Below you will find a list of the most frequently asked questions about SEO (search engine optimization). If your question is not listed here, please contact me or ask your question in the forum.
The questions are automatically ranked by the amount of times they’ve been viewed, so the most popular questions are automatically shown first.
Yes, you don’t really have to do anything. I recommend installing blog software that can ping every new update, however.
Without links pointing to your blog, you cannot expect to stay long in the search engines.
Does Google favour their own product Blogger over WordPress when it comes to indexing?
No, test have shown that there is no difference. It wouldn’t make any commercial sense either, since Google is the most popular search engine due to its highly relevant results. Censoring websites would put them in a less competitive position
Mid 2007 Google started indexing sites faster and faster, and in one occasion I had an update to the website ranking in Google after only 3 minutes. Other people have seen this happen as well. But lately, my site is just not updating. Is my fresh content being sandboxed?
Well, I don’t work for Google, so I can’t tell you anything but what I can see that is happening out there: if you frequently update your site, Google will list you in its database pretty quickly. Frequently updating a blog is the surest way to get Google updating your listings almost in ‘real time’ (having Google trust your site enough to publish it in its Google news sections has the exact same result).
However, when you don’t update your site as frequently, the spiders adjust the frequency of crawling your site.
What you are experiencing is in all likelihood not a sandboxing feature (the data out there does not correspond with any sandbox activity on Google’ behalf) but probably the result of a slowdown in updates to your site, or some sort of defect that disables Google from finding your new content.
When renaming your page names, redirect the old URL’s via a 301-permanent redirect. This tells the search engines that the content of the old page has a new location. Keep the old URL’s on your sitemap for a month or so, until search engines have fully re-indexed your site, then update the sitemap with the new URL’s. (this last step is not absolutely necessary, but I’ve had some great results with it. P.s. I am talking about the sitemap you submit to Yahoo, Google and MSN).
This parrot that I talk to in the pet store told me that I should create a blog for search engine optimization purposes. Can you speak to this?
Blogs have no special powers of high rankings. What they do have (if done correctly) is fresh, unique content. Search engines do tend to like that, regardless of the format. If they know any given site is adding new articles on a frequent basis, they will come around often to index it. Blogs are certainly one way of easily adding new information to your site. Newsletters archived on your site can provide a similar benefit, as can archived press releases, or a popular forum.
The "pinging" done by most blog software these days also seems to help get blog posts spidered and indexed very quickly, which is a plus. In addition, blog posts will also show up in blog searches such as Google's Blog search, and Technorati Blog searches.
My site ranks well on MSN and Yahoo, but is nowhere to be seen on Google. I’ve done everything for it to rank well, but Google refuses to list me.
Or
I used to rank well for my industry key phrases, but 3 months ago my ranking on Google went awol. I just can’t get back in their index. What can I do?
If your site suddenly disappears from the search engine listings, it is usually because you have violated one of their (sometimes unwritten) codes of conduct. Either text was hidden or hard to read, the links pointing at your site have been reclassified as ‘extremely ‘spammy’ or you’ve done some naughty (ip cloaking, javascript redirects, etc,) and you’ve been reported by your competitor. If that is the case, all you can do is rebuild your site in a search engine compliant way, and wait until they lift the ban on your site. For smaller sites, this can take an eternity.
If you swear hand on heart that you have attempted nothing to deceive the search engines, then there are a few other reasons why your listing might have disappeared / dropped:
New sites are constantly emerging and maturing, and old sites compete with you by hiring their own SEO marketers. There is bound to be some upheaval in the rankings and in light of the intensified competition, you might need to invest more time and effort in maintaining your rankings.
All major search engines have been tweaking their algorithms quite a bit over the last year, and that has caused some shifts in the appreciation of relevancy of sites and their subsequent rankings. You might have used certain SEO techniques that artificially kept you high up in the search engines, but now that Google has depreciated this technique, you’ve dropped like a stone. Changes in the search engine algorithms are happening faster and more elaborately as the industry is maturing, competing harder and has greater wealth to buy new technologies.
In all fairness, if you are a small brand and don’t have a large amount of relevant back links and you want to rank well, you will need to use a ‘content structuring’ techniques (= tags, journalistic writing structure, content hierarchy, etc.) that help identify your key content. Even big brands are still well advised to take these techniques to heart, but have more freedom to ignore them. You will always be in danger that Google develops a smarter algorithm that depends less on identifying the most important content (e.g. by looking at the title tag first) and instead has an improved syntax algorithm that puts the emphasis even more on a certain style of content.
Therefore, never rely on a few keyword phrases alone for your business. Cast a wide net, so that you remain visible in the search engines, even if you lose your ranking for some of your important keywords. Just rebuild your pages for those keywords through my tried and tested methodology, and opt for a PPC campaign in the main time.
Also: don’t panic if you loose some of your keyword phrase rankings; you might be gaining elsewhere. When the words you rank for change, be sure to consult your analytics tool: has your overall conversion rate improved? Has your traffic really plummeted or did the contrary happen? Use at least two months data since your new ranking structure and analyse whether it was a curse or a blessing – and whether you want to change existing pages or create new pages to re-conquer your position in the search engines for your lost keyword phrases.
If you have the time and the money, you can diversify the ways you try to target the search engines, by building alternative pages for the same product, perhaps in different categories. Or allow for a discussion board at the bottom of the product page, and allow users to generate content for you. Users naturally talk in the language they search with. Create a mini-site for each of your key products, and have it be an alternative way of your site being found. Make sure that you have a strong reciprocal linking with the mother site, so that no link juice goes lost, and emphasise your link building on the mother site, while generating buzz in the press and the blogs to point at your mini-site – have marketing create a new angle for the mini-site every 6 months, and generate new buzz, perhaps through competitions.
As always, cast a wide net, reinvest your profits, and keep growing your SEO strategy in the most diverse matter. This will ensure that your SEO will remain the goose that lays the golden eggs, if not always for the same old keywords. However, if your SEO strategy is sound and mature, it will become harder over time to lose your ranking for the key phrases most relevant to you.
oh how strange it didn't work that time. When I posted it in the business forums it said something different ...... maybe I dreamed it, I shall have a look for it later....
Hi Lorenz, thank you for all your answers today. I have been busy and redesigned both the blogs, so am learning slowly.
I am struggling to explain the url issue, I will try it here and see if it works. I have just copies your site url and will post it here and when I save the post it should say something different (well it did when I posted it in forums)
http://lorenzlammens.com/
I was just curious as to how you did that, it is very nice and I believe google like links with keywords in....
I am not 100% sure what you refer to, but my URL's are re-written in two ways: via my .htaccess file and my website engine that runs on PHP. This does require some more advanced web developing skills....
Let me answer your second question first:
Give your new blog time to rank. New content, especially in a sub folder needs to accumulate trust in the search engines. You can speed up the process by registering your feed with Feedburner and your blog with Technorati, amongst other usual suspects. If you want a full list, email me, and I'll send you all the sites you should register your blog / RSS feed with.
As for your first question - it would be bad practice on my part to discuss strategies for your s...
Hi Sally,
this is untrue.
What is likely to happen is that Google will index your content first, then the article that has identical content. It will put the article in the 'supplemental' index, meaning that the article will only rank for very broad, long tail keyword searches.
However, the danger is that your blog post ends up in the supplemental index, because Google indexed the article first and allocates more trust to the domain.
Duplicate content is always a bad strategy. Imagine somebody f...
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