But we have learned lots and evolved & adapted to the challenge. In March, we migrated our main front-end server to a yet-again more powerful dual processor server with LiquidWeb (liquidweb.com).  Why Liquid Web?  They host gigantic forums like webhostingtalk.com & many others, and have the reputation as being some of the best in the business when it comes to pro-active server management. They stay on-top of hardware & security maintenance completely, freeing us up to take better care of our clients. They also have extensive experience in scalable hosting & in dealing with various kinds of attacks — enabling us to still do our own tweaking & optimizations to our hosting infrastructure while having full support for the types of issues that require specialized experience in hosting to handle.

We’ve noticed since the upgrade in hosting that many of our client sites are loading even faster than they were at best on the old server.  Here are some performance test results we have observed:

It would be generous to call our own website (wickedwebsites.ca) bloated and media heavy. To be honest, it’s super-bloated and media-heavy! Never the less, here are the results from Pingdom Website Speed Tests:

WickedWebsites.ca Speed Test Results:

So we have taken the loading time of our own website & cut it in less than half with the recent upgrades in hardware & bandwidth alone — and we’re still improving with more optimizations to the site & hosting infrastructure itself!

Here is another result from another extremely media heavy website, envisionauto.com :

EnvisionAuto.com Speed Test Results:

Once again, showing an improvement of almost 1.5x from hardware upgrades alone.  So how do our streamlined, not so media heavy websites do?  Check out our results from ExcelSalesConsulting.com :

ExcelSalesConsulting.com Speed Test Results:

An already fast website that used to load in 1.63 seconds loading to completion in 0.6 SECONDS from the original request!

We’re proud of the improvements to our hosting infrastructure, happy with our changes, and think it was worth the bit of downtime only a couple of our clients noticed to make it happen. We hope you’re enjoying your exceptionally fast websites!

ps. These keywords aren’t exactly “a cakewalk”!

More results? Alrighty then.

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Check out the Full PDF Rankings Report for more detail.

Excuses?  No thanks, don’t need em!

We will continue to work on our results here & keep everyone posted (if we have time in-between all the phone calls from new clients)! 

If you’d like us to apply the same attitude & techniques towards *your* company’s search engine rankings – give us a call (before your competitor’s do).

1. Original content builds credibility with your site’s visitors.

Maybe you have some lame, unoriginal copy on your website, or a bunch of stock photos they’ve also seen on your competitors website.  Perhaps you have a few generic pictures related to your business but no original and truly worthwhile media (pictures and videos). Perhaps you thought you don’t really need to bother with blogging or social media, or newsletters & creating new content for your website on a regular basis.

If this is you, then your competitors have a gigantic leg on up on you. If they do this & you don’t, then you are not going to come across as very credible, unique, or interesting. Regardless of how experienced you are, or how long you’ve been in business, or whatever else you do. It’s important to use your website to let people know “what’s going on”, why you’re different, and make a great presentation with your own video & imagery — otherwise all your website really amounts to is a very fancy, overpriced business card.

We can help!

2. Original content is critical for SEO.

If Google doesn’t think your content on your website is original, your website will be more or less ignored and be completely left out of the rankings.

Not only that, but you need some great content to prove your experience, skill & knowledge in a given field and to allow for the search engines to see your original content filled with the keywords that relate to your business.

Finally & perhaps most importantly, without original & interesting content; your web design doesn’t matter & no one will have any reason to share it with anyone else, building critical back-links that raise the authority of your website on the internet. A great web developer &/or copywriter can help you to do this.

3. First Impressions Are Critical For Developing Customer Relationships

A great web design firm will help you to craft your marketing copy carefully so that you create a good first impression — getting across your value proposition while simultaneously creating a positive, credible impression and inspiring interest.

However it doesn’t matter how great your design, presentation, reputation, & portfolio is if your website doesn’t interest anyone that finds it to purchase your products or services. That’s one of the main reasons it is so critical to spend the time to write your own content carefully, and to continue to produce your own relevant content for your pages, blogs, and social media. This is a key to building your online marketing presence.

Client’s always ask me: “How do I get tons of new business from Google?”. Well, we can certainly help you to put your best foot forward, but at the end of the day it comes down to putting in a considerable amount of effort to translate your business and everything anyone would want to know about it to the web. Of course, having a great developer that really understands marketing, and is willing to take the time to try to get to know your business sure helps!

(Results from yesterday, Sunday March 4, 2012)

Click To Enlarge

Check out the Full PDF Rankings Report for more detail.

Even with our rank-tracker program having issues gathering data from yahoo [we are actually doing quite well on Yahoo, also], we still see substantial gains in overall visibility & all our main targeted terms. We also have a bunch of #1 rankings in Google for what are called “long tail” search terms that are relevant now… such as “seo company in calgary”. This is part of our specific strategy, which we won’t go into too much detail about for obvious reasons!

If only we could also brag about our client’s rankings which to be honest we are more excited about right now. We think that by the end of month 2 we should be past the 50% visibility mark & have the majority of our targeted terms on the front page… check back to see our progress!

Click To Enlarge

Check out the Full PDF Rankings Report for more detail.

The mystery above is the lack of love we have been getting from Yahoo – it makes little sense to us since they’ve adopted the same algorithm as Bing & have apparently integrated their search results with Bing; and Bing seems to like our website just fine!  Our theory at this point in time is that Yahoo is just a bit slower with indexing and/or we’ve offended it’s algorithm somehow… but it should come around with a little patience (and doesn’t matter in the first place since it’s market share is pitiful and isn’t responsible for any traffic anyway).

So once again: 42 days from zero to #4 on Google for “Calgary SEO” ahead of many older, larger companies… and that being kind of a primary term, not exactly “low competition”. Still, there will be no surrender and we aren’t done yet by a long shot… although we hope this serves as an example of what we love to do for our clients the most — and our attitude towards making it happen.

If you’d like us to do the same thing for your business, please give us a call & we’ll be happy to give you a free consultation including a keyword analysis report & rankings report.

Click To Enlarge

Check out the Full PDF Rankings Report for more detail.

We expect to be able to post a much more impressive update soon as we creep onto the front page for these highly competitive terms and keep consistently moving up in the rankings.

If you’d like us to do the same thing for your business, please give us a call & we’ll be happy to give you a free consultation including a keyword analysis report & rankings report.

So, what do these somewhat negative looking results actually say?  To us, they are showing a common and expected tendancy for quick and impressive ranking gains to rebound in Google after a concerted SEO effort.  Google’s algorithms are very smart; and big gains in a short time-frame are in a way an indication of something “fishy” and “un-natural” to Google so we tend to find that if we gain too much ground too quickly sometimes it seems as if rankings are arbitrarily scaled back.

Our rankings for the very competitive terms that we have targeted have been scaled back a little bit; but we are still growing aggressively for many other relevant search terms; and we expect to now head into a more steady, progressive and slow growth of our rankings for these highly competitive terms as we head towards the top 10 (and thus the front page of Google)! By taking a much less aggressive approach to SEO, we may have avoided these seemingly arbitrary setbacks, but such is the nature of the beast & attempting such an ambitious goal.

Keep checking back to see our progress, we will continue to post regular updates & commentary!

That said, we are on the scoreboard for our primary targeted term “Calgary Web Design” and also doing well for a few other terms we are targeting already after a week… and showing huge gains as time goes on.  Here is SEO Rankings Report #1 for this SEO Challenge (PDF). We have seen significant gains in Google, Yahoo, and Bing for the term “calgary seo” and have seen great gains in Google for calgary web design, calgary web designer, calgary web development, & web design calgary.

Results speak louder than words, so see for yourself:

It’s worth noting that we have attained these gains using ethical, white-hat methods of SEO & link-building & not using paid links as we’ve discovered much of our competition uses to try to trick Google… We want sustainable rankings that are a reflection of the quality of our website & SEO skills; not to vanish off the search engines entirely some day soon as Google updates the intelligence of it’s ranking algorithms yet again and penalizes yet more sites for not following their webmaster guidelines.

Onwards & upwards! We will be back with another update next week. It’s also worth mentioning that it’s not realistic for us to expect to see these kinds of gains regularly & that we certainly don’t expect to continue this rate of progress; nor will we always see green arrows! As other sites also improve their results, as the rankings naturally fluctuate and as Google constantly tweaks things, re-evaluates sites and their algorithms, we expect to see minor up’s and down’s in our progress with a slow but steady growth. With any luck our efforts will continue to appreciate over time like a great investment should.

Happy new year! We hope you had a fantastic holiday season, and we’re starting the new year with some great announcements, tons of interesting developments, new services & reporting capability and a much better infrastructure – all to help you get better results from your websites & internet marketing.

Overview of What’s New

• We’ve massively improved our hosting infrastructure. Have you noticed your website is markedly faster and more responsive?
• We’ve done a professional & complete security audit of all websites & our hosting infrastructure.
• We’ve started to leverage the power of Amazon’s Cloudfront & S3 Content Distribution Network’s to further improve loading speed of all websites we maintain.
• We’ve dealt with unexpected problems popping up several times after the new dedicated server went live; as detailed on our twitter account – and we aggressively solved them with minimal noticeable service interruption (most of you were probably not aware of any interruption).
• We’ve launched our new company homepage & spent a lot of time perfecting articles that provide a great introduction to our philosophy on web marketing, search engine optimization, and speak to our focus on speed, reliability, and business effectiveness.  Please check it out and let us know what you think!
• We’ve invested in industry-leading search engine optimization tools that allow us to do in-depth competitive analysis, search term research, search engine visibility & rankings reporting and all kinds of website optimization and tools to help us be more efficient and effective with our SEO efforts to help you generate more business with your websites & get more traffic & sign ups on twitter, facebook, and email marketing!
• We’ve started a Company Blog & are doing a public SEO Challenge to show off our proficiency in climbing the Google rankings for extremely competitive search terms like Calgary Web Design.
• We’ve increased our focus on using Twitter as a means to communicate (Please Follow Us if you’re not already!) and keep you up to date on company & industry news & developments.
• We’ve developed relationships with great digital logo artists, hosting technology experts, and SEO link-building specialists to fill in the blanks and increase our capacity to provide a complete internet marketing package efficiently & on time.

Like most beginning developers we started using one of many shared hosting companies. We chose well, we mostly used a hosting company called “Dreamhost” a well reviewed and high quality shared host and we paid the kingly sum of roughly $20/month to host all our websites for the first year after the company was started. After launching some very demanding, highly dynamic, media heavy websites like Envision Auto, we decided that it was time for an upgrade and had a terrible experience with a company called Media Temple. Finally we decided no more compromises were tolerable and purchased our own dedicated server – not just any server, an extremely powerful one with many upgrades such as enterprise grade solid-state storage which vastly increases the responsiveness of all requests & queries to the server and reduces the overall latency for any page load substantially. We hired a Linux Guru & ITSec consultant to professionally setup our dedicated server security & setup our server in a very unique customized speed oriented way. Our software setup is nearly identical to Facebook using Nginx to handle requests for static files and Apache to hand requests for dynamic content.

During the migration process all websites we audited for security & numerous potential exploits and vulnerabilities were updated, patched, and solved.  A backup system is now in place which backs up every client website in it’s entirely off-site every single day.

Speed Results: We’ve benchmarked several websites with various website speed test tools & public websites & on average websites load about twice as fast now; with some sites loading up to 80% faster. You can check the speed of your site by typing “web page speed test” into Google. We recommend pingdom’s test as the most thorough and accurate. We will post a blog updates detailing before & after results in the near future.

Summary of Updates:

• Went from cheap shared hosting to an extremely powerful dedicated server with solid state storage in a top-tier Seattle datacenter (We didn’t feel any Calgary Datacenters were up to snuff in terms of routing & quality).
• Improved security, updated all passwords & audited all websites for security issues during migration process.
• Backup system put in place with complete backups of every client website off-site every day.

Content Distribution Network

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is essentially a group geographically dispersed servers that deliver some of your Website content to the customer from servers closest to your website visitor. This can mean that your website content is delivered quicker to your visitor. We’ve started to use this with some of our more media-heavy websites; this can help loading speeds not only by allowing more items to load asynchronously, but also gives a nice Google rankings bonus from extra page speed all over the world as the sizable items of each page load from the server closest to the viewer.

There are several different CDN’s we’ve been testing out and have more or less settled on Amazon’s Cloudfront as the most reliable & consistently fast – as they have one of the biggest networks in the world.

Issues Solved

As tends to happen with all big changes we had a few issues during the process of switching everything over to a dedicated server.  The server itself had some growing pains resulting in a bit of downtime; we fought with the server company to not only replace the faulty hardware ASAP, but do it at night to avoid noticeable downtime. This also resulted in some issues with email & contact form functionality of client sites for a short period of time, which we noticed and solved ASAP. If you ever notice a problem with anything, be sure to let us know!

New Company Home Page

We’re proud to have launched our new company home page a few months back and think that it better reflects our company tagline “Beautiful, functional, well marketed websites for business”.  Please check it out and give us a comment on twitter & a like on Facebook!

Search Engine Optimization Tools & Other Marketing Strategy Updates

If 2011 was the year for intently focusing our improvement efforts on speed, reliability, security, and all forms of on-site optimization; 2012 is on track to be a year of intent focus & massive improvements to all off-site marketing efforts. We have recently purchased a number of expensive software & tools that allow us to automate reporting & analysis tasks when it comes to SEO; and make link-building and climbing up the Google ranks more efficient and economical for you.  We’ll also be increasing our focus on taking advantage of social media & improving our ability to automate & integrate it into websites. There are now great plugin’s for WordPress, Joomla & Expression Engine that allow us to automatically Tweet & Facebook postings with the click of a button as soon as you publish a news posting, blog, or article on your website.

We’ve already had some impressive results at the start of January doing link-building for a client that wanted more stable long term results & a better value than you get through pay-per-click advertising. Check out the results reports here & here! These reports are just initial reports after only a few days of link-building effort for the client & show the kind of aggressive & efficient improvements we hope to be able to offer everyone who wants tons of targeted traffic to their website.

We should be touching base with you to discuss SEO reporting & sending a sample report with an overview of your rankings for key search terms shortly if we have not already.

Company Blog & New Services

As you can see here, we’ve been making an effort to keep you up to date using Twitter. In 2012 we plan to keep this up & do even more with our Company Blog, SEO Challenge, and posting about the great results our clients are having with their websites. Please follow us on twitter, there are sure to be some interesting posts this year!

We will be rolling out some new services over the course of the year that will help to economically promote & maintain your website in the front page of the major search engines for the terms that will help your bottom line immensely, as well as services that will help you to take full advantage of social media & email marketing to stay in touch with every potential customer that connects with you via your website.

With that said, we are currently in an awkward position when it comes to the question of our ability to prove our SEO & overall internet marketing prowess because of the fact that we’ve never put any effort at all into marketing ourselves and this company; and have always been busy from referral work & working to achieve better results for our clients! Also we can’t take all the credit for the success of our client’s websites, especially when they are running other forms of marketing campaigns; nor can we always show off the details of their internet marketing strategy and the coinciding impressive results.

What to do?  How about just going from non-existent to #1 in the search engines for one of the most highly competitive search terms in Canada?  Now that should inspire some confidence and really say something about who we are as a company and what we aspire to for our clients.

So let’s be clear about the objective: This website [www.WickedWebsites.ca] will go from 0 to hero for the search term “Calgary Web Design“.  This is one INCREDIBLY competitive search term, have a look:

The top companies here are well established, 10+ year companies with far more resources at their disposal, larger teams of full-time employees, and long track records with an obvious ton of SEO effort gone into achieving these rankings because there are literally thousands of Calgary Web Development, hosting, and optimization businesses behind them that are also vying for a front page position.

While we won’t get into details of our competitive analysis, various optimization efforts and methods; we will post detailed ranking reports starting next week as soon as we get on the scoreboard and begin our climb up the rankings. With some analysis, intelligent strategic decisions, and a bit of elbow grease & rolling up the sleeves hard work, we think a first page ranking (and perhaps even a #1) is achievable within a few months.

Check back soon for detailed updates on our progress!