How to secure your rankings after Google's latest update

Google's Panda update caused a ranking drop for many websites. Google has a very long official discussion thread about this topic. The discussion reveals things that you can do to make sure that your website gets its rankings back.

The update is not just about content farms

Google's new algorithm targets low quality websites. It seems that Google defines a low quality website like this:

·         The website does not have enough content to be useful (shallow content).

·         The website has poorly written content.

·         The content of the website has been copied from other sites.

·         The content of the website is not useful.

With Google's latest update, it is not enough to have unique content on a website. It also doesn't help if there are many unique words on your web pages. The content has to be useful to your website visitors.

Even high quality pages can be affected

The low quality content on part of a website can impact the rankings of the entire website:

"It's important for webmasters to know that low quality content on part of a site can impact a site's ranking as a whole.

For this reason, if you believe you've been impacted by this change you should evaluate all the content on your site and do your best to improve the overall quality of the pages on your domain.

Removing low quality pages or moving them to a different domain could help your rankings for the higher quality content."

Things that you can do to make sure that Google does not penalize your site

There are several things that you can do to make sure that Google does not penalize your site:

·         Improve the poor quality pages on your website. Ask yourself: is the page useful to my website visitors? If not, improve the content of the page to make it more useful.

·         It is very likely that the overall user experience is important. Check the usability and the design of your web pages. Your web pages should be easy to navigate and they should have a professional design.

·         Check the ads/content ratio on your web pages. If a web page mainly consists of ads then it is likely that Google considers it low quality.

·         Don't try to cheat Google with shady search engine optimization methods. Focus on optimization methods that are beneficial to webmasters, website visitors and Google.

 Search engine optimization is not about getting high rankings for every possible keyword. It is about getting high rankings for the right keywords and about meeting the expectations of the website visitors.

If you have high rankings for the right keywords, your website will deliver many new customers to your business. If you give Google what they want, your website will get high rankings and more sales.

Increase Site Visitors

Tips to Increase Site Visitors 

Here are 26 sure-fire ways to increase web traffic and site visitors to your website.

1. Optimize your site (SEO).
   Win on the search engines when people search for keyword phrases related to your products or services.
   
   
2. Get your site listed in directories.
   Submit your site to all the major web directories. This will generate traffic directly from the directories themselves and will also help to improve your link popularity. That helps you win on Google!
   
   
3. Get listed in search engines.
   Submit your site to all the major search engines.
   
   
4. Get links to your site.
   Get people with complimentary sites to link to yours. You offer rental kayaks on the beach. Ask the local restaurant owners to link to you, and offer to link to them. Ask the local tour guides, the real estate agents, the night clubs, and everyone else. Links lead to clicks onto your website and help to improve your search engine rankings.
   
   
5. Buy links to your site.
   Buy text links on other websites. That means more spiders stopping by, more people clicking through, and better search engine rankings.
   
   
6. Buy banner ads.
   Buy banner ads on other websites. It helps to build brand recognition.
   
   
7. Participate in a banner exchange program.
   It won't cost you anything, and will lead to a few extra visitors. Plus, you're spreading your brand all over the place.
   
   
8. Participate in a WebRing.
   Connect your site with other sites in your niche.
   
   
9. Pay for clicks to your site.
   Pay for clicks or inclusion on the search engines so that people will see your site in the sponsored links section of the search results when they search for keyword phrases related to your products or services.
   
   
10. Set up an affiliate marketing program.
    With affiliate marketing, you can either pay per click, pay per lead generated, pay per sale, or pay per customer acquired.
    
    
11. Use smart public relations (PR).
    Get news coverage of your business and your site. Approach online and traditional media. This will often lead to others placing links pointing to your website, which leads to more clicks and also to improved search engine rankings.
    
    
12. Use E-mail marketing.
    Ugly, but effective for the cost. Blast out your special offers, but be nice about it.
    
    
13. Use off-line marketing.
    Promote your site. Put your URL on all your license plates. Paint it on your car. Buy newspaper and yellow pages ads with your URL. Put up flyers and stickers. Sponsor a little league team. Do anything and everything to spread the word about your website around your city.
    
    
14. Run regular promotions.
    Stage regular giveaways and spread the word about it.
    
    
15. Get published.
    Write articles for publication on other websites. The author profile will link to your site. The article will show that you're an expert.
    
    
16. Publish yourself.
    Write articles for your own site regularly. This will help you to win on the search engines and gives your visitors a reason to come back over and over.
    
    
17. Ask for reviews.
    Ask for reviews of your self-published articles on other webmasters' websites. Ask for reviews of your website, your products, your software, your services. These will usually include links to your articles.
    
    
18. Write briefs.
    Write daily or weekly news briefs focusing in on your industry or specialty area. This keeps your site "fresh" in the eyes of the major search engines and helps you to spread a wide net when fishing for top search engine positions.
    
    
19. Create a newsletter.
    Ask your visitors to sign up for your newsletter, and encourage them to send it along to people they know. Send a newsletter regularly with teasers or lead-ins to your in-depth new articles or with special offers and the latest products.
    
    
20. Post in chat rooms.
    Become active in bulletin boards and chat rooms focusing on your industry. Leave inciteful comments, and people will click on your profile, then visit your site.
    
    
21. Give away free stuff.
    Offer something people want at your site. Give them a reason to come back and get more. Offer free downloads and update them regularly. Offer coupons or discounts. Content content content.
    
    
22. Give awards for excellent sites in your niche.
    This builds more links back to your site and establishes you as a credible reviewer, an expert in your space.
    
    
23. Run a contest and promote it.
    Photo contests, essay contests, goofy contests, random drawings, anything. Example: Messiest Garage in America contest on OfftheFloor.com.
    
    
24. Join your local business organizations.
    Chambers of Commerce and other organizations will often add your site to their member directory. That's an added advantage over the obvious business-building and networking opportunities.
    
    
25. Create an RSS feed.
    Give people another way to interact with your content.
    
    
26. Be accessible.
    Build your site so that it is accessible to all browsers and to PocketPC and Palm Pilot users. Don't forget, people with disabilities buy things too. Make your site Section 508 complaint. Your competition probably hasn't.

 

What Is Link Building?

What Is Link Building?

Link Building is the process of creating inbound links to ones own website. This can be done by reciprocal links, being listed in e-zines, newsletters, directories, search engines, etc. Link building is one of the best ways to make your site popular. There are few types of linking one of which is reciprocal links.

Reciprocal links or link exchanges is the process where two webmasters agree to show the other's link on their website. After link building when the number of sites which link to a particular site is known as link popularity which helps in the search engine ranking of a website.

There are many advantages of link building.

1. Link building helps in getting quality traffic from relevant sites which increases sales.
2. Also when there will be high quality incoming links the site will also be seen as a valuable resource.
3. Link building helps in creating awareness, visibility and credibility of your site.
4. The site also obtains wider search engine exposure.
5. It also helps the website get indexed by search engines.

Today links have become important for all websites and they are worth the money. In fact, there are several companies dedicated to selling links (as opposed to companies that you can pay to do link building for you).

How Do Directories Help?

Web directories are collections of web pages with similar subjects and similar content. These directories help in many ways as they are extremely popular with Internet users as they are considered a source of valuable information. Listings in directories improve your chances of page ranking as well. If your site is listed in a directory, the search engines are more likely to find it and add it in their listings for free. Also submitting a site on directories helps in getting one way links which are that we have not linked the other person’s site but they have linked us.

There are three kinds of traffic that you can get from the directories where you are listed. The first is click-through traffic, meaning that anyone who ends up on the directory page will be able to see your web site and information, and there is a good chance that they will visit.

The second is indexing your site. Directories will begin to index the pages of your web site once they find the links to it. After that they can come back again and again, bringing you traffic as they do.

The last way that the directories will increase your traffic is increasing your ranking on the search engines themselves as they find the volume of links and references to your web site.

Overall link building is one of the most important steps in building a site, Getting quality links improves your PR and espouser to search engines. Also the possibility of gaining traffic to your site. Many people say link building is dieing out but the facts are simple, You build a site and build links and traffic will come. Also link building also increase your Page Rank thus getting more traffic via Google.

Are you crawlable?

Creating great content and making your site accessible to web users and search engine spiders goes hand in hand. In order to get as much of your content indexed and linked to as possible, it needs to be highly visible, easily navigated and clearly structured.

There are a number of common ‘build’ obstacles that can affect how easily your site can be crawled. Fixing these hitches is a fundamental part of on-page optimization and can make a real difference to the volume of traffic you receive. Here are a few bug bears:

Images with no alt text: Search engines cannot read images. Your page may look beautiful thanks to the glorious image you’ve included but it will be completely invisible to the search engine’s spiders. Likewise if you have submission forms, diagrams or text box images, none of the important content you’ve created will get its due credit from the likes of Google etc. This is easily remedied with either an alt tag providing a description of the image that the human users can see, or by ensuring your text is not embedded in an image file, but as HTML text.

Flash heavy and framed sites: As with images, spiders don’t deal very well with Flash or Java. While Flash can enhance a user’s experience of a site, as long as it doesn’t slow down the loading time, it hides important content from the spiders. Highly creative sites commonly have their homepage in Flash, which looks great but is detrimental to the site given that most inbound links will point there, yet the spiders can’t see it. Finding ways to secure a balance or at least ensure there is a text option available is crucial to a successful ranking. Similarly, a framed site can cause spidering problems as frames tend to fragment your site. Content from pages within the overall framework can be hidden as the spiders might only read one of the frames on a page. It is best to avoid building your site in frames if possible.

General functionality: Being too clever, including whizzy graphics and such like can sometimes slow down your site. The user experience has to be as smooth and as uninterrupted as possible so avoid over-complicated functions, ensure file sizes are low for downloads etc and invest in some high quality server hosting. Checking your site works in different browsers is prudent and it also pays to check regularly for broken links in order to limit user frustrations and also ensure that all content can be accessed by the spiders at all times. Having a site map helps both user and spider as, if your site’s not vast, it means that most of the content can be accessed in two clicks.

Duplicate content: Search engine spiders like unique content. If they find duplicated versions of the same content, they will take one page as ‘canonical’ and display that single page as the result. This is particularly damaging to your ranking in the search engine results as the strength you have built up through the links to a particular page will be diluted by the additional copies. Commonly this can occur on a site’s homepage when multiple versions of the URL are used e.g. the inclusion and exclusion of the ‘www.’. As most external links tend to point to the homepage, it is important to protect its strength which can be done simply by using a 301 redirect. This ensures you dictate the canonical page to the search engine spiders by pointing all duplicate pages to the primary page.

Design and navigation: The design and navigation of your site can guide a user seamlessly through your content on a path you have pre-ordained. This is the same for the search bots. By creating a clear and logical network of internal links, obvious navigation systems, breadcrumbs, well written anchor text so it is clear what will be returned on the click of a link, and so forth, you not only create a smooth user experience but lead the bots deeper into your site. Search engines look for relevancy so designing your navigation system to act as a funnel; taking them from broader to narrower subject matter within an overall theme, will help them rate your relevancy and suggest there is depth and quality to your site.

These are just a few of the most common adjustments that can help improve your site’s crawlability. Speaking very generically, it stands to reason that the better the experience for the web user, the better it will be for the search engines. The key is to make sure a literal, textual translation is provided at all times for the internet’s creepy crawlies.