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Archive for the ‘seo’ Category

I once heard it stated that “…website designers keep SEO’s in business.”  And while that might irritate a few web designers most of the time when it comes to getting a website indexed, ranked and visited, it’s the design of the website itself that can be the culprit.

So how do you know if the firm you hired has done “all the right things” on your site so that when the search engines come to pay a visit, they’ll happily run through your field of flowers like a little girl on a warm spring day?

• Check your mark-up code.  You can check your code for free online by visiting the W3C Markup Validation service.  There are a lot of “best practices” stated by W3C and as mentioned here, suggested by Bing.  Without listing them all, which will make your head spin, just visit (or better yet, have your website designer visit)http://www.w3schools.com/.There’s been some debate on whether or not Google takes proper code into account  but…one website did do a very small test on four of its pages and found that Google tended to prefer the page with the proper mark up code.My advice?  Especially if you’re using XHTML is to be absolutely 100% compliant.  HTML seems to have a little bit more wiggle room.  But…even with that said, it’s better to be safe than sorry and just be sure your code is up to standards.
• Bad Links.  ”Bad” links aren’t just links to bad neighborhoods, they’re also those broken links that you have *gasp!* within your own website or from your website that point out to external sites.  Now, you obviously can’t control whenever someone else moves or gets rid of one of their web pages but you most certainly can find out which links on your site are broken both internally and externally.I suggest using a free program called Xenu’s link sleuth.  This will do a check on all the links on your site to see which ones encountered errors.  Depending upon how large your site is, you may want to run this at least once a week.Other “bad” link problems are…
  • missing page elements – for example, images aren’t loading properly on a page.  This is why it’s so important to usecanonicalization(video) when linking up anything on your site.
  • Don’t use scripts for internal site navigation.  Instead just use anchor tags with keywords as the anchor text.

Other coding errors that can create issues (as stated by Bing) are:

• Missing, empty or duplicate title tags.  (Note the duplicate title tags especially).  What Bing is saying is that you should not use the same title on more than one of your site’s pages (sage advice).
• Missing, empty or duplicate meta description tags.
• Missing, empty or duplicate H1 tags.

Additionally, according to Bing, if you use a 302 redirect on any of your web pages note that it DOES NOT pass link juice.  Proper SEO dictates the use of 301 (permanent) redirects.

You can read Bing’s coding guide here.

This post is an excerpt from Bonehead Bits – The SEO Newsletter.  To get your copy before the public does (for free), click here now and get signed up.

A question that’s often asked (nearly everywhere SEO is talked about it seems) is about PageRank and what to do if all of a sudden the awesome PageRank you just had yesterday – has tanked or worse yet, disappeared all-together.

If your PageRank has Dropped

First, determine what has really happened.  If you had a PageRank of 5 yesterday and you all of a sudden have a PageRank of 1, all is not lost.  This could actually mean a variety of things.  One of them is that one of the sites linking to you has seen a significant drop in PageRank itself.  Remember, when other sites link to you (and especially if they’re one way links), you get a portion of their PageRank passed on to you.

So if you had a site that had a PageRank of 7 linking to you, thus helping your own PageRank status, and they all of a sudden dropped to a 3 (as an example) then your PageRank will likely be affected.

Now consider this PageRank drop with not one site but with multiple sites.  This would definiately have an adverse effect on your overall PageRank.

The first thing to do would be to check and see if there have been any changes to the PageRank of the sites linking to you.  But first, you have to know who is linking to you.

One way to do this is with Yahoo’s site explorer tool.  Enter in your domain name, click “inlinks” and then choose “except from this domain” from the drop-down list.  This will show you all of the links pointing to your own site.

Visit these sites and be sure that none of them have been removed from Google’s index.  (You can find this out by typing in the Google search box the following – site:thenameofthesite.com.)  If nothing comes up, they’ve been removed from the index and this could be one of the causes of your drop in PageRank.

You can also use Google Analytics to see who is sending you traffic via the “Traffic Sources -> Referring Sites” link.

If Your PageRank is Gone

Ok, this is probably one of the worst-case scenarios.  If you previously had a PageRank on your site, even if it was as little as a 1, and all of a sudden you look up at your trusty Google toolbar and notice that the PageRank of your web page is now gray, this can be a very significant issue.

The first thing to do is to first check that URL in Google and see if it’s still indexed.  Just type in the Google search box site:yoursiteurl.com and see if something comes up.  If it doesn’t, it means that you’ve probably been removed from Google’s index.

So what should you do?

Well, if this were to happen to you that means that Google felt that you were doing something illegal; or at least something against their webmaster guidelines.

So you first need to ask yourself a few questions.

• Did you use any kind of black-hat techniques on your site?  Things such as cloaking, invisible text, redirection, etc.  If so, this could likely be the reason.
• Were you selling links from your site?  Likely that this could be the issue.
• Did you offer any downloads off of your site that could have contained malicious code?

There are many possible questions that you could ask yourself – and far too long of a list to post here; but the bottom line is that if you were doing something “illegal” in the search engines eyes, they probably found out about it and you are now feeling the reprucussions.

You can also check out Google’s business listing quality guidelines andGoogle’s webmaster guidelines to double-check to be sure you were following the rules.

If you have a Google webmaster account, log in and see if you have any messages from Google.  If you’re lucky, they’ll have sent you a message telling you why your site was removed.

Whatever it is that they tell you, FIX THE ISSUE.  Once you have the issue fixed, you’ll next need to submit a reinclusion request.  Which could take a bit of time so be prepared to wait and ready to explain yourself.

This post is an excerpt from Bonehead Bits – The SEO Newsletter.  To get your copy before the public does (for free), click here now and get signed up.

The much-awaited SEO Book has arrived.

For the past few months I’ve been updating a Lesson-by-Lesson SEO Book that literally hand-holds you through the entire SEO process.

Not only have I created this massive course for you but I’ve also included checklists and spreadsheets that you can use to keep your site moving upwards in the search engines.

These are the same tactics that not only have I used but many other website owners have used in order to get top positions in the search engines (for proof click here).

To get the book for yourself, visit http://www.BoneheadSEO.com/cb/ and take a look at everything that’s inside.