EXIF Data and Unique Content

Only two groups of people ever used of Google+ in the early days: insider fan boys and professional photographers. Sort of a strange combination.

The fan boys were there because they'd already been invited into beta testing long before public release, and photographers began joining because they discovered uploaded photos retained all their exif data and thought that was a big deal.

Most websites at the time would reduce the size of uploaded images through some manner of shrinking, compressing, and stripping out exif data. This made things much faster and made sense because computer screens couldn't display anywhere near the resolution of real photographs and exif data was of no use to anyone.

But for professionals wishing to share and appreciate photos taken by themselves and others, exif data is part of a photograph. It helps explain what's being seen in ways the rest of us don't get. Google just wanted to keep more details about everyone's pictures, but photographers found tremendous value in this feature.

The most important thing exif data does is identify an image as truly unique. Original content, so to speak. Likewise, it helps identify stock images used on thousands of websites, content that clearly isn't unique to any of those sites.

Because of this I believe Google will continue using exif data as a way to identify unique content for some time. This is one reason Second Glance Digital Media is happy to provide photography services for clients (locally of course), and encourages the use of original photos throughout your website and blog.

Some Common Webmaster Mistakes

Note that this video is from 2013, although I doubt much would change if it were answered now in 2016. Same philosophy, different implementation.

Website Update: Accounted For

Accounted For is an accounting business operating in Bracebridge, Ontario and serving the Gravenhurst and Huntsville vicinity. The owner of the business, Laura, visits many of her clients in person, and deals with others by computer and telephone.

Accounted For provides personalized tax filing, payroll services, and bookkeeping. Whether you have a unique personal income tax situation (truck driver? stock trader? rental properties?), want to get your business finances tightened up, or just have some simple routine filings, she'll get the job done, and at an amazing price. She can also explain CRA correspondence and help you with audits if necessary.

This has been a top-10 ranking website since it was built many years ago, when the owner was originally in Peterborough. This change is a partly cosmetic, but primarily to re-target the website to residents of the Bracebridge area.

The site has just one page of content, designed to help a visitor determine if Accounted For provides the accounting services they need. It is modest compared to other accounting sites with many pages and flashy designs, but her clients aren't looking for a huge international accounting firm, and the simple look reflects the small business owners who form most of her clientele. I'm happy to continue providing this terrific small business with top-10 rankings in a field of much larger competitors.

Website Redesign: Buckhorn Sand and Gravel

We've finished a new website for Buckhorn Sand & Gravel. They sell sand, gravel, and stone, and also offer construction and landscaping services. They've been in operation since 1963.

Their website was never a major channel of marketing or communication, the telephone being the main point of contact. This explains why the site became neglected, and why they were still so busy despite it: their abandoned website honestly wasn't a detriment to business. But at least they realized the website didn't represent them, and made a wise call getting a new one built.

The goal here was to create something new, modern, and with better information, yet remain simple enough for their customers. Visitors get a thorough idea of their product line and range of services, and plenty of carefully selected photos (that pop-up to large versions). Customers will still phone or email regarding their projects, but the website is now much more useful to start with.

Colors stem from their logo's white and orange, with a textured rock background throughout. The site already appears in the top-10 search results for aggregate products and landscaping services in several of their target geographical areas.

Website Update: Maxama Protection

One of our existing web design clients, Maxama Protection, wants to grow their business in the Oshawa and Durham region. The company is based in Peterborough and provides security guards and marked cars throughout central Ontario. Their existing website is a top-ranking success that draws many inquiries.

After some discussion we decided the best approach would be simply adding a page to their site about Oshawa security guard and patrol services. We could have created a second small website or tried adjusting the wording and content throughout the existing site to rank for Oshawa searches, but both those ideas are spammy and unprofessional. So we created one clean and focused page.

After about one month live, this page now ranks in the top 10 search results for Oshawa security guards! This is no doubt due to the high quality of the site we started with, plus the simple straight forward targeting of the new page.

Website Redesign: Pharaoh Scents

This client sells aromatherapy sprays made with essential oils. The feel of the new site was to be very slick and atmospheric, fully themed with the product line.

While not the worst website out there, it sure needed help. The sprawling white pages were too bright with little imagery to compliment the text. It was a design that worked with monitors available at the time of creation (i.e. 1024x768 or smaller), but with today's laptops and large desktop monitors, the dynamic layout was very strange looking.

The central work included nice clear recreations of the logo and other artwork, new product photos, and top-to-bottom code rewriting. It lacked even the simplest elements like H1 and ALT tags! This website had a full range of typical deficiencies, never mind SEO.

Online shopping will be added to the site in coming weeks, but the redesign is basically complete. Work will now continue towards improving the search rankings and driving traffic, with ongoing adjustments to the content and copywriting, as well as reaching out through social media. There are also several legitimate directories this company should be in that are specific to the products they sell.

Top-Ranking Success: Naylor Systems

Naylor Systems manufactures very high quality marine equipment like aluminum docks, boat lifts, roller ramps for boats, and much more.

They're a market leader in Ontario, with over 50 dealers selling their products. By virtue of their genuine popularity and credibility the website was actually ranking ok, the main issue was the look. Extra planning was needed to ensure smooth redirects from old pages, clear on-topic content, and continuing ranking success.

This was another tale of a site built by a prior employee and now outdated and not representative of their business. The photos were blurry, the layout confusing and inconsistent, product information was both old and not prioritized well, and the look was late-1990s at best. Not to mention the automated Flash slideshows with background music! I hadn't seen such a thing in years. I thought the internet was free of such insanity!

Many of the photos sent by the client were taken during a thunderstorm, with dark skies. And since this redesign was occurring in October and November (when people pack up their docks and equipment), there was no chance to get better pictures. Much time was spent to salvage these otherwise good photos.

The website really turned into an online sales brochure, focusing on the details of their products. A lot of information is provided, yet the site remains simple and easy to use. Some of this was accomplished by putting non-core information in pop-ups (using pure CSS, so they work even on Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP!). Great client, great business, and now a great new website with compliments coming in!

Top-Ranking Success: Granite Ridge Estates

Our latest top-10 website client is Granite Ridge Estates in Buckhorn, Ontario. They build custom luxury homes in their own subdivision in Buckhorn, as well as throughout the Kawartha Lakes.

They had an old website that was outdated and didn't reflect their current business very well. It was more or less just awful Flash slideshows and very little text.

The focus of the site now, aside from proper descriptions of what the company does, is tons of interior and exterior home photos (galleries that clearly show all the images available and can be navigated freely), plus actual floor plans of their various base models that can be printed out.

Work included an update to their logo, several on-location photo shoots, new high-resolution scans of dozens of floor plans, and lots more. The look of the site was made clean and classy by using simple black and white along with earth-toned colours like those found in the homes they build.

Faster Website = Higher Search Ranking

Web Page Loading Speeds
Can you think of a time when you went to a website and it seemed like it wasn't going to load, but you waited and it finally did?

Even 5 to 10 seconds for most people seems like forever compared to typical web pages that load instantly. We sure take lightning speed for granted, don't we?

I generally abandon a site if it takes more than about 5 seconds to load because I assume it's either poorly designed, and/or utilizing unecessary plugins, and/or redirecting to another site improperly, and/or it is infected with malware.

It isn't because 5 seconds is a long time, it's because I have no idea if it has crashed or if it will end up being 60 seconds, by which time I could have already found what I wanted on another site. And it's also because I know how dangerous it is to be on an infected website for even a few seconds.

(Here's a video explaining what is called drive-by malware.)

We Build Fast Websites
It makes sense then that one of the 200+ criteria that Google uses to evaluate website quality is the time it takes for pages to load. As mentioned above, whether it's because of sloppy design or something else, a slow loading page is a poor experience for internet users. So for two websites with the same overall credibility and value, Google will give the edge in search results to the faster one because it will be a better experience for the end user.

Google added site speed to their list of ranking criteria back in 2010. Here's the official site speed announcement.

Because of this, Second Glance Digital Media takes extra steps to increase the speed of every website we build for every client. By optimizing server settings, site architecture, and individual page design, it's just one of the many things we do to stay on top, in order to keep our clients and their businesses on top!

Top-Ranking Success: Gillmore Home Renovations

Our latest client has squeaked into the top-10 rankings on Google after about one month live, a little sooner than anticipated! In fact the site was ranking #3 on Bing after just two weeks, so we could tell it was off to a good start. It should settle closer to #5 on Google eventually.

Gillmore Home Renovations does interior and exterior renovations, construction, and carpentry in Peterborough, Ontario. The owner, James Gill, has been doing home improvements for about 10 years, and has some great testimonials from happy clients.

Most of his business is kitchen and bathroom renovations, but he also builds custom decks, fences, and much more.

This client came to us after building his own free site, which he quickly learned had limitations in terms of both looks and being found in searches. We've traded that in for a top-ranking website that reflects a very professional craftsman.

The website is focused on photos of his work, along with simple yet descriptive copywriting about aspects of home improvement that visitors would be interested in. Future plans include adding a Frequently Asked Questions or Interior Design Tips page, to provide further educational value to visitors.

Top-Ranking Success: Maxama Protection

This is yet another client who came to us with an existing website that was of little use. In fact, it ranked... wait for it... #57!

As of writing this post, it now ranks #6 for "Ontario security company", a major leap from obscurity to top-10, and the owner is thrilled. Actually, the goal was to get it ranking in the top-10 for "Peterborough" security guard terms, so we ended up doing far better than planned.

Maxama Protection provides security guards in Peterborough, as well as vehicle patrols and alarm response throughout central Ontario. The basis of the redesign was focusing the site on these three fundamental services they offer.

The site was good looking, it had a simple and consistent layout in the company's colors of black and teal. Looks weren't the problem, even if most of the photos were too small and there were some stock images that seemed out of place.

But just about everything to do with SEO was awry.

There was a 1990s-style "splash" page, pointless and bearing no content except the company logo. Every page had the same uninspiring title, "Maxama Protection Inc" and same description. Not a single link was formatted properly. Body text was scarce, and what existed wasn't optimized for either marketing or SEO advantage.

The single biggest improvement for this site was the addition of a huge amount of meaningful copywriting. All pages were expanded to include lots of body text and bigger, better pictures. The content was lacking basic sales elements, such as stressing the 30-year history of the company, and listing the key benefits of what they do for clients. The company address and phone numbers were added to every page, instead of being hidden away on a separate "Contact" page.

As well, a map was added to the home page showing where the company operates, something visitors/clients immediately need to know. Links, photos, and headlines were given proper tags. The css was cleaned. All the code was simplified and clarified. Server files were added to strip the site of the "www", designate an error page, and other back-end basics.

Another successful website redesign, and one very happy client!

Six Basic Keyword Reminders

Between doing market research, drafting mock-ups, and repeatedly asking clients to send you information, web designers can have much to do when designing a website. Which means sometimes even the most basic SEO elements get lost in the shuffle.

Remember, a site that can't be found in a search is useless, regardless of how nice it looks. It's always good to go back and double-check your keyword implementation towards the end of a site design.

1) Don't always take your client's advice on the best keywords for their industry or market. Take their suggestions, but do your own keyword research, because consumers often use different words than people within the business realize or expect.

2) Don't assume your client's competitor's sites are designed well. Their keywords/phrases may or may not be well chosen, so don't just start copying them in an effort to compete. Be careful looking at competitor info.

3) Don't simply choose keywords/phrases for your client's site that are hot in their industry, choose accurate ones that describe what they really do. The whole point of keyword selection (for legitimate business websites) is to get the correct visitors to the site. Traffic that isn't looking for what your client really sells is useless traffic, and will be a waste of their time to deal with.

4) Page titles such as "Home Page" or "Welcome To Joe's Lumber" are useless to both visitors and search engines.

5) Page descriptions such as "Home Page" or "Welcome To Joe's Lumber", or even "Joe's Lumber is your #1 source of lumber" are a waste of an important search engine tagline.

6) Use only one or two H1 headlines containing keywords, not dozens of them. In theory you could put the entire contents of a page inside one big H1 tag, but then search engines would see the whole thing as equally (un)important. Focus search engines toward several specific, logical, important elements that contain targeted keywords.

Six Persistent Web Design Myths

Over the last few days I've been browsing some other web design sites and chatting with people. Here's a sample of some of the untrue, yet surprisingly persistent, beliefs still shared by many web designers:

1) An older website will rank higher in searches than a newer one
2) A site with many pages will rank higher than a site with few
3) Search engines have difficulty reading inside tables
4) You can tell a search engine how often to visit a site
5) It is important to submit sites to search engines
6) Code that is "compliant" with "standards" makes some kind of difference

There are other myths still circulating in the web design industry as well, some based on things that used to be true a long time ago, and some with no foundation in reality. This short list seemed like the most common.

It's hard to know if colleges are teaching this stuff by mistake, or if some bad apples in the industry are (still) intentionally trying to mislead new designers. Or perhaps people who are teaching themselves are being misinformed by what they see on poor quality sites and forums.

In the back of my mind, I'm inching closer to creating some kind of training course... although having confused competitors is fantastic. What to do?

Top-Ranking Success: Graywood Sporting

This top-10 ranking web design is another site update. The company is a manufacturer's agent in Canada for sporting goods. (In other words, if you owned a sporting goods store and wanted to sell Winchester ammunition or SOG knives, you'd go through Graywood Sporting.)

The original website used detrimental text graphics in place of real text, the small amount of real text was Times Roman, every page was offset to the far left for no reason, everything was one shade of green upon green, and nothing was optimized for search engines to make any sense of.

Updates included centering pages, adding a custom background image, editing and formatting all the text, adding a plain text footer to every page, switching to plain text navigation links, SEO of every element from page titles to images, and updating the manufacturer, distributor, and sales contacts.

The redesign makes it cleaner, more colorful, and easier to read for visitors. And of course the real benefit to the client is a top-ranking website.

Top-Ranking Success: Heritage Cattle Company

This is one of our very rare web design make-overs; we don't normally do "SEO work" on existing sites, since it tends to be more of a hassle than just building a site correctly from scratch. You have to go through someone else's code and remove stuff, add stuff, and edit almost everything, which ends up being twice as much work. In this case I knew the owners and did them a big favor.

The result? We turned a site that literally couldn't be found into a top-ranking winner.

The existing site had been up for a few years, yet we spent a hilarious half an hour trying to FORCE it to appear in search results and failed! We tried the name of the company, the town, the owner's names, and all those things combined and in long-string quotes, and still the site wouldn't come up on Bing, Yahoo, or Google.

It seemed the site either wasn't indexed or had possibly been banned (although that would be unlikely across all three of the big search engines). But we did find it indexed in all of them. It was just such poor web design that search engines didn't see anything of value and didn't know how to categorize it.

The first change was a new header on every page, with the company name, address, and phone number in plain text. Next was editing the copy to immediately tell visitors and search engines "We are a cattle farm that sells natural beef", which could have been implied from the original site but wasn't obvious. Then a pile of photos were added, since there were few. After that, tweaking all page elements for clarity.

The intention was to get it ranking well for "natural beef" in the Peterborough and Keene regions of Ontario. But now it actually ranks in the top 5 for "natural beef Ontario", which is substantial. It's certainly a long way from spending half an hour unable to find a site you know exists.

Top-Ranking Success: Discovery Child Care

This is a fun and bright website using the client's selection of green and yellow to match their print material. There are many photos throughout the site, featuring parents and children at the day care.

The target audience is parents seeking child care in Peterborough, Ontario, so there are useful links and documents for them on the website. The parent handbook is one of several forms available to view or download, and links to regulatory and industry groups are prominent on the home page.

Top-10 ranking for this site was achieved by designing the site in the simplest possible way. Four pages with clean and obvious navigation; no ads, scripts, or embedded content; no css or other off-page or off-site calls. Nothing that doesn't directly describe the child care center. All content runs straight out of the root directory. Search engines and visitors have instant access to all content on the website within two clicks from anywhere.

Top-Ranking Success: Robin Walton

Another rewarding top-10 website we designed is RobinWalton.ca, for a freelance illustrator in Ontario Canada. Robin is a true freehand artist, using chalk and pencil. The world is overflowing with computer graphic designers, so it was a treat being able to build a top-ranking website for a traditional artist.

The site is simple, basically a bio of the artist and some of her sample illustrations and drawings.

In terms of the top-10 website ranking, there weren't a lot of elements to add to the site that would have been of value to visitors, so we merely optimized what we had. In her effort to gain new book publishing clients, it was important that we kept the site simple and focused: freehand illustrations by a freelance artist. Paying attention to the basics was all it took. (This site has a broader audience than our typical local sites, being the entire province of Ontario, yet the ranking work remained much the same.)

Top-Ranking Success: Cassel Entertainment

Cassel Entertainment is another of our top-10 ranking local websites, in the category of wedding DJs in the Peterborough, Ontario region.

This is a typical DJ service, providing music for indoor and outdoor events. Dan Cassel, owner and disc jockey, primarily provides music for wedding dinners, receptions, and dances. But he also does graduation dances, office parties, reunions, or any other type of get-together.

Dan wanted the site to be classy, and made a specific request for a vintage '57 Chevy. After several designs, the result was a prominent custom black & white graphic at the top left of each page. He was pleased with the addition of a couple dancing beside the car. His logo was also custom made, as were the spinning music notes in the navigation links.

In terms of ranking, other local DJ sites aren't built very well (many are "home-made"), so getting him ranked in the top-10 didn't require any special effort, other than sticking to the basics of proper web design. During research it was found that DJ websites rarely have backlinks, other than directory listings. DJs tend to serve one-shot clients who don't have their own websites. That could be something to consider in the future if necessary. In the meantime it's already a top-ranking site with good traffic.

Top-Ranking Success: Inside Security

This is an industry-specific site designed for security guards. The province of Ontario Canada has new training and testing requirements for all guards, private investigators, and bouncers, and everyone needs to learn what it's all about, both current employees and new applicants.

The site was designed to provide straightforward facts about the new training course and test, and has tons of specific links to important information (mostly government acts and regulations). The layout is simple, using solid neutral colors for extended reading without eye strain.

There's an Ontario security industry overview, specific security course and test information, and a page explaining private security work for new guards.

This site achieved top-10 ranking because of a huge amount of detailed 100% original information, a very targeted audience, and focused SEO elements. It's getting a ton of traffic. A top-ranking success.

More About Me

Here's a little info about me. The profile section on Blogger is sort of lacking, and I didn't want to make a whole page just for this. And one benefit of using a regular blog post is I can link directly to this message from elsewhere.

My name is Jeff. I'm the owner of Second Glance Digital Media, and author of this blog. I'm a Search Engine Optimization specialist with a proven track record, and have been doing web design and graphics for about 10 years. Lately I've been building sites for small local businesses and getting them top 10 rankings on Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft.

You can read more on the Second Glance Digital Media site.

I also trade forex, and enjoy bicycling and sometimes video games. My pet peeve is local (Peterborough) "web designers" who don't know anything about web design. Especially the ones who say they do SEO, yet don't show up in searches because they haven't even coded their own sites properly! I hate the fact that business owners are being ripped off by amateurs. GRRRR! So I try to educate people the best I can.

You should also know that my brother Scott is an online marketing specialist, with about 12 years experience. He'll organize an entire online advertising campaign, do testing and tracking of different strategies, generate leads, and take commission from the new business he brings in. He currently works with a select few clients as a marketing consultant.

My expertise is building sites and getting them ranked high through proper design principles, and understanding how both people and search engines look at websites. Scott's expertise is finding out where your customers are, advertising to them in ways they'll respond to, and driving them to your site. So between us, you can get maximum traffic from both sides of the equation: organic and paid advertising.

If there's anything on your mind you'd like some advice on, leave a comment or drop me an email.