Oh dear… has your site been banned by Google? I know the feeling you currently have, that gut wrenching fear and loss of control. Where has the site gone? Why has the site gone? When will it be back? I have been developing and marketing websites since 2003, many of those sites I promoted using techniques that today would be considered “alternative”. I don’t shy away from this because it means that I have the scars of battle with the search engines…. believe me, you can quickly achieve a short term gain with Black Hat techniques, however long term it is not a viable marketing strategy.

View the search engines as your source of free targeted traffic. Don’t mess with them, give them what they want… great content and information. Play by their rules and they will reward you. Every business in the UK should follow the webmaster guidelines, if you don’t then you’re running the risk of being banned.

If you do not know whether you are following Google Webmaster Guidelines, then start asking some questions. Click on the link and read through what they say. If you work with an SEO agency, get them to confirm and demonstrate that they are not risking your business by using SEO techniques outside of the guidelines.

Ok, if you’re on this page it is probably an emergency and you’re keen to get to the meat of the problem. So let’s have a look at some of the reasons your site might be banned, or lost its ranking. We’re looking at the quality (sometimes technical) part of your website, rather than the look and feel. Please note this is a summary of potential issues, if you know your site fits into any of the points below then it is worth doing something about it as not doing anything will affect your rankings.

Broken Links and incorrect HTML

There’s not much more frustrating that broken links, 404 pages, error pages etc. If you consider that Google wants to provide relevant and helpful content to its users and your site and your competitors site have similar content; the next step for Google will be to check the quality of the links and code. If your competitor matches W3C and has not broken links compared to your site, then guess who gets shown first.

Dynamic Pages

You won’t get banned from Google for having dynamic pages, however it is not going to help you. An example of a dynamic page is a URL that has a ? in the title and is created because the site has queried a database; often this refers to shopping carts. A dynamic page URL by nature changes, whereas a static page does not. This means it can be indexed by the search engines, which is good.

Number of links on your page

You should not have more than 100 links on your page. That is a rule and part of the Google Webmaster Guidelines. If you have more than 100 links on your page, then you have broken their terms. Lots of sites do this, especially today when a lot of sites include links to social media and bookmarking sites. If you’ve lost a bit of ranking recently and not sure why, then this could be one of the reasons.

Make your web pages for users

There is a temptation for website owners to try and deceive the search engines, the upside for this is more traffic and more sales, so you can understand why people are tempted to do it. One method webmasters have used is cloaking, which means that the search engine is presented with one set of content and the user is presented with something completely different. This is a technique that will get you banned.

Don’t use tricks to try and outsmart Google

Google is one of the biggest companies in the world today; they are also the smartest search engine and know their onions for sure. So why anyone would want to try and outsmart them is beyond me. As already mentioned in this post, in the short term you may get away with it, however if you’re looking for a long term search marketing strategy, it will not work for you. In simple terms, anything outside of the Webmaster Guidelines is a trick, so try and keep to the rules.

Links

This is a big one. In the early days of the Internet, optimising your website was simply about throwing a website up and getting loads of links. This strategy no longer applies and falls into the “tricks” category. The areas to look into here are:

1.       The sites you’re linking out to… bad neighbourhoods don’t go near them. Don’t be associated in any way with them.

2.       Link building schemes - Run for the hills. It is about natural link growth, if you’re part of a link exchange scheme, this could be having a detrimental effect on your ranking. If you need more information about the definitions, visit Google’s Link Schemes page

3.       Reciprocal links are ok, they are not going to get you banned but it is worth considering your reciprocal link strategy.

4.       Buying and selling links is not a good strategy for increasing your search engine rankings. If you’re buying links to increase traffic, this is slightly different and can be neutralised from a SEO perspective by using the “nofollow” technique.

We recommend that you think about why you are linking to a page, is it for the benefit of your visitors/users or is it because you believe you are getting an advantage from the search engine. If it is the latter, then you’re playing the wrong game.

Hidden text and links

I have to be honest, this used to be one of my favourite techniques. It would be very easy to hide text and links on a page and the search engines never used to mind. Times change and Google very much discourage this technique, usually if you are caught you will be subject to a ban.

Make sure you do not have malware or other bad code on your site

This is a serious one and has been on the increase in recent years. The premise of this advice is simple, don’t create pages that phish for information, install Trojans or virus etc. So this is quite obvious why Google would not want to rank your site. However, sometimes this types of software can be installed on a site without the webmaster being aware of it. So this can be about security of your site. We saw an example recently where phishing pages had been uploaded to a website. The only time the customer knew about it was when their server company contacted them to say they had suspended their site.

Keyword stuffing

A lot of webmasters “keyword stuff” their pages without knowing the affect. Unfortunately, it is an issue within our industry and a result of poor advice. Too many keywords on a page is keyword stuffing, so try to create content first and foremost to be read by your users.

Duplicate content

There are two types of duplicate content, one type is content that has been taken from another website and repurposed in the same way. There are many reasons why you would do this and it happens regularly without issue as long as a credit is applied. The challenge happens when you try to rank well for that page. If you think about it logically, Google has already indexed a piece of content that is the same as yours. The original piece of content was there before yours, so why would they choose to rank you above the original source?

The other less known issue with duplicate content is when you have duplicate content on your own site. Sometimes this can be an issue when a site has not defined its www.domain or http://domain properly. Google effectively has 2 pages to look at and decide which is most important, this can impact your rankings significantly.

There are a few other reasons your site could be banned or losing rankings. The important thing to note is that whatever the issue, as long as it can be identified and fixed; then your website has every chance of recovering its Google rankings. If you would like any help and advice in this area help and advice in this area, please feel free to contact with our SEO Consultants.

Tell me… Could you describe and explain social media and online marketing to your grandma, in such a way that she could confidently use it to potentially better a business? I know I couldn’t.

I did however go to a seminar today on this very subject that did exactly that! No the room wasn’t full of ‘grandmas’, but it did break down the mysterious lore that is social media and online marketing into easily digested nuggets of knowledge.
This seminar was hosted by Generate UK at the spectacular Donnington Grove in their ‘Cloud Suite’. The ‘Cloud Suite’ is a luxurious room lined with lovely old paintings, overshadowed by a fantastic painted ceiling. There was free tea and coffee, there was glorious sunshine and there was a friendly buzz as attendees began to arrive.

We were all seated in some rather fancy chairs and we covered a variety of things from e-marketing myth busting to the fundamentals of the ‘twitterverse’. I already knew some of the basics that were covered but it was nice to see that all the fundamentals were explained so that everyone else understood the more advanced things that were to follow. Overall it was very well presented and it left no one guessing.

Over the course of the morning I mentally noted a number of clever marketing devices for later use. I learned that no more are the days where one could simply post a few thousand identical links all over the Internet to rank their page from ‘unheard of’ to ‘the industry authority’ in a matter of weeks; nor can you purchase links on leading websites to boost your own rankings… Well, not without major repercussions anyway. The emphasis nowadays is on natural link building, quality and content with a hint of tweeting; although the ‘Tweeting’ is optional.

Natural link building is the activity that promotes the recommendation of your online presence by getting other online entities to refer to your site naturally via a link; this could be as a point of interest, or perhaps in the form of a recommendation of your products or services. This is done of their own accord. This is now necessary because the search engines have ‘wizened-up’ to those manipulative chaps that have previously gone out to the marketplace to spam every existing website with their own links and false recommendations; all in a bid to rank higher on the search engine results. The current digital marketing paradigm now dictates that it is better for a company ‘footprint’ to grow gradually over time as more and more web users begin to trust the site in question and recognise it as an authority in the field.  For those of you that didn’t know, an online footprint is the measurement of your own online presence size… Yet another vital thing I learned today that I have lovingly passed on to you.

Now, can you tell me of something currently going on in your life or workplace that you’ve told other people about? I bet you can. Yet, many companies with an online presence clam-up and communicate next to nothing. If you have some experience in a particular field, enough for you to generate money from, it must be worth shouting about surely?
This is where we come on to the subject of quality and content. I learned today that some companies are beginning to embrace this as a guideline for their online activity. Not too many years ago the majority of companies had a static website that was occasionally updated with some generic company news. Nowadays however, the early adopters of new digital marketing methods and technology are beginning to share their knowledge, views and information online. This interactivity allows users to communicate with the company in a dynamic fashion allowing the aforementioned businesses to stay firmly on the industry pulse; this is due to their grass roots interaction with the end consumer, so businesses are more aware of what these consumers are thinking right now.

How is this done? In a surprisingly simple way actually, it’s all a question of sharing targeted, interesting and relevant content with the web surfers you want to attract to your business.  This does require that you embrace some of the new social media platforms that have recently come to power though i.e. Facebook, Twitter, del.icio.us etc. So although the process may seem straight forward, there is a significant learning curve involved which puts many companies off.
Let me give you an example. Imagine you and I run a fashion outlet for customised clothing and accessories. We could do our traditional market research, develop prototype designs and then hope that when these items finally go on sale they will indeed, sell. This is admittedly, a very short-sighted example but now imagine this; instead of doing our in-house research with a few participants… We opened up a website listing all of our latest designs. We could then use a platform like Twitter to ‘Tweet’ (post information about) those designs to the masses whilst linking back to the main site. This would then open the door to other ‘Twitterers’ (Twitter users) for them to offer valuable feedback on our designs and to perhaps make some valuable recommendations for change. Not only that, but by engaging with the fashion conscious community on Twitter, we could explore what other people in the field are talking about and then throw in our own ‘two cents’ on the subject. We have just outlined a way to improve our customer interaction, improve our market research and product design process as well as establish ourselves as an authority in the field of fashion by expressing our expert opinion in up-to-the-minute conversations on the subject; all the while building natural links and generating traffic to our sales website, hopefully earning some extra money. Of course such a strategy would require much more thought and planning, but such a scenario is not uncommon where clever individuals have managed to leverage this powerful technology to their own business benefit.

The basics however are centred on sharing relevant, quality content with other users in an engaging way so that these users will interact with your business. Got a new product line? Tweet it. Planning a big PR event? Set up an events page on Facebook. Little things like this as part of a wider marketing plan can really level the playing field when competing for business against larger faceless corporations. Consumers like to know there is a bit of humanity in the business workings somewhere, something they can relate to. This is what makes quality content sharing on these innovative platforms so damned powerful.

It has been a manic summer so far with companies doing all they can to promote themselves within the search engines and vying for every scrap of business that’s available. Having the opportunity to compete over price is now seen as a luxury; it’s being found in the market that is now seen as the biggest challenge.

Search engines feed on keywords; these are the phrases that users type in when they are looking for a websites, services, products or specific pieces of content. It is important that you do your research to understand what keywords or phrases are being used by your potential visitors and customers. To research these statistics there are a number of keyword tools that are available to use, some free and some usually via a subscription.

Fighting over the competitive keywords to increase the level of traffic is a priority for many business owners. From our perspective, we cannot stress enough how important it is to do your keyword research and we don’t mean do it once and think that the jobs done! Markets change, companies change, people change in the way they search, therefore so should your keywords.

Keywords should be considered as the platform for your online strategy and should be used throughout your website and all online marketing collateral.

When researching your keywords, don’t put all of your eggs into the most popular keywords. Whilst it may be true that they are important for your business, they may also be the most competitive and therefore will take a more sustained approach to build good ranking. Consider your locality, your products and your service.

Ideally you are looking for keywords that generate good levels of traffic i.e. highly searched for, however are relatively low in their competitiveness i.e. the amount of times they appear as keywords in other websites.  These Keywords are calculated using a KPI (Key Performance Indicator) out of 10 and the higher the KPI the better.

As we have already mentioned in other areas of this blog that research shows that people do use multiple keywords rather than just one. Categorising your keywords into groups often helps structure your approach, taking the generic word and creating more targeted phrases from them, for example Restaurant > Italian Restaurant > Italian Restaurant in Newbury

As a strategy, decide upon your primary keywords and choose a number of secondary keywords for each page.  Ideally you’ll have 10-20 highly focused keywords for your home page, and approximately 2-3 secondary keywords for each sub page. This may equate to approximately 20 secondary keywords in total.  Be careful not to have too many as this can dilute the importance and effectiveness of each page and therefore have a negative impact.

Have faith in your keywords and use them in all your online marketing collateral. Use them in the titles, heading, meta descriptions, Alt texts and anchor texts i.e. links within the content itself. This will help the search engines understand what your content is about and provide you with a greater opportunity to move up the search rankings when your keywords are being searched.

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