If you follow Matt Cutts, the voice to our industry, you will simply love the video that spoofs him and his webmaster videos. Even if you don’t know Matt Cutts, you will want to watch this cute but instructive video that explains how you too can get to be number one on Google.com. View it on YouTube.
Inside the Google Search Algorithm
Ever wonder how Google decides what websites float to the top of the organic search? This interesting video reveals the Google process on algorithm updates. The key is that Google aligns reader’s interest in what is displayed when a search query is done by massive testing and scientific review. View it on YouTube.
Using Freeloaders to Your Advantage
You’ve hit the tipping point on all you do and now your website traffic is continuing to rise, in fact you’ve never had so many visitors to your website before, but your conversions have not grown at the same rate, what can you do?
First, it is great to be successful and have a high traffic site, but if you are not converting your readers into buyers you may want to consider a new strategy to specifically market to the reader-freeloaders on your website. Much of what you will select to do will be based on your specific sales goals.
If you are a local seller and your traffic has grown, but when you look in Google Analytics most of your traffic is outside of your service area, I would enjoy the numbers and know that Google will eventually award you with improved organic placement. However, I would put your out of area readers to work for your benefit by actively asking them to Google +1 your pages or like you on Facebook. You’ll then be able to get SEO juice off of the traffic that will never convert to a sale for you.
If you sell nationally or service locally but also sell products nationally, I would take a careful look at your traffic and the pages where you think you have freeloaders. On those pages you will need to evaluate if you should follow my advice on Google +1 and Facebook or if the pages are good areas for you to advertise the products you sell nationally.
If they are a good fit with product sales, then start by creating your own banners, buttons, and links to your store to promote your own products. If you are going to provide great informational content, you should work to have the readers who like what you say move into your store to buy, Google +1 you, like you on Facebook, or be added to your email subscriber list. Which direction you take or multiple directions will depend on the information specific to your site. The key is to put the traffic to work for you! Don’t just invest your time and money into a well trafficked website, move your readers to action that will benefit your long term approach and goals.
Insights on Why Your Website Has Dropped Organic Placement
I found this terrific article and wanted to share it with you. It is “10 Reasons Your Site’s Search Engine Ranking Dropped”
by Paul M Ventura on SitePro News. You can read the full article by clicking the article title above. Paul shows some terrific insight into why your site may have dropped organic placement on Google in light of some of Google’s recent algorithm changes.
In a nutshell here are his reasons interspersed with some of my own comments:
- The Google Honeymoon Ended
I’ve seen this before, new sites start out strong and then after about four weeks fall to their more realistic organic placement on Google. If you evaluate the site in the first several weeks that the site has been added to the index you may be placed well, but check again in about 8 to 10 weeks for more realistic expectations on where your site will normally reside so you can start improvements. - Google Sandbox Effect Started
This isn’t talked about much, but I have seen in highly competitive industries such as real estate site’s not even get listed in the Google index until other sites have started to link to it. They can sit in the sandbox all alone for as long as six months
while Google evaluates where they belong organically. A good plan is to do article writing for links during this period to start building links. Another recommendation is to do press releases during this period to start building legitimate links as well. - Algorithm Updates/Link Juice Lost
With the Panda/Farmer update having penalized many article syndication sites, I feel that Paul has some good insight here in that your site may have had links from these sites that were penalized and so your site dropped in placement as well. - Malware
Don’t think you have it? Well if you have a WordPress blog on-domain, you’d better be monitoring. Why wait until Google has you banned or blocked in the organic results. It is better to proactively scan your site and WordPress files on a regular basis. I was even hacked and never had been before. It can happen to the best of us with serious consequences. - Server Issues
Has your site been down? We have several clients where they are hosted on small no name companies and on their Google
Webmaster Control Panel the robot is constantly reporting it cannot find or access files. Move to a new host when possible if you are seeing this problem. - Robot.txt File Problems
Webmasters can get carried away with permissions to the Google spider. I’ve seen two situations where the webmaster inadvertently disallowed access in this important file that all search engine indexing spiders access before they spider your website. Make sure you have the correct permissions and block only the files you need to block. - Penalization
Did your last SEO firm or webmaster use “black hat” techniques, hidden links, and keyword stuffing to get you organic
placement before? How about keyword dense text the same color as your page background? Think you are clean? Think again. I saw hidden text on a large attorney website that had been installed by their website designer to scam the
system. Don’t get your website penalized by these tactics. Google will not be mocked. - Broken Links
Check and check again. For blogs you can use a plugin. For other sites use Dreamweaver to scan for broken links. - Duplicate Content
I install on my site meta tags that show me to be the content owner. Make sure when you add new content pages that
you tag yourself in the code as the owner. Google is getting pretty smart on this one, but there are still scrapper sites that may grab your content. When I find them I send a cease and desist notice to the webmaster and if they don’t remove my content I report them and the page to Google’s spam department and if I get really made to their web host with a take down notice. Don’t make yourself crazy over this, but it is a good idea to check your top trafficked pages with online scanning tools. I use Copyscape and Dustball for this. - The Google Dance
Grab your partner right? No, the Google Dance is a phenomena where your search results will fluctuate wildly the first week and sometime two weeks after Google does a big algorithm update. Hang on and don’t freak out the first time you check your placement. Check again in one week and then in a second before you start remediation just to make sure you
aren’t dancing with Google. If you are your site will pop back up at the end of the dance. Maybe not in the exact position, but nearly where you were before.
I think Paul nailed the ten topics in the article, the comments on each topic are mine garnered from years of experience.