Hermesmyth Internet Marketing Blog

SEO Key Performance Indicators

If you website ranking well and positioned well in search engine, and disappeared suddenly from the search listing after few content additions of content. No worries! All you have to do is check if there was duplication of content in your website or your website content was copied to a website which has a better page rank then yours. The below are few possibilities of a sudden disappearance of website from search engines.

Case 1: Duplication of Content

To check if the website content is copied from some other site visit www.copyscape.com and analyse your website. This shows the list of site which has similar content. So if you feel like the content in your website is same like the other, just tweak your content. In case your content is original and someone has copied it, report it to Google or any other search engine provider.

Case 2: Duplication of Content within website or from your old website

If you have the same content in 2 different web page links, then you need to block one from search engine index, if you want the other page not to be indexed. To do this, visit Google Webmaster central, add and block the link which you don’t want the search engine to crawl. (Though you can do this using the .htaccess or robots.txt, this method will also work in Google – as Google is most used search engine, importance is given to Google search)

In case your entire site or specific pages is the same as your old website, all you have to do is take the content and have them in the server backup, and see that the old website doesn’t appear. Once the entire website shows a 404 error, resubmit it to search engines, so that once they crawl, if there is no content found in the website, search engines will remove them from their index.

Case 3: Website Server IP

This rarely does happen, if a website has two servers 1. Live server and 2. Development server (which is not supposed to be available for public and is used in internal organisations). If you buy a website ip from a service provider, and by chance you get a the ip of the link, which was ranking good and now is dead, the content which you may post would reflect on the website which doesn’t belong to you. So your website will appear in 2 different website.(only the url will be different, all the others will remain same) This is something the Web host provider needs to take care off. In this case, you need to ask the host provider to clear the cache of the old server.

Case 4: Link Spamming

Link Spamming is frequently changing the links with the same content. When a search engine crawls the website, and if the links keep on changing, and each time, the previous link is dead/broken, then search engines will think, those are spamming links. So this may also lead to drop in search listings.

Also Watch the Video – These are the insights given my Matt Cutts, Google

Source: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

Apart from this there are many reasons, but these are few important points, which optimizers see that there is a sudden drop in the traffic. (Even I forgot, these things, and later realized, these are the things, I missed out during analysis. Though I concentrated on the few things which does occur normally)

Source:  http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-site-review-session-from-google-io-2010/

As we discussed already, its always good to acquire natural links for websites. Recently I came across the posting “Calling for Link Spam Reports” by MattCutts – a Software Engineer in Google, stating that Google has been aggressively working on the new algorithms to tackle linkspam.

Linkspam is an illegal method of obtaining page rank, where a website owner will buy paid links from some other websites which has good page rank, acquiring links by providing spam comments, excessive reciprocal link exchanging and many more.

Actually both buying and selling links doesn’t adhere to Google policies, hence these types of links are intended to manipulate the page rank and increase the website visits. But the saddest part is that most of the SEO (Seach Engine Optimization) Companies, do paid linking as business.

I strongly suggest SEO”s to adhere to the Google search engine optimization policies and work hard towards it to achieve your website goals. Do not follow illegal methods of obtaining page ranks and later feel for it, once your site gets blocked or pushed to the last results.

So instead think Positive – while you are thinking to post a link somewhere in a website, just check for relevance, hence Google always checks for Quality, Quantity and Relevancy when manipulating page ranks.

If you come across a website which buys or sells link, just post a complaint to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?pli=1

Acquiring natural links may be sometimes difficult for beginners but wonder, Slow and Steady wins the Race. Build your website natural links slowly, and get good page ranks in the long run

Many of the fresh search engine optimizers (SEO’s) as well as experienced sometimes knowingly or unknowingly in order to increase the website traffic start using few unethical ways which doesn’t obey the SEO guidelines. These are done in order to bring the page rank, and increase the website traffic in a short period of time.

So what are the common black hat seo techniques that are followed and what happens to a website if black hat seo are used?

Here the answer for your question.

Generally, black hat seo is kind of spam and unethical, for which search engine companies penalize for misuse by banning the website from their search engines.

Using Invisible Text: This is a common method, in which website developers use to get the list of top searched keywords and put them in the page, in the website background color. When a person searches in a search engine a using a specific keyword might reach this page, whereas the page which he lands has nothing to do with that keyword, nor it would be visible to the website visitor.

Below is a recent site that I got in my Google alert for a keyword I subscribed. When I went to the website, there is irrelevant content to a furniture shop . Here is the invisible text “keywords” they used to rank it.

Stuffing Keywords: Lot of keywords are stuffed in a specific page, with lot of repetitions, which is against the search engine policies. Also the Meta tags also have lot of keywords.

Website Cloaking: A webpage is created for the sole purpose of increasing the website traffic by identifying the search engine’s spider user agent or ip address. When a user visits the page, he would be taken to some other page which wouldn’t be related to what was shown in search results.

Doorway Page: A page is optimized for specific keywords and once starts getting in traffic, the website would be redirected to the real website. This is also similar to website cloaking.

Link Farms: This is a kind of spamming the search engines indexing algorithm. This is also known as spamdexing. It linking to site whereever possible, but which are not relevant to the content or keywords. This is made with the only intention to increase the backlinks, reciprocal link, which search engine see as spamming, as it is against the search engine indexing policies.

 Penalty:

 Is there a good penalty other than blocking or re-ranking the site? Yes, good penalizes by blocking the site or by dropping site from its current position to some the bottom of the results.

Here is the site, that was blocked by Google  for using Black Hat Technique. ( I have provided the image of the invisible text given in the html code)

Today as soon I came in, I just checked for few seo alerts. I found this news and thought I should definitely share with you all.

“In the last week, more than 280 search terms have been attacked by more than 6,600 black hat search engine optimization (SEO) operations, according to a study by SonicWall.”

Read the full article here: http://www.lastclicknews.com/black-hat-seo-operations-become-rampant-101052.html

Most organisations send promotional emails to sell and promote their brand. Do they  really know how many people have really read their email and have visited their website?  75% of the organisations don’t know how many visitors have visted the website after a email campaign.

Here is a simple online tool by Google, which makes your task easy by showing the click throughs in your google analytics account. All you have do is just tag your url providing a campaign name which would be shown in analytics once someone visits your website through email campaign.

Visit: Google Analytics URL Builder for URL Tagging

http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578

For More Information Visit: http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55518

Soon will make a new post regarding the traditional method of tracking open rates while doing email campaigns.

Many of you if not having a website, would surely use a blog either Blogger or WordPress. You may be posting lot of good articles, but still you may not see your blog listed in any of the first 10 pages of your favourite search engine.  Are you really interested in bringing your blog within those first 10 or 5 pages or even to the first page, then follow the below simple web blog optimization tips.

1.      Choose a domain / blog name (With a keyword, else if you want you to have general name then go ahead and follow the below optimization points – a domain name with a keyword is an add-on to seo technique.)

2.      Have a theme / template that is really pleasing to the eyes. There are lot of free templates available, use them

3.      Checkout for a good and reliable webhosting provider. Also if you use a wordpress or blogger for blogging, they can you their self-hosting.

4.      Avoid overloading the widgets in your blog, it will slow down the web page ie. It will take long time to open the blog itself.

5.      Provide a Descriptive Title with right keywords in it. Title should not be more longer.

6.      Use original content, do not copy somebody’s content and post it in your blog, it will be duplication and your site won’t rank at the top.

7.      Permalinks – while give the links for the post, use the month / date and title of the blog. And again in wordpress you have an option to edit the link itself. Say if you have a got link as “blog.com/november/26/Web-Blog-Optimization-Tips-and-Techniques-for-all-blog-beginners.php “ you can make that as “blog.com/November/26/blog-optimization-tips.php”

8.      Make use of the RSS feeds. Submit the feed links to RSS feed reader sites, this will help your content travel. Customize your feed content like only first 2 paragraphs appears and there is a option to read more which brings the feed readers to your blog.

9.      Submit your blog to web directories and search engines.

10.     Keep posting and updating your blog regularly

11.     Use descriptive and relevant keywords in the tags. The tag clouds will help in bringing visitors when indexed by search engines.

12.     Keep submitting your blog links to social networking sites like digg, delicious, stumpleupon , technorati and many more

13.     If available install some seo supported plugins in your blog. Also when there is newer version of blog available upgrade it.

14.     Add social media websites icon in the footer of the blog to share your posting in social networking sites.  You can do this by visiting www.addthis.com register and add the code provided in the template footer.

15.     Keep you blog interesting and precise. (This is a pretty long post for me….but thought this would be a great interest to my readers )

16.     Keep reading the latest Search Engine optimization (SEO) techniques and follow them

Submit your press releases for free

1. Title Tags – Give higher importance to title tags hence 9.8/10 importance is given to Page Title by Search Engines.

2. URL Structure – Build a short keyword optimistic page link with relevance

3. Content – Content is like a king in Search Engine Optimization. A good content with right keywords and relevancy would bring good results. Include your targeted keyword in H1, H2 and H3 Tags

4. Internal Linking & Navigation – Provide proper and right anchor texts. Anchor Texts also is an important attribute in on-page optimization, which helps the visitor to navigate throughout the website.

5. Dead Links – Have a periodic check on the broken links and redirect them to the relevant urls. More the number of broken links can also affect the search results and ranks.

web directories

Thought that the below links would be useful for you in getting the right keywords and generating the meta tags.

Free Keyword Suggestion Tools

 http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

 https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

 http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/

 Keyword List Generator

 http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-list/generator.php

 Free Meta Tag Generator

http://www.free-webmaster-tools.com/Meta-Tag-Generator.htm

 Free Meta Tag Builder with Time Interval

http://www.1stsitefree.com/meta_gen.htm