Trust me, I have learned the hard way.

Website Rankings Dropped – 10 Possible Causes

The error I am about to list have actually caused my website rankings to drop when they occurred. Many webmasters just keep adding content, hoping that the problems will go away, but if you jump in and fix these errors your ranking will return like fire.

#1. Broken links

Broken links were my first lesson to losing website rankings fast. In fact when this happened, the rankings dropped so fast that I could hardly find my website in the search engines. This was a shock for me as the site I was looking for ranked high for everything I posted.

I think this error went on for days and the whole time I studied, read everything possible, and tried to fix the problem. I asked questions all over the internet but not one person could help me, not even on the Google Webmaster forums (where all the experts apparently hang out ). I even employed an expensive top SEO guy to help but he couldn’t even find the problem. It was a nightmare. I wanted to check the site for broken links, but in those days it was not as easy as installing a plugin like we do now days. No way! It was a difficult task, but to my surprise, my site was riddled with broken links. As soon as I repaired the broken links the site began to move back into the rankings fast! That was a great feeling!

The broken links came from:

1. Changing my content management system to WordPress.
2. Posts I had deleted in the move when other pages still linked to them.
3. Links I had placed that had since died. (Sites had shut down)
4. People commenting and leaving broken links. (Still happens today)
5. Permalinks changed in the move.

#2. Server Problems

What if the search engine spiders try to access your site and it does not respond or loads slowly? If this happens too often what do you think happens? Yes you are right in thinking that your site will be dropped from the search results.

If you have a planned downtime you can setup a 503 code which tells the search engines that you’re aware of the situation and that they should try again later. You can even set a return time for the search engines to crawl your site. This is pretty technical for the average webmaster but you can see more details from the Google blog. Another technical resource is this post.

If you are using WordPress you can use “Site Maintenance” plugin which automatically creates a 503 page for you. This is an easier option and all you need to do is activate this plugin for the 503 error code to be working.  When your maintenance or downtime is over then deactivate the plugin.  Unfortunately you cannot use this plugin when your server is completely down.

You will also find that some premium WordPress themes have an option to go into maintenance mode.

#3. Robot Text File

What is in your robot text file. Did you know that you can block the search engines from accessing your site with one stupid mistake?

This tiny little text file that lives in the root of your domain can do a lot of damage.

Simply adding something like:

user-agent: *

disallow: *

The user-agent part means who you want to block. In this case * means all search engines. Then on the next line we have disallow: * which means block access to the entire website.

If you had:

user-agent: *

disallow: 

This would tell the search engines to index everything. This is a tiny mistake that can hurt your search engine rankings.

Also you might want to block one file in a certain directory on your site but by accident, you might block the entire directory. For example a forward slash like this / by itself, after the word disallow, can cause your entire site to be excluded from the search engines. 

#4. Errors in Your Sitemap

I had a site map plugin that I used on a WordPress website. You know the ones where they auto generate a list of your website URL’s and send it to the search engines?

I decided to tick a box in the settings section and it actually added the category name into the url that it listed. Then the plugin sent a copy of this sitemap to various search engines with completely the wrong URLS.

The sitemap URLs had a category in the link and my permalink structure was set to only have the post name and no category.

That actually caused the search engines to index a set of urls that were in fact 404 errors. As soon as I repaired the sitemap, my rankings came back.

#5. Duplicate Site Title

This just recently happen to me, an experienced web master! Look at the screenshot below.

There is a duplicate site title causing a drop in rankings. Ouch!

The stupid thing is that I am just so busy with all my work that I seriously thought that me neglecting the site made it drop from the search engines. This site ranks well for anything it posts so I probably should have investigated earlier?

What caused this? It seems that the theme I had was adding a site title and so was Yoast’s SEO plugin. I have not had much luck with SEO plugins, except SEOPressor of course, so now I am very wary of what they are actually doing. You can see my SEOpressor review here.

#6. The Bloody Algorithms

To tell the truth, I am not worried about algorithms any longer, after experiencing these various errors, an algorithm loss of rankings would be almost welcome. I also think that most sites drop in rankings because of errors and blame the change in algorithms as they have no real idea what the cause is.

I have survived without Google traffic when my sites have dropped from the search engines so I know that Google is not god. I like the traffic though, don’t get me wrong, but the smart thing to do is not rely on it.

#7. Links Disappear

Links to your site help you rank.

But your links can disappear as fast as they are made and many webmasters get a few links and then sit back thinking this will do. No, not at all.  Link building is fuel for the fire and if you do not feed it the fire dies out. It burns what is on the fire and anything else you put on. Link Building is ongoing and you need to constantly stoke the fire.

A big log ( a great link) will stay and help the fire stay alive but it will not last if it is the only log. Weird way to put it, but true.

#8. Your Site is Hacked

Your site could have malware. This is an awful experience because when people try to click on your site in the search engines a big malware warning comes up. If that does not scare your traffic away nothing will.

I have had malware on a website and I simply contacted my web hosting company and told them  (Hostgator of course). But not all web hosts fix this for you because securing your website is really your job and the biggest security threat is not having regular updates installed. If your web hosting company will not help, Google has some free tips to remove malware from your site.

 #9. Canonicalization Problems

If you plan to be a serious website owner, maybe even creating an authority website, you will certainly need to know about the how SEO works under the hood of your website. It is not enough to look at the surface of your website as errors can form from within.

Canonicalization problems are one of those sneaky errors that need to be dealt with swiftly. Most pages on a site can have a few versions. For example, when people comment on your site, a URL for that comment is then created. You really do not want the search engines to index every comment URL as this would look like duplicate content and cause problems. Therefore you only want to index the original post.

When Google finds duplicate pages with the same meta descriptions and content, it has to choose which copy to serve in the search engines and then devalues all other copies.

There can also be two versions of your domain name like www and no www. You need to choose one and stick to it!

If you use WordPress the Thesis framework is one theme that has an option to fix this canonical URL problem. Also the Yoast SEO plugin has a similar option.

#10. Your Competition is Just Better

Yeah lets face it. You site has dropped from the rankings in the search engines because other sites have come along and have bigger and better content. If you have thin content you will not stand a chance when the competition decides to cover the same topic. They will wipe the floor with you.

This is the first and most important error on a website, not having awesome quality content.  Why bother doing something if you are not going to do it properly?

Conclusion

Of course I could go into each error in full detail as they may seem simple now, but when you are going your website rankings dropped from existence, they are far from simple then. I have consulted so called experts about these errors and they have been no help whatsoever.

Therefore if your website rankings dropped tomorrow, you will not doubt be fixing these errors yourself.

A blog post title that is boring will get passed by and the awesome content that took hours to create slips off into nowhere land.

Why are blog titles so important?

They are important because this is what the human reader sees before visiting your content. Just think how you search for information? You scan through the results fast until you find something that grabs your attention. If there is nothing there you try another search. This is how SEO works under the hood of our websites as we should just be thinking about how the humans will find our content.

The readers see blog titles:

1. In the search engines
2. In RSS feeds
3. In social media sharing
4. On the front page of most blogs
5. On Commentluv links

Search engine traffic is free so why not grab it if you can?

It would be great if we could put a big arrow pointing to our blog post titles to tell people to click on it but we cannot. We have an amazing weapon in hand though and we should use it.

I really think that Google is not god in this situation because if the humans do not click on your listings, Google’s algorithm will naturally move your listing further down the rankings.

10 Tips for Creating Eye-Catching Blog Post Titles

When crafting an eye-catching article title, you are generally trying to catch a reader like you would catch a fish. Firstly you must figure out what bait you should be using to catch that fish.

You should ask yourself these questions:

• What type of information should I be providing to attract the right people to my website?
• What would the reader be typing into the search engines in order to find this information?

When you know what your content is supposed to be about you can now go ahead and create a blog post title to match.

Writing Great Blog Post Titles – 10 Tips

I love writing top 10 list posts. They just work. Therefore I will use that type of post as an example title here.

1. Always set aside 10 minutes to work on your eye-catching blog title. Many people leave this to the last minute and the title simply suffers.
2. Research your competitors because they might have an awesome title that will give you an idea. You can see how much one title gets shared compared to another.
3. Research keywords and make a list of possible combinations that suit like “blog post title”, “article title”, “post title”. I use Google Keyword tool. You should find out which term has the least competition in the search engines and one that has people actually searching for it.
4. Write out some descriptive words like ‘eye-catching”, “attention grabbing”, “gob smacking” “boring”, “cool”, “critical”, “crazy”.
5. Choose how many tips you want to share. Let’s say I have 5 tips. Not always about giving tips but it is a great way to start learning how to write awesome titles.
6. Mix up some titles until you see one you like.
   • 5 Crazy Ways To Create Attention Grabbing Blog Post Titles
   • Boring blog Post Titles SUCK! Here’s 5 Tips Steel The Lime Light From Your Competition
   • Are Your Blog Titles Making Your Readers Snore? Here’s 5 Tips To Wake Them Up
   • 5 Ways To Lose Precious Website Traffic With Your Lame Post Titles
   • Awesome Content But Dead Boring Post Titles – 5 Tips To Fix This Stupid Mistake
   • How To Write Gob Smacking Blog Post Titles and Steal Those Precious Clicks
   • Are You an Idiot? Blog Titles Are Important and Here’s 5 Reasons Why
7. Make sure your title is capitalised correctly. If it is not you will look like an amateur.
8. When crafting your title, even though you want it to be eye-catching, you cannot sacrifice grammar and spelling for attention grabbing.
9. Always write your post title for the humans because that is who you want to ultimately impress. Then if the humans are impressed, the search engines will also be happy.
10. Never copy another sites post title as this is bad web-master etiquette.

The competition for your reader’s attention is more than fierce nowadays. There are so many publishers out there with equally awesome content but you have to find out how to turn your reader’s eyes to your content.

How are you going to make your blog post title stand out?

Common Mistakes With Blog Post Titles

1. The main problem is dead set boring blog post titles.
2. Your title is over-exaggerated.
3. Your title has nothing to do with the content.
4. Your blog post title is awesome and your content is crap.
5. Your title promises the world and delivers crumbs.

Blog Post Titles Examples

Here are some of my most popular posts where the title has helped get the traffic.

Google Is Not God! Make Up Your OWN MIND About SEO

Get Started Blogging For Business – 7 Essential Tips To Make Your BOSS Happy

9 SEO Tips To Dominate Google Search Results

Two Years Blogging And No Real Income! 8 Reasons Why

How To Monetize A Website – The Rocket Science Behind It All

Website Traffic Checklist – 25 Concrete Ways To Get Website Traffic

20 Often Forgotten Website Traffic Tips

18 Ways To Turn Your Ordinary Blog Into A Million Dollar Business

How To Create A Successful Website With WordPress – 12 Point Checklist

Which blog post title do you like the best?

Can you see how having dead boring blog post titles can bring your content down?

That is because you haven’t actually created a test to gauge to quality of the content. How do you actually know if the content passes the test, if you haven’t created a test in which to grade it? You don’t.

That means that you have to actually be able to create a test, or a set of criteria, that will help you to gauge the quality of your content by. And I can help you with the creation of this test.

Here are 3 tests you can use to gauge the quality of your content:

Test #1: General Quality Criteria

As a general rule with web content, there are commonly accepted criteria to gauge quality content. According to most standards, a piece of content should AT LEAST pass these criteria to be able to be considered quality content.

These general criteria include:

• Length of article: at least 500 words
• Images in article: at least 1
• Calls to action in article: at least 1
• Outbound links in article: at least 1 to 2
• Internal links in article: 1

So, check your content and make sure that it passes at least these most basic tests.

What this test tells you: This test tells you if your content at least passes the most basic rules of accepted quality web content.

Test #2: Social Media Reception

The next test you can use to gauge the quality of your content is to analyze how that content was received in the social networks. And how do you gauge how well your content performed in the social media world? By tracking the activity that it created. This can be done by seeing how many shares it generated: how many retweets, FaceBook likes, +1′s, pins, comments, etc it received.

What this test tells you: This test is one of the best ways to gauge how others are receiving your content, or how “quality” they view the content to be. The more shares your content received, the higher quality the social media world viewed it to be.

Test #3: Business Goal Achievement

You have business goals that you are trying to achieve. All of the efforts of your business are means to achieve those certain business goals. That includes any content you are creating: you have a main business goal(s) that you are trying to achieve, and your content should help bring you closer to that goal(s). The business goals that your content could be helping to achieve could be as simple as more visits to your site, all the way to how many sales your content was able to generate. Use an analytics software to help you track the visits/purchases/subscriptions/downloads/etc that you were able to generate from each specific piece of content that you create.

What this test tells you: Business is all about the bottom line. So anything that is able to directly (or indirectly) positively affect that bottom line is a good thing! This test is able to tell you very specifically how your content as a whole and on an individual basis is affecting your bottom line, and thus how beneficial your content efforts are to your company.

Conclusion:

With the proper tests in place, you can see if the quality you are creating for your site is, indeed, quality content. If you find that your content isn’t passing some of the simple tests of quality content, it might be a good idea to look into a content writer, SEO company, or SEO reseller plan to help you create the type of content that will bring you the results you are looking for.

Nicole has been blogging about SEO and Social Media for years. She enjoys helping companies learn how to find more success with their SEO efforts.

1 – Make Sure You Have Full Control

If you’ve hired a third-party web designer to build a site for you, make sure that when they’ve finished their work, you have complete control over everything. This means the domain name and hosting should be registered in your details, you should have all the passwords for everything and possession of all the files created during the web design process.

If you don’t have all of this, making future changes to your site will be a lot more difficult than it needs to be, especially if you lose touch with the original web designer.

2 – Be Sensible With Your SEO

The desire to rank highly in Google can lead to people engaging in search engine optimisation tactics which will backfire in the long run. Before you do any SEO work at all, read Google’s webmaster guidelines to make sure you understand what is and what isn’t unacceptable.

In recent years, the search engine giant has been increasingly proactive in clamping down on those sites which engage in practices which breach its rules and sometimes removes sites from its results all together. Recovering from one of these penalties is notoriously difficult.

So looking for a quick SEO boost might work in the short term, but if you’re looking for long-term growth then you need to take a more sensible approach to things.

If you’ve got the budget, look at hiring a reputable SEO agency. If you haven’t, then learn to do SEO yourself or focus on other areas of marketing.

3 – Find Suitable Web Hosting

Finding web hosting can be complex and confusing – there are plenty of top website hosting companies out there and the whole business can get incredibly technical. The web hosting package you choose should be carefully aligned with your business goals and your growth expectations.

If you’re starting off small and targeting steady growth, then you won’t need to worry too much about dealing with a huge influx of visitors.

However, if you’re looking to establish buzz and then launch a ground-breaking product you need to be sure your hosting package will be able to cope with a rapid influx of visitors. If it can’t, you can expect your site to go offline and that’s never good.

Work out what you need and, if you need to, consult with an expert to make sure you get it.

4 – Test as Much as Possible

How would you feel if in five years’ time you were to discover that your ecommerce site’s profits could have been ten per cent higher every month if you’d changed the colour of the checkout button from red to green?

It’s an exaggerated example, but if you’re not testing how users are interacting with your website, then this is exactly the kind of insight you’re missing out on.

Look into implementing A/B and/or multivariant testing on your website as quickly as possible because without it, you’re missing out on amazing conversion rate optimisation methods which could boost your income.

5 – Future Proof Your Website - Back up Everything!

Getting into the habit of backing up your website whenever you make a change is vital. If something goes wrong and your site is compromised, a recent back up can mean the difference between being back online in hours and having to start again from scratch.

Backing up your website on a regular basis might not feel like it’s important right now, but it certainly will if you face major problems.

Guest post by Will Stevens of 123-reg. The company is the UK’s largest domain name registrar and has just launched a new line of cloud servers.

There are a few steps you can take to greatly reduce the likelihood of receiving spam complaints from those you are emailing to. They aren’t difficult to implement, and they can save you a world of trouble!

Why People are Accused of Spam

Obviously, there are true spammers out there. We could have a whole folder full of spam every day. Yet every day, ordinary online marketers get accused of spamming, even though they never intended to spam anyone. How does this happen?

Most people who receive your emails are probably on lots of lists. They may get hundreds of emails every day. At some point, they may reach a point where they are stressed out and are tired of getting so many emails. They may look at a particular email – yours maybe – and think to themselves, “I don’t remember signing up for this list. I’m going to report this as spam!”

That’s why it’s necessary to make it completely clear to everyone you send emails to that you’re only doing so with their permission. Here are some of the best ways to protect yourself in this way.

1. Use a Double Opt-In Autoresponder

Most autoresponder services give you an option to make your list single or double opt-in. for example Aweber offers both options. A single opt in list means that someone can subscribe to your list simply by filling out a form. Double opt-in means that after they fill out a form, you send them an email asking them to confirm that they want to be on your list.

Some marketers prefer single opt-in because it’s simpler and makes it easier for people to sign up for your list. It’s also more dangerous, though. Double opt-in forces people to confirm their decision, making it less likely they will ever accuse you of spamming them.

2. Never Purchase Mailing Lists

You may be tempted to buy a mailing list, especially if it looks like a bargain. This is something you should never do! There is no way you can be sure where these names are coming from. Some people simply scrape email addresses from any place they can find them and sell the lists.

Even in the best case scenario, where the seller built his or her list in an ethical manner, this still doesn’t protect you. After all, these subscribers never signed up for your list. This means that they could complain that you emailed them without permission!

3. Don’t Trick People Into Getting on Your List

Some marketers get people to respond to free offers or use other tricks to gain subscribers. Surveys and contests are another tactic. There’s nothing wrong with any of these strategies, provided you are clear about informing people that you intend to email them in the future.

Likewise, you shouldn’t assume because someone purchased something from you that this constitutes permission to email them. Once again, you should only email people who have specifically given you their permission to do so.

4. Make it Easy For People to Remove Themselves From Your List

Some email marketers hate losing subscribers. They hate it so much that they make it very difficult to get off their lists.

They may have a “remove me” link in very small print at the bottom of the page. They may force subscribers to respond to the email with the message “unsubscribe”. Or, worst of all, they may not have any instructions on how to stop receiving emails. This is asking for trouble.

You only want people on your list who want to be there. Spam complaints aside, if people are trying to get off your list, they aren’t going to be very good customers anyway. So make sure it’s easy for people to click on the “remove me” link with every email you send.

5.Provide Quality Content

Finally, you have a better chance of avoiding spam complaints if you provide people with useful content and not only ads and pitches. While you have the right to use your email list to promote offers, if you only do this all the time, people are more likely to regard your emails as spam (even if they aren’t literally so).

This is a good business practice anyway, and will help you hold onto your subscribers for a longer period of time.

Conclusion

When it comes to avoiding spam complaints, you must err on the side of caution. Since many people are quick to complain, even when they don’t really have the right to, you must avoid any appearance of being in the wrong.

Spam complaints can lead to having your site shut down if your web host receives too many complaints. Theoretically, the web host should give you the benefit of the doubt since you are their customer, but this isn’t always the case. Sometimes they just want to avoid trouble and find it easier to shut down the website!

Keeping the above tips in mind can go a long way to helping you avoid this problem. Just maintain the practice of being very straightforward about getting people on your list, and make it easy for them to leave if they want to!

SEO goes deeper than what you can see sometimes, especially when you find duplicate site titles added to your listings in the search engines and in social sharing. This problem is not easy to find as you cannot really see the second site title on too many of my pages as the search engines only show a certain amount of characters.

Over the years I have seen all sorts of problems arise but this one was just too simple for me to see and I was looking in all the wrong places.

Check out the screenshot below of a listing in the search engines. Ouch!

Also when I went to share my site on Twitter I noticed the duplicate site title there too!

I had to find the answer to this quickly as my rankings were in shatters.

What Caused the Duplicate Site Title?

I Googled this situation and found a common result. The Yoast SEO Plugin. I was shocked. The funny thing is, I use SEOPressor on all of my sites except for this one. I like to experiment and I had seriously forgotten that I had this plugin installed.

So apparently the Yoast SEO plugin had added a site title and so did either my new theme or my previous one. Hmm I had no idea that was going on in the background, causing my website rankings to drop fast.

How Did I Fix the Duplicate Site Title?

1.  In the WordPress dashboard, click on appearance, then editor.

2. On the left hand side you will see a list of files. Click on the header.php file to edit.

3. In that code look for the <title> tag as shown below. Also look for where it ends and delete it all.

4. Now replace that old code with this below.

<title><?php wp_title(''); ?></title

5. Press save. Now you can see only one title there. See the screenshot below when I tried to share my link on Twitter.

Please note that the search engine results will not show up changed until the search engine bots have crawled your site to see the changes.

I also had to make sure the Yoast plugin rewrite site titles option was not checked!

Most large companies focus on CRO as essential to finding out which solutions work best for their sites, with Amazon particularly strong at displaying different versions of their product pages to users. To make the most of your site through easy to implement approaches, it’s worth thinking about the use of A/B testing, physical testing, click mapping, changing headlines, and experimenting with different testimonials.

Luke Eales, Digital Marketing Manager at Ingenie, said: “When optimising for conversion, an important variable to keep in mind is “Where is my traffic coming from?”. Customer journeys don’t always begin directly on your site – but often on search or advertising channels. Make sure this is reflected in your conversion programme – segment your traffic to create tailored, relevant journeys, and keep your messaging consistent from your ad copy all the way through your sales funnel.”

1 – Use A/B Testing - Conversion Rate Optimisation

Otherwise known as split testing, this involves showing slightly different versions of the same page to users when a page loads; one page may have a slightly larger font than the other, or may have a different headline. These kinds of tests can be easily set up via tools like Google Analytics, and can provide valuable insights into why certain types of pages perform better than others.

By incorporating repeated usage patterns into the design of your site, you can try to estimate which page styles will be the most successful at delivering a conversion. Multivariate testing can also be used through changing and re-testing multiple pages to get a stronger sense of how users behave on sites.

2 – Physical Testing

As successful as using analytics can be to determine the amount of traffic and conversions that result from user behaviour, sometimes the most effective CRO results can come through traditional human testing.

You can see whether or not someone responds to a page in an emotional way, and can get on the spot feedback over why they might keep on coming back to a page, and how easy it was for them to find the content they were looking for.

This kind of feedback can be combined with customer surveys and analytics to try to measure how users respond to particular pages.

3 – Click Mapping

This approach, also described as heat mapping, involves using tools like ClickTales to analyse how users behave on a site. Flash videos can be created that show how a user actually moves around a page by showing the areas that get highlighted, and the buttons that get clicked.

Using these videos, you can consider why some users aren’t scrolling down to the bottom of a page, and whether a large number of users always go straight for a search form, or whether they take the time to browse through the content of a landing page.

4 – Changing Headlines

There can be cases where headlines just need a few small tweaks to make them more effective; as with optimising your header tags to include the right keywords and metadata for your SEO, you can work on creating and refining the most distinctive headlines for a page. Think about whether a headline uses the right kind of keywords for your brand, as well as whether there is some kind of call to action contained within them.

Subheadings can also be varied here through A/B tests to see whether users will follow a page down if they respond to particular tags. Going over the same headline multiple times for a page can help you to figure out what kind of language works best for your site.

5 – Experiment with Different Testimonials

It’s possible to run tests that experiment with a range of different customer and client testimonials; these kinds of testimonials can work well if you know your user base, and what kind of content they tend to respond to. You can include testimonials from reviewers and other industry figures, or you can just include several different examples of customer feedback you’ve received from a site.

Video testimonials can also be tested to see whether users are more likely to watch through a whole clip, while social media shares and toolbars can be used to indicate whether or not people are actively recommending particular pages. In terms of testing, you might also want to run different, locally specific pages for users depending on their country to see whether they respond to these recommendations.

SEO and Internet Marketing

Ask any internet marketer what SEO is and they are likely to spend the next ten hours telling you all about their complex strategies for improving ranking and “beating the system”.  Unfortunately, SEO is rather like a ball game where the rules keep changing and the goal posts are constantly shifting.  Just when you think you have it cracked, the search engines change their algorithms and your website drops from page one to page one hundred. Ouch!

How does SEO Work?

SEO helps people find your website out of the trillions of identical websites out there.  Imagine you have created a website from scratch all about cat scratching posts.  You want people who are looking for cat scratching posts to visit your website and hopefully stay a while.  But unless you apply some SEO techniques to your website, it is unlikely anyone will stumble across your site because it won’t show up in the organic search engine rankings. SEO works on the fact that humans need to find your content because they are the ones typing in the keywords to find your content.

Search Engines Are Not Human so How Important is SEO?

Human beings see websites entirely differently to search engines.  When we open up a website, we read the text and look at the pictures.  Through a combination of both, we can instantly tell what the website is all about and if it is relevant to what we are looking for.  Search engines look for “keywords” in your text and match them up with common search queries.  So if you want people to come to your cat scratching post website, you need to include the most common terms people are likely to use when typing in a search query. Writing for the humans and not the search engines is a valuable tip.

Links to Other Websites

In the human world, the more friends we have, the more popular we are perceived to be.  It is not all that different in the world of SEO and website marketing.  When a website has lots of external links, search engines place greater importance on the site and it ranks higher.  This is because good content is more likely to be shared across social media and talked about in blogs and forums.  Obviously having lots of external links is not fool proof and if a large number of those links are to dubious websites of questionable quality, it can have a detrimental effect on page ranking.

Is SEO Easy?

The biggest problem with SEO is that it is constantly evolving.  What works like a dream one week is the kiss of death the next.  This is why a great many amateur internet marketers give up after a few months.  They may see great results in the early stages of promoting their website, but when traffic drops off a cliff and their income dries up, they lose faith and chuck in the towel in disgust.

Remember the Basics

The most important thing to remember when looking at SEO is that good quality websites will always prevail.  Get the SEO basics right and you are in the best possible position to start experimenting with different SEO techniques.  Make sure you have good content people actually want to read and effective internal links that search engine spiders can follow.  If in doubt, you could always pay a professional SEO expert to do the job on your behalf.

Jann Webb is a writer who believes that SEO techniques are critical to the success of your website marketing campaign. If you want to know about how to use SEO techniques and social media sites to your advantage, she recommends seeking advice from a company like Rumpus PR agency.

This isn’t at all helped by people calling themselves SEO experts who promise to get your ranking in first place by the end of the month or who offer ‘One Week SEO’ deals.

You need to start saving yourself time and stress by turning your mentality to SEO at all times. If you need some help in doing this, our guide should point you in the right direction.

Understand that SEO is Long Term

SEO is something that you are always going to be doing. You cannot focus on it for a week, or a month, and then decide to place it on the backburner if you want to be successful.

You also need to realize that it won’t send an extra 10,000 visitors to your site overnight. The thing with SEO is that it might take six months to see an impact from your activities today, but everything you do is building up your profile in the eyes of Google and making you a better long-term search bet for the future.

Ask any professional SEO; they will tell you about a client who pulled out of a campaign after a few months because they hadn’t seen any results, despite being on the cusp of something great.

You Should Always Look to Build Links

The beauty of this point is that when your website starts gaining visitor numbers you don’t have to do anything. As long as you are producing quality content, people will want to share and link back to your pages, and your link building will take care of itself.

Before then, however, you might need to carry out some manual link building. A handful a week when your site is first launched will seem natural to Google and be easy to do. Remember to focus on the quality of a link rather than how many you can build.

Longer term, it is all about the quality and consistency of your content.

Create an Editorial Calendar

When it comes to content you have to get into a pattern of producing it, whether it is a daily news article or a weekly blog post.

The impact from this will be two-fold.

• · In terms of SEO, Google will recognize that you’re producing quality content on a regular basis
• · Readers will know when to expect your posts, increasing your regular visitors but also ensuring you get links from social shares and other backlinks.

Consistent production of high-quality content will see you become a trusted, valuable online resource, and you’ll soon be boosting your search rankings without even thinking about it.

Focus on Your Audience

There’s great irony in the fact that many an SEO campaign falls down because webmasters focus far too much on giving the search spiders what they think they want. If you want to get into an SEO focused mentality, you need to condition yourself to write for your audience.

Yes, keywords and links are important, but if you’re satisfying Joe Average who visits your website on a daily basis, you’ll be quickly onto a winner.

The SEO Mentality

If you can think SEO at every stage, you will be on the right path to making your website a great success. It might be tough at first, but over time it will become a natural process and your SEO activities will become an effortless part of your daily routine.

Robert is a local SEO specialist who regularly advises individual entrepreneurs and small businesses around the best ways to optimize and maintain their websites for strong search performance on a consistent basis.

However if you are just waiting for these announcements then you aren’t being very active. Sure, when Google announces a change to their algorithm you can say with certainty that some changes to your site will be able to benefit from particular strategies – but so can every other webmaster on the net and all your competition. If you want to get ahead of the pack then you need to think logically about the things that Google might be doing, and you need to test your own theories. In other words, rather than waiting for Google to announce their next update, you should be trying to second guess what that update will entail and getting there first. This way, your site will be benefiting from every new development before your competition has even had a change to react.

Think about it – you know what Google is trying to achieve, you know the basics of how a search engine works, so shouldn’t you be able to hazard some pretty good guesses as to how the boffins at Google might improve the system in future? Or do you have to wait to be told?

Testing Your Theories

You might now be thinking that this sounds like a somewhat reckless idea, seeing as you won’t know for sure whether what you’re doing is actually benefiting your site – couldn’t it in theory even be damaging yourself?

Well really the short answer to this is probably not and the worst case scenario is going to be that your effort is wasted. If you are doing things that you genuinely suspect Google will be looking for in the future, then it’s highly unlikely that you’d get it so wrong as to damage yourself, and even if it doesn’t pay off now then it might still pay off in future.

Furthermore, by testing these theories in split tests you can quickly find out what effect your new strategies are having on your ranking and that way either stop or continue with the same kind of confidence you would have using a ‘Cutts verified’ technique.

Some Examples

If you’re wondering precisely what I mean by ‘second guessing’ Google then let’s look at some examples of things you might be able to ‘presume’ about the way Google works.

One example for instance is that Google is highly likely to clamp down on miss-spellings and poor grammar. Word processors show us how easy it is for an algorithm to spot bad writing and incorrect spellings, and so it’s safe to presume that Google probably knows how to do this too. More to the point though, we also know that Google wants to pair visitors with high quality, well-researched content that preferably comes from recognized brands and real corporations. It makes sense then that they would make it so that bad spellings hurt rankings because a big website with a well-researched article is unlikely to have incorrect spellings.

Likewise one could imagine Google would be likely to prefer longer articles because these would be more likely to include more detail and information and because 300-500 word articles are indicative of content farms. Indeed many webmasters have apparently tested this themselves and published the results which appear to concur.

It’s this same kind of logic that tells us that having a registered trademark for your brand could help, and that having a privacy policy on your website would probably also be useful. It’s also why smart webmasters realised that it wouldn’t be long before Google stopped penalising sites for do-follow links to useful external sites. Why would Google punish you for helping them index other good sites, and for pointing your visitors in the direction of useful content supplementary to your own?

The moral of the story is that if you want to be not just good, but great at SEO, it’s not enough to just follow orders and become a SEO ‘sheep’ – you need to second guess, to use your brain and to stay one step ahead.

John Crenshaw is an SEO enthusiast and founder of a Cincinnati SEO firm called Razorlight Media. As well as offering SEO, Razorlight provides PPC management and web design services for businesses.