Greatson Media – Saco, Biddeford Maine Website Design & Hosting

Today I browsed through the 3,500 or so SEO questions people asked at Google and chose the most common ones to answer. I figured that, if so many people were seeking out answers for these SEO questions at Google, many of you may also be wondering the same things.

Unsurprisingly, many questions were along the line of “How do I get my site found in Google?” (Answer: Read everything the High Rankings website!) And sadly, there were tons of questions about Meta keywords, as if they had anything to do with SEO. But there were lots of specific questions that you may also have wondered about recently, from very basic things that we in the biz assume everybody already knows to what’s happening right now with Google’s latest algorithm changes. (I’m starting out with the more tricky technical ones. If those go over your head, please scroll down to the “On-page SEO Question” section.)

Let’s dig right in…

Technical Google Questions

Q. Can I recover from Google’s “Penguin Update”?

A. For those who don’t know, Penguin is the name of Google’s latest algorithm change that came out toward the end of April 2012. At this point, it’s too early to have had any Penguin recoveries. However, as with any Google update, of course you can recover from it as soon as you understand what it was that your site had (or didn’t have) that caused it to be nuked from the search results. From what I’ve seen so far, Penguin is simply an extension of Panda. Reading what I wrote in “Why SEO in All the Right Places No Longer Works” is a good place to start your recovery.

Q. How do we know about unnatural links to our website?

A. You can use backlink checker tools to find some of them. Or ask the jerk spammer company who purchased them for you.

Q. How do I find the number of pages of my site that Google has indexed?

A. The quickest and easiest way is via a “site:command” at Google. Go to the Google search box and type: site:example.com and hit the search button. You’ll then see at the top of the page: “About xx,xxx results.” That’s the approximate number of URLs from your site that they have indexed. You’ll be able to scroll through the first 1,000 results, but that’s about it. Please note that site:command isn’t 100% accurate and you may find vastly different results from one day to the next.

If you want to see how many pages Google has indexed that actually bring traffic to your website, SEOmoz had a post from 2010 that shows how to find that number in your Google Analytics. I’ve taken that a step further and created a custom report that does something similar.

Q. How often does Google update its search results? (Or another variation: How long does Google take to index pages?)

A. In the early days of Google, it could take up to a month for pages to get indexed. And the search results would shift once a month or so during what was called the “Google Dance.” Today, due to much more processing power and many different data centers, most existing sites see new pages getting indexed almost immediately. This in turn causes the search results to also change constantly. Even brand-new sites will often be indexed within a few days if they ping Google and/or have a few tweets that announce it.

Q. Can you have two domains for the same site?

A. You can have as many domains for the same site as you’d like. However, you typically want only one of those domains to be indexed by the search engines. Use 301-redirects to point to your main domain from your extra domains for best results.

Q. Can a web crawler find unlinked pages?

A. They do seem to manage to find them these days, so be sure to exclude them via your robots.txt page and/or through a robots=noindex tag.

Q. Does the canonical link need to go on every page of the website?

A. The canonical link element aka rel=canonical doesn’t necessarily need to be on any page of your site. But if there is a chance of pages having URLs that get appended one way or another with stuff that doesn’t change the content, it’s not a bad idea to use rel=canonical to ensure that Google indexes only the correct (main) URL. It will also pass all the link popularity to the main URL as well. All pages where the URLs may get appended should use rel=canonical.

Q. Will deleting duplicate content from my website get me ranked again?

A. If the duplicate content on your site was what caused you to somehow lose rankings, then yes. Just remember that it’s doubtful that your site was penalized for having duplicate content. What may have happened, however, is that you split the link popularity of your content between multiple URLs, which can definitely affect rankings. In which case, using rel=canonical as mentioned previously can help.

Q. How are search rankings affected by a domain name change?

A. If you 301-redirect the old domain to the new, tell Google about the new website address within your Google Webmaster Tools (GWMT) account, set up a new GWMT account for the new domain, and change as many of the old links to point to the new domain, your rankings and traffic shouldn’t be affected.

Q. If forum signature links can be seen only by members, does Google count them?

A. If the forum has set the Google spider to be a “guest” and not a “member” (which is the norm), then no, they can’t see the signatures and therefore can’t/won’t count them. That’s how we purposely have it set at the High Rankings Forum, but every forum has its own unique settings.

Q. What is the best for SEO: PHP or HTML?

A. By the time it gets to the browser, PHP is in HTML form, therefore they’re both the same as far as search engines and SEO are concerned.

The rules of SEO seem to change on a continual basis, and techniques that work one month don’t seem to work the next month. Strangely some website owners refuse to cotton onto this fact and so they continue to use the tools they’ve always relied on and that used to assure a good search engine ranking – even though a lot of these so called ‘tools’ have now fallen into the SEO myth category.

So what are the SEO tools and techniques that are now widely considered to be myths?

1. The higher the keyword density of your website content the better your search engine ranking will be.

This used to be true to a certain degree, but because spammers realized that keyword stuffing boosted ranking they took it to the extreme, with the result that now keyword stuffing can earn you a website review or even worse a ban. The same goes for the continual repetition of a single keyword. Any website that focuses exclusively on a single keyword will often be classed as a sp@m site and disregarded by Google and the other big search engines.

It’s much more advisable from an SEO point of view to concentrate on several keyword phrases that you know (through research) are searched more than most in your niche.

2. Putting your main SEO keyword in your Meta Tags will boost your search engine rankings.

Again this used to be true, but the spammers took this to excess as well. Now it doesn’t really matter whether you include your main keyword or keyword phrase in your Meta tags, they will be overlooked by most of the main search engines.

3. You should concentrate on just one keyword per website page.

This myth is related to the first one in that concentrating on a single keyword per page can lead to you inadvertently getting flagged for spamming. You only need to exceed the recommended keyword density by a relatively small percentage to get yourself noticed by the search engine spiders and bots.

Hence, it is again advisable to have a main keyword per page but also to include several popular alternatives as well.

4. Website SEO only needs to be done once.

This is probably the most frustrating SEO myth ever! Obviously if the rules of SEO are constantly changing then the SEO you use on your website needs to change accordingly. It’s pointless having useless, generic content stuffed with keywords on your site if the search engines now blatantly ignore such content. It’s also pointless sticking with old keywords when internet users have refined their search terms e.g. they may have searched for ‘iPhone’ when you initially did your website SEO, but now they probably search for ‘iPhone4′ or ‘iPhone3GS’ etc.

Website SEO is an on-going process and although you don’t need to update your content on a daily basis you do have to work at it on a regular basis to stay with the competition.

5. Trading links helps to boost rankings.

At one point website owners used to trade links with other website owners simply because they knew search engines such as Google looked favorably at sites with incoming and outgoing links. These huge scale linking strategies are now frowned upon by most search engines, and especially when the linking websites are seen to have absolutely no connection with each other i.e. they are totally unrelated in every way.

This SEO myth is one of the funniest because some website owners still believe that search engines won’t be able to recognize a useful link from a spam link. Non-useful links are easily caught and discounted by search engines and as a form of SEO they are now valueless.

6. My home page will always rank highest so I should concentrate my SEO here.

Search engine spiders and bots no longer read and index your home page more thoroughly than the rest of your website; a fact that means you need to SEO your entire website with just as much effort as you do your home page.

It isn’t uncommon for internal website pages to rank much higher for certain keywords than home pages so in order to cover all bases you must SEO your entire site – and this includes contact pages and other seemingly un-index-able pages.

7. All search engines use the same parameters to rank websites.

Again this is a huge myth that people tend to forget. Google uses over 200 factors to rank a website and it’s possible that Bing uses over 200 as well – but you can be sure they don’t use the same 200 factors.

The result of these differences: the SEO tactics you use to achieve a high rank on Google may not get you the same high rank on Bing or Yahoo or any of the other search engines. It’s important that you don’t try to satisfy every search engine with your SEO techniques or you could end up in a big mess and ranking low everywhere.

There are of course numerous other SEO myths floating around the internet, but these 7 are the ones that never seem to disappear. The sooner they do however the better for every website owner interested in getting their SEO just right.

By K Damian Qualter (c) 2012

Keyword Optimization…Overlooked Keyword Research and Processes!

Keyword optimization, better known as Keyword Research, is the researching, the analyzing, then the choosing of the most suitable keyword phrases for your content. Keyword research and optimization done right will create a funnel of qualified and targéted traffic back to your site from the search engine results pages (SERP’s).

Proper keyword optimization is the finding of those targeted and profitable keywords and keyword phrases that your potential visitors will enter into the search engine’s Search box, which will bring up the most relevant sites to a particular subject.

This process will play a large role in determining where you will land in the Search Engine Results Pages… it could mean the difference between not being found anywhere on the Web, or being the first site that users click on when performing a search.

This keyword optimization procedure is NOT a onetime thing… this is something that needs to be done each and every time you decide you want to bless the World with your brilliance of the written word.

Choosing the proper keywords for your site is absolutely critical for SEO… finding yourself within the search engine results pages (SERP’s) for keyword phrases that you are targeting isn’t too shabby either. However, proper keyword research and optimization is probably one of the most common areas overlooked by online marketers.

Overlooked Keyword Optimization & Research that Search Engines Use!

The whole purpose of the list below is to familiarize yourself with crucial optimization elements that are often overlooked by the average blogging professional, yet the search engines look for while crawling your site.

Best SEO Keyword Research Practices!

Let’s Start with the Long Tailed Keyword Phrase: Long tail keywords are a way of expanding on a core, generic word to be made into a more specific targeted keyword term. Example: A Generic Broad Keyword – “Knives”; a more targeted, Long Tail Keywords Phrase – “Handmade Damascus Knives.” What you have done here is narrowed down the visitors search by giving the specific information that you are offering for “Knives.”

Since the Google Panda Update was developed “to give people the most relevant answers to their queries,” it might be in your best interest to target keywords that are related specifically to your content. You might consider this your best method to find your main targeted keyword phrase suitable to your article topic.

You can use the Free Online SEO tools like the Google External Keyword Research tool to find the keywords that potential visitors will associate with the information you are offering.

Keyword Variations: This is just another way of saying that not each Internet searcher uses the same words to find information… you need to think like your visitors and create some different variations of your targeted keyword phrase adding words at the beginning, the end, the middle, etc.

Example of keyword variants from the above long tailed keyword phrase: “Custom Damascus Knives,” “Damascus Hunting Knives.” These types of keyword phrases you can put within your written content where it sounds right and makes sense.

Keyword Synonyms: Fairly self-explanatory… these are words that have similar meanings and the search engines are looking for word association within your content.

Keyword Stemming: This is the growth of one keyword phrase that is related to your website article by using suffixes, prefixes, or adding pluralization. This is another way of making one keyword phrase into many additional new keywords that you can use in your article.

Example: blog, blogs, blogger, blogger’s, blogging, weblog, weblogs… you get the idea!

Semantically Related or Relevant Keyword Phrases: The use of these relevant keyword phrases in your content will allow the search engines to determine relevancy by the subject matter, rather than keyword density. In the world of organic or the natural search, semantically related content refers to words that are connected thematically to a specific search query.

For example: Canon Cameras, Nikon Lenses, SLR, Zoom Lenses, Tripods, etc., can all be synonymous with the word Camera. Creating sentences and paragraphs using semantic keyword variations in your article can improve its relevancy score in the search engines’ ranking algorithms.

Best SEO On-Page Keyword Optimization Practices!

Let’s Start with the URL Structure: URL, which stands for Uniform Resource Locator, essentially is an address which is used to find your website pages. Without them there would be no means of navigating from one page to another.

Making your URL file names relevant to the content contained within the page is not only an important organization factor, but both search engines and your visitors associate the name of the page with the content that it contains. Just as it makes sense to have relevant keywords within your web page for the topic you are writing about, you should name the file URL after your main keyword phrase.

Your URL file name needs to contain only the keyword phrase that you are targeting. It does not need to be the full sentence of the main article headline… the shorter, the better!

Main Article Headline: Capture the visitors attention with a compelling and relevant headline in regards to their search, or lose them. You have less than 10 seconds to grab their attention before they move on. And, of course, you will want to place a keyword phrase describing your content within the article headline.

Keep in mind that your Article Headline is a brief summary of the content contained, it does not need to be more than 5 to 7 words long.

By John Engle (c) 2012