Category: Search Engine Optimization

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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.

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With Facebook and Twitter, Do You Still Need Blogging?

Many clients are now investing time and money on keeping Twitter and Facebook updated so with all of that do you still need your blog updated? Absolutely!

If your blog is installed under your own domain and resides on your website server then adding to your blog benefits the organic placement of your website as you build blog content. Twitter and Facebook are important ways to engage customers, search engines are starting to look at your activity on these networks as part of their SocialRank scale which impacts organic placement, but activity on these platforms does not build website content like blogging does.

When it comes to choosing where your money is best spent to improve organic search placement I like blogging best, then Facebook and finally Twitter. I place Facebook above Twitter as Facebook is where your prospects are spending a significant part of their time and I feel it is important to engage them where they are active.

Although SocialRank does not carry the same weight in organic placement as PageRank, both Google and Bing are actively now monitoring SocialRank. I feel that over time the activity you have on Facebook and Twitter will become more important in affecting your organic placement and where you appear in personalized search results.

In fact for national businesses involvement and engagement on Facebook and Twitter may be key to mitigating the focus of localize search results in organic placement that Google and Bing are both pushing at this time. I say that as search results are now personalized and focus heavily on showing results in your geographic area, but also include a social component where personal connections and interconnections are a factor of the results you see as well.

We invite you to find our more about our services for blog writing, Facebook updates, and Twitter writing if you have a need.

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Do Videos Help My Organic Placement?

Do videos help your website to place better on Google? Hmm, that is a good question and one that has several answers and this is mine. Yes… but.

First off I would not install Flash videos unless you have to. My preferred way of showing videos is to load them to YouTube.com (a Google property), and then embed the iframe tag into the website page. There are several reasons why I recommend this course of action.

  1. At YouTube, you can add tags, a keyword dense subscription that Google will spider and spider preferentially as YouTube is a Google property. By building a channel on YouTube you can actually get organic placement boosts by keywords and add to your own site authority with links from YouTube to your site.
  2. Others can link to your YouTube videos, embed them in blogs, and use them while you get the credit. Traffic can funnel to your website directly or to your website via your YouTube channel page.
  3. If the videos you have are not yours but you are authorized to use them, you cannot go the YouTube route and then your best scenario is to place them in a quick loading Flash player. You won’t get SEO juice from them, but you will improve website stickiness.

Video however is not the SEO placement magic tool that it was once thought to be as when Google bought YouTube and started pushing video several years ago. At that time, many SEO gurus claimed that adding videos would move your website up in organic placement. That however has simply not happened. Videos are just another great way to engage customers, get your message out, and if you are using YouTube potentially get some link juice and web authority back to your website.

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Google Rolls Out the +1 Button

This past week Google released access to the +1 Button. If you have not added it to your website or blog yet, here’s a link to the code generator. If you don’t know, Google has said that +1 button votes will be used to raise your position in organic results. Here’s what Google specifically says about that issue:

“Content recommended by friends and acquaintances is often more relevant than content from strangers. For  example, a movie review from an expert is useful, but a movie review from a friend who shares your tastes can be even better. Because of this, +1’s from friends and contacts can be a useful signal to Google when determining the relevance of your page to a user’s query. This is just one of many signals Google may use to determine a page’s relevance and ranking, and we’re constantly tweaking and improving our algorithm to improve overall search
quality. For +1’s, as with any new ranking signal, we’ll be starting carefully and learning how those signals affect search quality.”

That’s pretty big news! If you want to read all the FAQs here is a link to the help section on Google. Right now you have to sign u in Google Labs to have the +1 results be shown in your own personal Google.com search results. What is great is that you can +1 something right from Google.com or if the website has the +1 button installed, you can +1 it right from their website page.

We are encouraging all of our clients to get the +1 on their website and blog. We’ve only run into one problem with installation. In only one case it appears that there is an onLoad issue with other scripts that are showing on the page, but that is just one website out of several we’ve installed so far.