How To Improve Website Ranking

SEO Tips and Essentials for 2013

Published on October 22, 2012 by: James H. Hobson

In 2012 Google's two algorithm bombshells were Panda and Penguin. There were numerous other algorithm changes to adjust and refine search results. Visit this link to see the major Google algorithm changes in 2012. As of this week they addeed the "Top Heavy" penalty and the "Exact Match Domain" penalty. Before 2013 arrives we strongly recommend that website owners make a critical assessment of all of their SEO practices for the past two years, and take a hard look at their SEO providers current understanding of best practices.

Out With The Old, In With The New

The Old: Outdated and Harmful SEO

There is a strong possibility that your company website has at least minor associations with outdated or harmful SEO practices. There are "gray hat SEO" practices that are now going to cause ranking losses, and other practices (of any shade) will lose their influence on search engine results pages (SERPs).

You have a very real problem if you have received a message from Google that is similar to the following:

"Dear site owner or webmaster of https://www._____________________/, We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines. Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes. We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you've made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google's search results."

The fourth quarter of 2012 is a good time to make a top to bottom review of your site to do a comprehensive SEO overhaul. You definitely want to be proactive in avoiding search engine's algorithm based penalties, and certainly prevent manual actions taken by Google. Proactive website SEO maintenance can only help your site, and will almost certainly mitigate having a gut wrenching surprise drop in rankings.

The New: Ethical and Sustainable SEO

On-Page SEO things to look at are your page titles and descriptions which should be unique to each page, alt tags and title attributes which should be written to help the user and not for keyword stuffing, eliminate sitewide footer links, use a canonical meta tag, limit outbound links, keep ads below the fold on your pages, correct spelling errors, don't use h-tags in a spammy manner, make sure your page load times are ultra fast, use an XML site map, add Schema markup when applicable, eliminate low quality or near duplicate content pages, and focus on branding in your messaging.

There are very specific requirements, standards and implementation methods for all of the aforementioned items. Google searches for any of these topics will lead you to pages with more detailed information.

Another great way to get an evaluation of how well your website desginer has performed is to check your website for technical errors. Because things like the Google code for the +1 button and publisher attribute do not validate, your website probably will not validate.

Even with such unavoidable issues, your website should have no more than 6-8 errors or warnings. You should correct as many deficiencies as possible.

Stepping Up Your Game

You can make substantial forward progress by rebuilding your site as HTML5 complaint and get superb enhancements by utilizing CSS3 in your design. An HTML5 site with CSS3 delievrs better performance and alleviates some code deficiencies associated with older doc types. The really top tier website designers offer responsive website designs that resize to fit various browsers using a liquid or elastic layout. Can your web designer do this?

Related SEO Considerations

You need to have these tools in place and use them to improve your SEO efforts. Google Analytics provides key user metrics and can provide valuable insights on ways to improve your website. Webmaster Tools enables you to verify your site, confirm technical settings and manage your site within Google standards. If your current SEO provider has not done this for you it's time to find a new SEO company.

If you're uncertain about the state of your website's SEO feel free to leave a question or comment. We welcome phone inquiries about any SEO matters.

Recovery After The Penguin Update

Recovery After Penguin?

Published on May 23, 2012 by: James H. Hobson

I'll start this piece by saying that our agency supports algorithm updates such as Panda and Penguin. Every SEO practitioner knows that there is, and has been for a long time, a LOT of black-hat SEO work happening. These updates are improvements to Google's ability to disempower the hacks in our industry - which improves our industry's reputation and increases the value of white-hat SEO companies. Unfortunately, there are some innocent businesses that are going to feel the pain from (presume unknowingly) hiring black-hat SEO hacks. These businesses who hired the black-hat hacks are now frantically seeking answers on how to recover after the Penguin update.

The Reality of Penguin

Penguin essentially nullified a volume of sites, including networks of sites, that were used to deliver super spammy links. There have been quite a number of outsource services which build and maintain sites that exist for the sole purpose of allowing these companies to generate revenue for providing a quantity of inbound links for a fee. This practice has helped to boost the rankings for a huge number of sites, but delivers no real value for the average consumer (web users). Because these sites have been neutralized, any website that had benefitted from these links has now had the benefit removed, thus the ranking drop. Obviously, the extent of your ranking loss is in proportion to the percentage of inbound links that you have coming from these link spam sites.

It is unexpected that the Panda Update will have any impact on local search results, although some people do create links to their Google Places pages. If this is a side problem for your business you should explore types of Google My Business help.

How To Recover

If your site has been hit by Penguin, our theory for recovery after the Penguin update is not too complicated, although the work involved probably will be extensive. Effectively what has happened is that your site has been pushed far back down the line. This means that you will need to spend a great deal of time, and associated costs, to replace the lost black-hat work with white-hat work. Make certain that the new SEO work is in total compliance with Google Webmaster Guidelines.

A Telling Sign

If your site has experienced a significant loss of organic rankings, our recommendation is to check the rankings of your current and past SEO providers. Chances are quite good that the work they did for your site is the same as they did for themselves. SEO companies that have also dropped substantially in rankings are almost certain to be, or have been, black-hat SEO hacks, and they are the cause of your problem - not Google.

Your Choice of SEO Services

Although it should be obvious by now, if you are working with a SEO company whose rankings have plummeted, you should discontinue their services and replace them with a nearby pany that was not negatively impacted by Penguin. Waiting for a Google miracle does no good, so take action now and recover from Penguin and move forward. If you have a relatively new SEO company, the odds are that they are not the cause of your problem, and you should stay with them and see how things go for the next six months or so.

What To Expect

Almost anything is possible. Certainly Google will continually roll out new updates, and rankings will change. It's reasonable to expect that if you have a competent SEO company, that stays current on industry best practices, your site should do well. Obviously, SEO is a very competitive environment so your actual results are always relative to how your own efforts stack up to your competitors. Our advice is that quality always beats quantity, so do the right things, in the right measure, and things will be good.