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I recently had to research this question for a client–I knew the answer on a gut level, but needed the data to back it up. Turns out, it’s kind of hard to find. There’s a lot of information out there about what you should do with footer links. And there’s a lot of information out there about the practice of “keyword stuffing” (and if you’re still doing this in your site, please join us in this decade!). But there’s actually relatively little information about specifically stuffing your footer with keywords. Everyone wants to rank well for key terms that may be a little hard to work into your home page content. And back in the day, keyword stuffing (whether in the body, hidden by colors or slide-out panels, or in the footer) did actually work. That was a simpler time…an easier-to-spam-the-search-engines time. But that time has passed. We can’t keep thinking of Google (or even Yahoo) as just a term-frequency-matching system. Try Googling (oh, the irony) how Google’s algorithm actually works to deliver search results. They’re not actually going to explain it to you. But what you will realize quite quickly is that IT’S REALLY COMPLICATED. Ranking highly for your key phrases hasn’t been a matter of simple frequency on the page in a verrrrrry long time. Keyword stuffing simply ain’t what it used to be. The other thing you’ll quickly realize is that the Google algorithm is REALLY SMART. The Google “bot” is parsing more than just your text content,…

Complete site redesign and fleshing-out is still underway (I’m far too neurotic about the site structure to just start putting things up without making sure I’m 100% happy with what I’m doing!), but in the meantime I’ve rolled over to the Twenty-Eleven WP theme, which in my opinion is much nicer to look at than the old theme. Though I apparently briefly broke the blog in the changeover, sorry! One thing I don’t like about the Twenty Eleven theme, however, is that in my personal opinion it has way too much whitespace and dumps too much content below the fold. Fortunately, this is easily modifiable in the CSS. So I just stripped out some padding. Though I love the header images that come with the theme, I hate being “default”, so I uploaded a photo I took in San Diego a few months ago as my interim header until the full design launches. Something about the image really appeals to me….it’s also my desktop background at the moment. I think it’s the pattern/texture of it. Horrible cold currently makes for notmuch work getting done, but there’s lots of stuff in the works!

Long overdue: I’m getting business cards. And a new website design. Thanks to a thoroughly awesome friend in the design field, they ought to be pretty snazzy. In other, less personal news: Google Plus profiles are now available for businesses. I won’t be getting one right now, but you can follow me on G+ here. This article on starting a business was great and totally worth a read. And I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet, but OMG user flow visualization in Google Analytics? Yes please! I’m currently working primarily in SEO, but my real love is actually user experience. I’m a big believer in combining the two to get the best website possible, one that users will love and will get results, and I’m also a big fat data geek and any time I can be neck deep in user data I’m happy. So this is awesome.

Okay, maybe not. But I was pretty pleased when I checked the Analytics data for ZiiBest and discovered that in less than a month on the web, it’s received over 400 visitors and 1100 pageviews with a sub 40% bounce rate and a near 3 minute time on site. Not too shabby for brand new!

Behold: the sun rising over Big Sur about a week ago. I was on vacation (aaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh) and snapped this with my iPhone camera right as the sun was coming up over the trees. Gorgeous. It was great to get out of LA and back into nature for a while, and definitely made me feel secure in my choice to move out of the city and back to the farm, which is happening alarmingly soon! My phone battery died shortly after we entered the campground, and there was little to no signal anyways, so I enjoyed two blissful days in Big Sur free of electronic interference–no email, no internet, no calls. As the sun rose on our last day, I charged up my phone at the camp shop so I could grab a few shots of the area before we left. Sunrise over the hills is something special.

I’ve been busy. What have I been up to? Hiring the incomparable Jess and Meg to the VISISEEK team! And they have been lovely. raising baby cockatiels! handling a truly massive amount of client work at VISISEEK hunting down a wordpress theme for my good friend’s site, which will be live soon with any luck

That’s our slogan and we’re sticking to it. Want to work for VISISEEK? Want me to be your supervisor? Want to always have something new to do? Well, assuming you want all that, and you are an intelligent, self-starting, internet-savvy person with excellent writing and analytical skills and the ability to stay on task and on time when working from home in a telecommuting position, we may have a job for you. Check out the VISISEEK careers page, currently showing an old but semi-accurate job description. Soon to be updated with current openings. Like what you see? Send a resume to holly at visiseek dot com.

I’ve been heinously busy the last two week with end of month and beginning of month client work, so this site has seen no improvements or work whatsoever, except that my host upgraded my WP for me. Thanks guys! But I did manage to get through my Google Analytics Individual Qualification (GoogleIQ). If you don’t know what that is and want to, here’s the GA IQ FAQ, which should get you your daily dose of abbreviations all in one go, but the gist of it is: The Google Analytics Individual Qualification is a proof of proficiency in Google Analytics and of course Google Analytics is: a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. The product is aimed at marketers as opposed to webmasters and technologists from which the industry of web analytics originally grew. It is the most widely used website statistics service Which is to say, I’m now officially certified as being reasonably competent to analyze statistical information about website traffic and use said data to make decisions that will improve traffic or conversions or what-have-you. I have to say, taking the test reminded me of taking the SATs rather a lot. Logic questions, multiple choice, the I, II, III questions–it’s all very SAT-like. Which is perfectly fine with me, I’m pretty good at that sort of format in general. But I would not have wanted to take the exam without at least as much GA experience as I have, I…