. For Example = allintitle:”this is my title tag”. skim threw the results and see if you are serving Google duplicated content from your site.
For ECommerce sites, please check each product page ie. a blue and yellow widget. the widget product page it can be listed under the yellow category(domain.com/category/yellow/product.html) and also it can be in the Blue category ( domain.com/category/blue/product.html) <– big Duplicate content flag

Solutions:

Use 301 redirect: Use 301 in your .htaccess file to smartly redirect all search crawler to the canonicalized version of your page
Use Canonical: by adding a in the HEAD section of your site.

Do a Quick Redirect Check

Use a tool such as Web Sniffer. For example, go to http://yourdomain.com and see if it redirects to http://www.example.com. Then check Web Sniffer to make sure the redirect used was a 301 instead of a meta refresh or a 302 redirection. Here is a very informative video about site canonicalization by Matt Cutts.

Check the XML Sitemap File

Sitemaps are used by the search engines to learn both the location of the webpages on a domain. Adding an XML sitemap to your website will likely create a short term boost in the number of pages indexed by the engine.

Review the Robots.txt File

Some webmaster and developers run into problems where they accidentally restrict important sections of the content from Search Engine Crawlers.

Go to Google Webmaster Tools the go to the “Crawler Access” Section Under Site Configuration and use the built-in robots.txt checker. This will show you pages that Google thinks are blocked off by the robots.txt file.

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While some ECommerce sites has some positive attributes from the UX (User Experience) point of view, it may fall in some deep SEO pitfalls. This quick audit with help you find important portion of sites major problems.

Integrate Rankings in your Google Analytics Report

Wissam Dandan — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 14:18:42 +0000

This post is Inspired by “How to Add Google Rankings to Google Analytics” post launched on June 6, 2011 by Robert Enriquez, Founder of Search Exchange (an internet marketing conference in Charlotte, NC).

So let’s start by doing a Google Search for the Keyword “Lebanon Web Design” you will get the the top 10 listings rankings for this Keyword.

Now you will start seeing some referrer strings that look like this:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CDEQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.DOMAIN.com%2F&ei=vyzuTe63Bsbe0QHRvuyYCA&usg=

It has been confirmed by Matt Cutts that the cd parameter in the referral URL indicates the position of your page in the search results.

CD=1 means that this listing was ranking #1 when it was clicked on.

Please Note: With Universal search results (with images and local listings) cd Parameter data will not provide accurate organic ranking number due to Images/ Or a local map listings showing in the #1 spot

Adding Filters

Click on Add Filter in your Google Analytics Account Profile.

Add a filter name (it can be any name)
Click on Custom Filter
Click on Advance

Add the following in the fields

Campaign Term – (.*)
Referral – (\?|&)(cd)=([^&]*)
Campaign Term – $A1 (Rank: $B3)
Make sure to put all Yes for the 3 radio buttons. Click on NO for Case Sensitive

Steps when moving your site to a new Domain

Wissam Dandan — Fri, 06 May 2011 18:39:45 +0000

Are you Planning on moving your website to a new domain? Lots of current website owners find this a scary process. How do you do it without hurting your site’s performance in Google search results or SEO?

We recently (March 2011) completed a major CMS migration project where we moved LEBSEODESIGN.com to a WordPress Powered CMS. Briefly, what we learned from this process that our domain authority has helped us a lot during this migration.

Google has posted a nice guide for “Best Practices when moving your site” . If you do follow these steps to the “T”, your chances to regain your ranks and juice is pretty achievable and quick. (Domain authority helps alot to make this transfer quicker)

The most important steps in the process are:

Page to Page 301 redirection
Google Webmaster tools update (change of address)
Sitemap updates (for Yahoo, Bing and of course Google)
Go after the most important incoming links and Send a request to update your links to the New Domain
build new links to the new site

Did you move your site recently? How did it go? Please share with us, in your opinion, the “Important steps” in this process.

Create Short URLs Using APIs and Google Docs

Wissam Dandan — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 19:48:05 +0000

The spreadsheet component of Google Docs have some great functions that will help import web data into your online documents. At LEBSEO, we wanted to create a spreadsheet where the user can input a Long Url and Google Docs will automatically parse these URLs into multiple short URLs.

In this post we created this spreadsheet as a demo , and we used 5 different URL shorteners (and of course all of them use 301 redirect)

Bit.ly
s.coop
cut.by
Click.me
is.gd

Grabbing your APIs

In this stage we will go and grab our api from each service provider respectively:

Bit.ly = http://api.bitly.com/v3/shorten?login=USERNAME&apiKey=APIKEY&longUrl=URL&format=txt[/code]
s.coop = http://s.coop/devapi.php?action=shorturl&url=URL&format=simple[/code]
cut.by = http://cut.by/?longurl="URL"&api_key=APIKEY[/code]
Click.me = http://clicky.me/app/api?username=USERNAME&password=PASSWORD&url=URL
is.gd = http://is.gd/create.php?format=simple&url=URL

Some apis requires you to have an Account and/ Or API Keys like Bit.ly, Click.me and Cut.by

Creating your Functions

In order for us to pull the data and the results from the api query, we need to use two functions:

ImportData
concatenate

the ImportData Function is going to import exactly the results from the web to the spreadsheet and the concatenate function will use it to help us create the URL with a variable to execute the API query.

example concatenate("FA","CE","BOOK") = the results for the formula will be FACEBOOK

We are going to use the Bit.ly API in the Function Below:

= importData(concatenate("http://api.bitly.com/v3/shorten?login=USERNAME&apiKey=APIKEY&longUrl=",B1,"&format=txt"))

So let me explain, here we added a function where Google docs will go and execute the query of bit.ly api usings our URL located in B1. and we requested the format of the response to be TXT. which will help us get only the Short URL without any additional data.

By clicking enter, Google Docs with execute and provide you with the short URL.

Hope you enjoyed this Small tip, if you have any questions please do Ask!.

Cheers

Google Search Market Share drops to 65%, Bing up 30%

Wissam Dandan — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 14:42:20 +0000

Hitwise has published it latest data on Search Market share on April 11, 2011.

This time Bing jumped 5% month over month and Google has Declined 3% . So it will leave Google at 65% and Bing reach 30% of the Search market share.

Google +1 Welcome to the Social “Liking” Game

Wissam Dandan — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 19:04:32 +0000

Google Has announced a new way to share and recommend results straight from Google Search and Search Ads(Adwords). its Called “+1″ (Plus one).

it will be slowly rolling out in English on Google.com. If you can’t wait, sign in to your Google account and go to experimental search site.

Initially, +1’s will appear alongside search results and ads, but later they’ll appear in many more places (including other Google products and sites across the web).