We have crafted a nice recipe for success for the Scottsdale Chamber of Commerce.

The short article in a recipe format describes the basic how-to for optimiing your website for better rankings on the internet. You may read it here.

I visited a website they other day, that will remain nameless. My task was to find a particular page where I could submit some information for a service request. Now knowing that we deal with websites everyday, and that we have been around the website block many many times, we think that we would be able to navigate even any navigation structure put in front of us.

But to my utter surprise and frustration, I could not locate this page. Anywhere. There were hundreds of pages on this site, but my little old page was buried. Never to be found.

In frustration I called the company and had to actually have the customer service rep walk me, click by click, to the page I was seeking. It turned out the page was only accessible by click on a general topic link from the home page, and then scrolling down through a list of over 300 links, in alphabetical order, to another category link, and then finally the eighth link down in the right column was my target.

The moral of the story is thus. Make sure your website is usable by the users. Seems simple enough. Yet many companies, and government agencies make the fundamental mistake of creating a website with no logical way to find information.

How many customers could your website be turning away in frustration?
How quickly can a user find the information they are looking for on your website?

These are fundamental aspects of a website that if not handled properly, lead to a bad user experience.

About obu Web Technologies, inc:
Founded in 2003, obu Web Technologies has quickly become the leading professional website design company in Arizona. Many clients have turned to obu Web for progressive web design, search engine optimization, and internet marketing services. obu Web Technologies’ business friendly approach as help many growing businesses achieve a positive return on investment for their web design dollars. Located in the heart of the Arizona Tech community. 13951 N Scottsdale Rd. Suite 132, Scottsdale, Arizona, 85254 www.obuweb.com

The Google update was named Jagger1.. and it seems thus far to be sticking around.. SEO is still and will always be a viable way to achieve top rankings.. one just has to adapt to the changes in the algo. But as always content is king. Here is a nice post on Return of Design that talks about solid seo pratices focused around content.

Well well,

There are many theories being tossed around the many forums as to what Google was trying to accomplish with this update. This is common as the knee jerk reaction is to question, moan, and cry in despair. Over the next few days it will calm down and the serious work of really analyizing will begin. Some of the most recent theories include: that google is looking more for synonyms in anchor text, therefore ranking sites more from permutation and variety of keywords rather than strict semantics. Also many are suggesting that large directories that sell links, are being devalued. This MAY be an effort by google to discourage artifical popularity building.

Matt Cutts blog mentions a possible link and PR update coming soon. Perhaps within days.

Relax and let the dust settle..

Well this has been an interesting weekend.. Google has done a massive update to the algo used to rank websites. Many many many websites have went from page 1 to page 500 in a matter of seconds. And other websites have remained unchanged. This is the nature of the SERPS. Now we learn, research, and figure out what the new factors are and adjust.

I have compiled some comments below from some of the sources I monitor for intelligence.

This is exactly what google needed to accomplish. And it’s so far exactly what I’m seeing, sites that have heavy seo work done on them, or towards them, have dropped, while sites that don’t, are either exactly the same, or ranking slightly better than before on the new results. Thus steveb’s claim that this is not an update. But who cares what you call it, this is clearly catching the intended targets, seos.

This may actually have some truth to it. Google as been rumored in the past to try and negate the function of SEOs. There is some evidence that “over-optimized” websites were indeed targetted in this update.

This also reminds me of Florida, and it’s why I have not been using any of the more aggressive seo tactics on the sites I have full control over, I expected this type of clamp down, especially after this summer’s filter tests and modifications, and especially after the apparently manual removal of directories a while ago. It is my working assumption that manual removal was carried out to enable google to construct a profile of spam backlink directory farms, at least that was part of the purpose.

I think maybe what has happened is that google is testing a completely new version of hilltop, with a completely redone trustrank component, which is why some people see little or no changes, while others see very large changes.

Again this author here suggests that seo’s may have been the intended target of this update. If this is the case, it illustrates further why a natural approach to seo is favored over a more aggressive, amatuer 1 sided approach. This is something obuweb has been doing for some time, taking a more wholistic approach to seo.

But other commercial sites did not drop, those also have seo done on them, but of I believe a different type than the ones that did drop, I haven’t studied them enough to determine what the difference was or is, but I could guess.

This is the magic answer that will come to light in time as further analysis is done.

At this time the infamous “Miserable failure” search text still works.
It can’t just be the anchor text that has been tweaked in the latest update.

The author is referring to an old google bomb in which the term “miserable failure” shows a site for GW Bush ranked number 1. This makes sense, and is in line with our theory that mainly just “recip IBLs” have been de-valued, and not ALL links..

More coming soon.. this post is open for comments.

Google has just finished an update to the algo. It seems the rankings and status quo of has been shaken up a bit. As details become available we will post them here.

Many of our listings have seen a significant slide from top 3, to 100+ in some cases.