I was in my accountant's office the other day and as we were wrapping up our meeting, he started asking questions about SEO. Apparently his site had suddenly dropped into oblivion for no apparent reason. After further investigation, I quickly found that there were about 2000 keywords hidden at the bottom of each page and that he had 5-6 domains all mirroring the same content. Over the next week we were able to get the spam cleaned up and submitted a reconsideration request to Google. In less than a week, he back up in the top three for his core keywords.

I don't think that this is a rare situation for small business owners as it there is a lot of information flowing around in forums and from eager web designers looking for quick and easy ways to confirm that "Yes, they do build optimized websites". Now in this case, my accountant had read a couple of forums and this seemed like a fine idea; Search engines look for keywords, so if there are keywords at the bottom of my page, it should help my search rankings.

I think that very often it is not understanding the big picture of SEO that can be a problem. No one technique or approach to SEO will yield long-term consistent results. When your SEO strategy is based on one single technique, you leave yourself vulnerable, at best to constant fluctuations, and at worst to penalties and even blacklisting.

When planning your SEO strategy, understand all factors that search engines look at and address many of them. Like a financial portfolio, this will hedge against short term fluctuations and will yield strong, consistent results over the long term.

Labels: reconsideration request, search engine optimization, SEO

According to Google’s software engineer, Matt Cutts – Google plans to shortly roll out a new filter that will treat sub-folders and sub-domains of a site equally. According to SE Roundtable (http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/015621.html), at a recent PubCon conference in Las Vegas, Matt stated that very soon things will change and a domain will be limited to 2 total URL’s within any set of search results.

So what does this mean for webmasters? Since sub-domains up until this point have been treated as individual domains, site owners had the ability to easily game the system and index an endless amount of sub-domains in Google to dominate a bunch of rankings. Google’s latest effort to put an end to this, will most likely have a significant impact on websites using these tactics. In addition though, some legit sites are likely to hurt from this change, as certain sites who let’s say had 3-4 of their own listings within top 10 search results will now be limited to just 2, therefore losing some of the traffic.

Whether or not this new algorithm will cause relevancy issues is under question, but the filter should surely put an end to black hat SEO’s taking advantage of the current situation, especially those in the more competitive areas of the business.

Labels: google, search engine optimization, SEO, sub-domains

Does your current marketing strategy take into consideration what types of online web directories you should submit your website to? If it does and you're not careful, you could end up wasting money away and potentially hurting or influencing your rankings. At Rock Coast Media, our SEO link building experts are constantly working to develop a comprehensive list of quality web directories to improve our client rankings. Below are Top 5 Red Flags on the types of web directories you should avoid.

Red Flag #1 No Editorial Review – Recently, Google has taken action on banning hundreds of web directories that it considers outside of its"quality guidelines". Senior Google software engineer, Matt Cutts has mentioned the importance of quality on numerous occasions in the past and present. However, while Google is the search engine leader, at one point quantity did play a greater role and was more important in other smaller search engine competitors such as MSN. These days though, this is not the case as search engine algorithms are constantly updated for improved relevance in an effort to reduce SERP manipulation.

You should always make sure the directory you submit to has an editorial policy and takes the time to review your site. If there isn't, then skip it and move on!

Red Flag #2 Excessive Advertising – When spotting a quality directory, take into consideration the amount of sponsorship/Google Adsense ads that are present on the site. There is nothing wrong with placing adsense advertisements on a web directory, but you really want to avoid excessive advertising when deciding where you should submit to. Keepin mind, a lot of webmasters will attempt to set-up web directories for the purpose of generating revenue (whether through adsense, or paid submissions) without serving any value to the individual who pays. So in the end, you end up wasting your money and getting no value back.

Red Flag #3 Directory Age – Pay attention to how old the directory is and how long it has been around. Best Of The Web (www.botw.org) is a perfect example of quality web directory which has been around since 1994! These are the type of directories you should go after.

Red Flag #4 Same IP Hosting – As I mentioned above, certain webmasters have a tendency to set-up web directories for the purpose of generating revenue and nothing else. Individuals may run a network of 100 or more directories all hosted on the same IP address, and you may not even know it. Before deciding where to submit, you should analyze each directory domain name to make sure it is hosted on individual Class C blocks as opposed to same IP.

And finally…..

Red Flag #5 – Check Domain Indexability! – So you're ready to pay to be included in a directory. Everything looks good, nothing seems shady, right? But, have you checked whether the directory is actually spidered by search engines? I am starting to see this problem more and more…webmasters will allow the indexability of its main domain name, but have you checked whether the directory listing page you plan to submit your site to is actually indexed by search engines? Webmasters will sometimes attempt to put a 'nofollow' tag on a lot of internal pages of their site to avoid a so called PageRank 'Leak', in an effort to boost up the PR oftheir homepage. Sure, a directory may look great, but one that passes no backlink value to your site is worthless!

You should pay close attention to these warning signs at any time you decide to do your web directory submissions.

Labels: link building, link development, SEO, web directories

Generally accepted practices in SEO have indicated that title tags are for keywords and that any extraneous, marketing-type words should be reserved for meta descriptions and your on page copy. While I would agree that this is partially true, this line of thinking may require a bit more consideration.

The reason for the needed paradigm shift is the engines ability to factor in click through rate (CTR) into their ranking algorythm. So much like the impact of CTR on your quality score in paid search, it is believed that the rate at which people click on your organic listing versus the number of times your listing is shown is an important factor in determining organic rankings. If you think about it, it makes sense. A search engines goal is to give you the most relevant results for a particular query and CTR is a potentially a good indicator of what users find to be relevant. There are some potential holes in this logic, but I'll reserve that discussion for a different post.

So how does this play into your title tag strategy? Because in order to improve CTR, you need to make your listing stand out from the other 15-20 paid and organic listings on SERPs page so that users will be enticed. Also, because title tags are the one thing that you can almost always rely on to be a a part of your organic listing, this is really your best shot to improving CTR. Now making your title tags more interesting, and thus more clickable, does not mean abandoning keywords and using straight-up marketing speak. It simply means making title tags more readable and eye catching by taking a more descriptive approach.

For example, lets assume that we have a page about how to teach your dog to sit and your target keywords are: teach dog sit and dog sit training. An old title tag might look something like this:

"How to Teach Your Dog to Sit Training a Dog to Sit"

A more enticing title tag might look like this:

"Dog Training Experts Show How to Teach Your Dog to Sit from "

You can see how the second version is more eye-catching as it creates a sense of expertise and is also more readable.

When writing title tags, be sure to accurately represent your target search terms but also find creative ways to grab a user's interest. If you can do so, your organic search rankings will thank you.

Labels: search engine optimization, SEO, title tags

As an SEO consultant, I have been asked on more than one occasion, is there a way to combine traditional SEO practices and pay per click advertising into one bundled package for optimal results? I am always delighted to provide the answer to that question. Absolutely YES! Yahoo has a program called Search Submit Express. The way the program works is for a site owner to set up an account with Yahoo and pay a nominal value to register a URL in the program. You then pay $0.30 cents per transaction each time a user clicks on your web site in the Yahoo Search Engine Results Page.

Now the question that generally is asked to me following that explanation is, how is this any better than pure PPC? The answer to that is rather simple. In traditional PPC, you may pay much less, $0.05 per click, or you could pay much more (in some cases $30 per click or more). Moreover, in a PPC campaign you select the keywords to go after and need to manage the account very closely. In the Search Submit Express program, you do not select your keywords; rather, your site comes up for the same terms it should come up for based on your SEO efforts. However, being a part of the aforementioned program your ranking is theorized to increase from its natural position in the SERPs to a higher position.

What is the gist of this program? You still need to use link building, content optimizing, title and Meta tags optimization and other forms of search engine optimization. However, the program will enhance those rankings which look natural to the user. All the while, you pay only a fraction of what many PPC programs might cost, and eliminate the stigma attached to paying your way into the engines that many searchers have.

Labels: PPC, PPI, SEO