SEO Q&A Session - fire away!
Posted by: Marketing Guy Date posted: May 14th, 2008 Published in: Search Engine OptimisationI’ve got a number of posts in the works that I can’t really be bothered finishing off right now, so I thought I’d start a quickie SEO Q&A session. Feel free to post a comment with any questions you want answered. 
Scott
Comments
How can I build links which wont make me drop on google?
Nice idea Scott…
It makes me think back to the first question I ever asked you on MSN when Dave told me to add you, it still makes me cringe what i asked, remember it? :$
Anyway heres my question
Where the techniques that Big Mouth Media encouraged you to use white as white or a bit on the grey side?
Hey Kevin,
Most links have a positive effect in some way or another - to much varying degrees though. A specific link or set of links won’t cause your rankings to drop - it would be too easy for competitors to screw up your rankings that way.
However, as with most aspects of SEO if you go too far (i.e. “over optimise”) then it could have a detrimental effect - perhaps not right away but at some point. You need to think more about what search engines are looking for in a site that deserves to rank well. In terms of links (or “link profile”) this could mean links from quality sources (such as reputable news sites, trade bodies, local government), links from community type sources (forums, blogs, social media) and to a certain degree commerical properties (directory listings, press releases, related sites and so on).
Going from there in terms of link quality you have the likes of freebie directories, article distribution sites and the likes. While these can be useful in certain quantities, it can be difficult to effectively compete with an established site if these are your only incoming links.
Rule of thumb for link building - keep a steady flow of new links coming in (regular link building) from a nice cross section of sources. I personally advise people to undertake the lower quality stuff on a regular basis, but to make efforts combined with traditional marketing, PR, social marketing to try and naturally build good links. That way you are covering the bases but you are also ensuring your marketing activities have not only commerical benefit, but SEO benefit as well (as they result in links).
Hey Paul - cheeky, cheeky!
I don’t think that BMM went out their way to do anything particularly grey or black hat - most of the stuff I did I was happy sending to clients - it just wasn’t perhaps the way I would have delivered it at times. A more generic approach than I prefer.
The obvious exception was the whole hidden text on the homepage that got them banned from Google fiasco, but that was more arrogant short sightedness than an attempt to spam IMO. They knew what they were doing and it was intended to influence on page copy, but IMO it was more viewed as a neat little cosmetic effect that happened to “help” with SEO rather than an outright attempt to cheat (they already had rankings, they didn’t need to cheat). In my view, a professional SEO should have seen and accounted for the risk involved with that before it went live - that was really their main failing (well, that and how incredibly bad they handled the PR fallout afterwards, which was shocking for a big brand marketing agency).
Scott
Hi,
Like iwth anything, little and often, depending on the competitiveness of the keywords. As mentioned get some good back links for initial foundation, then look at social marketing.
Been working using SU and had some good results, nothing earth shattering but good allthesame
Hi Rob,
To be honest I think it’s about time social marketing and SEO were ripped apart and ordered to remain at least 100 metres from each other at all times!
They are no more the same thing as advertising and PR are the same thing. Yup, they can compliment each other very well but businesses really need to approach them with a different perspective.
I’ve had a lot of good traffic from SU and in turn that does convert into exposure for the site and possibly some more links somewhere down the line, but I think businesses really should look at it from the traffic and exposure perspective primarily.
The reason for this is that many businesses get it into their head that Digg, SU, et all are a prerequisite for SEO success - this isn’t the case. My opinion is that if your site lends itself well to certain social media activities then certainly take full advantage of that, but do it in a way that is separate from (but compatible with) SEO.
A unique strategy should be developed for your social media campaign - people need to get out of the mindset that simply sticking some “Digg this” buttons on each page of their site is enough or even appropriate in some cases.
Scott
We get loads of traffic because we have been careful in terms of optimising our images, most people forget about this aspect…so any tips as to what should be done.
In reply to Richard, not realy SEO related but if your getting a lot of traffic via image search, try adding a frame breaker to a few pages to see if it brings visitors in to your site more.
Test well first though, and monitor that by adding a frame breaker it doesn’t result in losing positions on image search.
1. When implementing an SEO Strategy do you wait for important onsite changes to be made and server issues (mirror sites on multiple domains, canonical issies) addressed before link building or would you happily start building links before?
2. Do you see the value in or participate in SEO competitions?
3. List in order of importance: Googleguy, Matt Cutts, Vanessa Fox, and Adam Lasnik
4. Business Forum or SEO Forum?
5a. Sex or chocolate?
5b. Does my bum look big in this?
Hi,
How useful is submitting to directories ?
Thanks
Dave
Hey good questions keep em coming!
Hi Richard,
There are really two sides to this - the technical process of actually optimising for the likes of Google Image Search and the more generic benefit of making use of different aspects of your site.
On the tech side it’s stuff that you would probably imagine - ensuring that your image file names and ALT tags are descriptive of what the image displays (and what people are likely to search for). You might want to take this to different levels depending on your site type - your business for example, doesn’t really rely on image traffic for income, but it can be good for exposure (and the occaisional natural link), so using your best judgement when naming your images is really enough to go forward with. For more image heavy business (e.g. celebrity photos) then you might want to look at more on page stuff like ensuring the copy around your image is descriptive and “on topic” - basically the same process as if you were optimising the page for the keyword. There are loads of good articles out there on image optimisation so no point rehashing it here.
In a more general way, I think you bring up a good point that many sites have more to offer than simply the products they sell or the information they publish. Small things like images, videos, applications, forums and so on all have value in their own right and it’s worthwhile for businesses to take some time to think about how they can promote and capitalise on these aspects (and perhaps not simply rely on SEO or PPC for their web marketing strategy).
I’ve recently been reading “I can make you rich” by Paul McKenna - he goes into detail about how people can identify their own personal skills and value in order to reassess how they approach money, life and business - I think this general approach can be good when looking solely at websites as well.
Hey Doobedoobe,
1. It depends. I won’t take on a link building campaign unless critical issues are sorted or are in the process of being sorted. I don’t think it’s “ethical” to sell link building before then because clients will generally think that link building is the last part of SEO they need to worry about and if there are potential problems it can come back and bite you in the ass later on. In the same respect, if their on site SEO is shoddy, there’s no point avoiding addressing that and skipping straight to link building.
However, if work is being done, I don’t see any problem with carrying out link building early on - the accumulative effect of links will still help when the pages are finally optimised or new content is added. And in some cases (if major changes are taking place), the link building can help speed up the reindexing process.
2. I started throwing up some pages for the V7N SEO competition but didn’t get round to doing link building so I didn’t get far.
I think it’s a bit of fun and not quite the drama situation people make it out to be - I thought the V7N one was genius in terms of link bait and a great example of how John Scott was able to find more value from his established community. Since then the copycat competitions are a bit lame with nothing much original to offer IMO - haven’t had the time or desire to bother with them.
3. In importance to the SEO community: Googleguy, Matt Cutts, Adam Lasnik / Vanessa Fox - simply because Googleguy predated the rest in terms of forum contributions which really helped shape the SEO industry in the early days.
More lately I’d say: Matt, Adam / Vanessa / GG - I think that would be more realistic in terms of their contributions to the community.
4. Lately, business forums - haven’t been on the SEO forums for a while. TBH, both have a load of noise and I regularly see some horredous advice being given out by people who think they know what they are doing.
5.a Sex.
5.b Yup!
Scott
Hi Dave,
It’s useful to submit to directories for various reasons and for various types of sites. For a newer site then a different approach might be better, but in general directories can help in different ways:
1. Paid directories (e.g. http://dir.yahoo.com/) - passes good PR / link juice to your site which is more of an all round benefit that can filter down to each of your pages. Less of a traffic benefit than people would think though.
2. Traffic focused directories (e.g. http://www.thebestof.co.uk) - again, passes some link weight to your site which has benefit - but also pass business and traffic which is good even if your SEO benefit is low (e.g. because you are listed in a deep category with low PR).
3. Free “reputable” directories (e.g. http://dmoz.org) - can be tougher to get listed, but again some good PR benefit (but minimal traffic benefit).
4. Niche directories - can be a much lower SEO benefit, but there’s still some bonus to being listed and generally the business and traffic benefits can be quite good.
5. Generic free directories - low SEO benefit (very low PR) and next to no traffic benefit - but you can usually dictate your anchor text which can be a major boon to your SEO efforts.
Combined with other link building techniques as appropriate you can get some great benefits from directories - I’ve got quite a few sites that rank great with just directory links - the problem though is that with any aspect of SEO there would be a risk with these sites that the directories could be wiped from Google so for business sites it’s good to get a range of different links from different sources.
Scott
Great answer, cheers Scott.
hey
Really nice tips!
will try to keep it in my mind
thanks!
With regard the SEO competitions:
I loved the early ones SERPS, mangeur de cigogne (a french one) and nigritude ultramarine and used them as a way of building up a network of like minded people.
I spent hours on them and experimented with different techniques and leaned a lot.
I ended up finishing 2nd in both rounds of the nigritude competition (first prize was a flat screen monitor, nothing for 2nd though :o( )
I dabbled with V7N but never really did a lot and instead helped out the Hulkster and the Dark SEO team.
I doubt I would bother with any more, once you have done a couple the novelty wears off.
hey i ask great questions, do i get a lollipop?
“I regularly see some horredous advice being given out by people who think they know what they are doing.”
Agree 100% the ’seo gurus’ claiming to have oodles of years experience in the industry *cough* with laughable spammy sites with zero competition in their link profiles.
No lollipops - they’re bad for SEO. Believe me, I have 32 years of SEO experience!
If you are SEOing a website for a client.. how long would you suggest they wait to see the results? first update/second update or more?
regards
James.
Hi James,
Varies a great deal - very site specific.
If you are optimising existing content then results can be achieved much quicker - so assuming there are no major problems with the site I would expect to see an improvement in results for mid-level competition phrases within 1-3 months. Although this is very dependant on the site itself and the level of competition - if the site has a very low link weight then the time to improve rankings increases.
At the 3-6 month mark I would expect newly added content to be ranking reasonably well and the older, existing content to begin to rank for more competitive phrases.
I really all depends though - very relative to the specific site / campaign.
An example - a small blog I have gets indexed every 2 weeks so changes take around 2 weeks to show up in SERPs (i.e. new pages are indexed, but not ranking). Optimised content might hit the top 50 within perhaps 2-8 weeks, slowly creeping up to the top 10 over by week 10-12 and usually hitting top 5 within the next month or so. Again, very relative to that specific market.
Rule of thumb I usually give is 6 months - that’s a good catch-all figure within which time most types will see an improvement in results to varying degrees. It’s usually sooner for less competitive markets and smaller sites, but all the same I think it’s worth managing expectations as best as possible.
I rarely see a huge jump or fall during major search engine updates - I think those tend to affect you more the closer you “fly to the sun”. There can be fluctuations but they aren’t usually too brutal.
I prefer to monitor progress of my own sites at least by key events rather than specific dates - relaunching a new blog design, the point at which it’s first fully indexed, new link bait material, etc - it’s useful to montior the impact this stuff can have on your overall traffic and rankings.
Scott
Ok, just to follow on from that - what happens if the page (site) you are optimising actually were to go backwards? do you sit tight and wait or do you undo what you have done?
James.
It depends - you really need to look at it objectively and work out whether it’s a minor SERP hiccup or because of what you have done. Sometimes simply fixing a site can cause it to drop in rankings - if the site was using techniques that carry a risk of penalty or even a risk that the techniques might be obsolete in the future (because of search engine updates) then I would always recommend that stuff is removed even if it causes temporary drop in rankings.
If businesses are investing in SEO then it almost always is a long term investment - it wouldn’t be “ethical” to let them continue to use techniques that could hurt them in the future and possibly cause a much larger disruption in rankings for a longer period of time.
It really only happens when you are taking over SEO work from another supplier so generally you might do things differently from them. Optimising new sites or sites that haven’t had SEO work won’t (in my experience) result in a drop in rankings.
I’ve only had one case where a client’s site dropped in rankings after I took over - it was a single competitive term and core to their business - a few places dropped meant quite a reduction in business. The changes we had made were minor - some title tag and other on page optimisation changes. I was so confident that the rankings would come back I waived their monthly fee and gave them monthly PPC out of my own pocket until the rankings had gone up higher than when I took over. It took a few months but we got there - now they are fairly stable at number 2 (they were 6th when I took over) and should see number 1 at some point.
The worst thing people can do is start making knee jerk changes to fluctuations in rankings - in my experience good SEO always comes out on top. Sitting tight can often be a good strategy in certain areas - or rather, forgetting about that single aspect of what you did for a while and moving on to other areas. That way you have an ongoing process of improvements to your site rather than obsessing about specific areas.
It’s important to also be familiar with what can cause changes - good or bad. I’ve had clients make changes to their site (against my advice) and a few weeks later rankings improved. Not because of that change, but because Google came along and indexed a load more content. But nonetheless, they associate the improvement with the change they made which could lead them to having the wrong view of SEO in the future.
It goes back to what I said above about monitoring changes as you make them - it’s important to understand the indexing and ranking process so you can quantify what you are doing to your site. A lot of people make minor changes then a minor update comes along and they associate the change in rankings with the changes they made to the site. While sometimes this may be the case, you need to know what really caused the changes.
IMO this is one of the most important parts of the learning process when it comes to SEO - the vast majority of mistakes made with SEO come from people who are too comfortable with their skill level - a little bit of arrogance that automatically assumes that a + b necessarily = c. The kicker with SEO is that sometimes a+b=c but for other sites that is completely wrong - experience is everything.
Scott
Here is a question for you.
Have you, or would you ever, try adding special characters in meta desrcriptions to see if it improves clicks?
Is this against google guidelines?
Haven’t tried it myself, but I think anything you can do to encourage click throughs is good (as long as it doesn’t look too tacky!). I see it quite a bit in title tags but not so much meta descriptions. I don’t see why Google would have a problem with it - you’re not doing anything to influence the site’s rankings - it’s the equivalent of saying “click here”.
Meta descriptions got a bad rep over the past few years of being pointless for SEO - while techically I suppose it is the case (they aren’t really a ranking factor anymore) there are loads of benefits to having decent descriptions. If you have some similar pages (for example low content product pages), unique meta descriptions can help avoid the pages going supplemental. Keywords in the meta description can allow you to determine the exact snippet of text search engines use for your listings. Those are a couple of good benefits from taking the time to write out a few words properly!
Scott
Can someone do a review of my site? we have dropped 8 places and i dont know why. http://www.corporate-gifts-co.com
I’ve been using a big star ★ in the meta descriptions of one of my pages and appear to be getting more clicks since adding it. I will be adding it to a few more pages soon and set up better monitoring to see if traffic increases to those pages too.
Try a search for Free Online Advertising and you will see how it stands out, it is particularly useful when in about 4th or 5th position as I think it draws the persons eye to it.
Nice touch your 2nd when I search
That does look pretty cool UKSBD, although I can see Google filtering out special characters in the future if it becomes too widespread - it could make SERPs look a little messy if loads of people go overboard with it!
It’s definitely worthwhile spenidng a little time thinking about meta descriptions and how your site appears in search results. For anyone reading not entirely familiar with SEO, Google chooses the short snippet of text (under your site’s name, before the URL) either from the meta description, a snippet of text from your page or from DMOZ listing descriptions. Meta descriptions are really the best way you have to control this so it’s important to have your targeted keywords in there - not particularly to help with rankings, but to ensure that the text says something good about your site. As UKSBD says, it can really help with click through rates.
Kevin,
I don’t really have time to go through a full review just now (others are welcome to chip in if they want to of course), but some of the common reasons a site can sharply change in rankings are:
a) Google update (1) - a change in the way Google decides to rank sites.
b) Google update (2) - Google decides to wipe other sites from the index, meaning a reduction in link weight from them, resulting in a drop in rankings.
c) Increased competition - can also be part of a Google update where they add more pages to the index.
d) Over optimisation - too many links, too many keywords and so on.
e) Under optimisation - for example, if you have stopped regularly link building.
It really depends on the site and without a thorough review it can be hard to spot the reason. There could be no Google update and no major changes to the site and no increased competition - but if your links are from certain sources then your site will naturally drop in rankings. For example, if most of your links are from forum signatures and you don’t post on your favourite forums for a while, the overall link weight you get from those links is reduced (because the old topics you participated in are pushed down to page 2, 3, 4 and have less link weight to pass on). Same applies to links from blogs - blog pages get pushed down into lower link weight categories and archive pages which result in less link weight for them to pass on to external links. Ditto press releases, article directories and so on.
That’s why links from business directories are pretty good - perhaps not in terms of individual value, but they do retain even that little value over time which gives your site a consistent boost (unless Google comes along and wipes out the directories!).
It’s that consistency that’s important - setup a Google webmaster central account if you don’t have one already and check out the link profile for your site. Are your links all coming from forums and blogs?
That’s another reason I think blogs are good for SEO. A lot of people misunderstand this concept and automatically assume that blogs = increased rankings. That isn’t the case. A blog is a mechanism to allow a site that might be a little bland and dull (e.g. an ecom) to produce and promote content that is interesting and link worthy. Don’t automatically assume that blog posts need to be “link bait” - they just need to be something that people might want to read and might want to link to. That potential for organic link growth is the benefit that it brings to your site.
On that topic I would also add that I don’t think blogs are very good for publishing optimised content - they can be useful at times, particularly for less competitive phrases and “longtail” stuff but keep in mind that optimising blog content has the same issue as links from blogs - over time the link weight of any given page is reduced as it is pushed back to page 2, 3, 4 so it might not rank as well in the long term.
Scott
Following on from Scotts post about optimising blogs.
A tip you might find useful which is rarely talked about is, learn how to use edit featues to your advantage and also adjust time of publishing settings.
I know most people say search engine friendly permalinks are a must, but not always.
Rather than just adding new posts all the time and end up with 100’s of pages try editing old posts, change the
titles, change the date of posting and simply recycle existing URL’s instead of keep adding more
Yeh that’s spot on - the whole “search engine friendly” URL stuff is crap IMO - never had any problems ranking content with default Wordpress URLs (on IIS with no rewrites). Redirecting URLs from key content can be useful as well - if you go overboard and get a page blitzed (maybe you chucked too many links at it), then scrap the URL and redirect it to the homepage and put the content on a new URL. Might take longer for it to rank again, but it will.
Changing URLs can bring great results sometimes.
During the World Cup (2006) I was doing some affiliate work and targeting football shirts, everything was going great, I was ranked top 3 for viirtually every *Country* Football Shirt and earning a nice bit of pocket money until overnight every page got dropped by google (probably over optimised and too many affiliate links).
I left everything as it was for about a week, but no improvement, I then had an idea.
the pages were stuctured italy-football-shirts.html (with a page for each country) I did a search and replace of all 32 pages, changed links and URLs to italy-football-shirts-x.html, uploaded them, left the old pages how they were and within 48hrs the new URLs were ranking where the old ones were with exactly the same content.
They got dropped again about a month later, but with the World Cup over it didn’t matter then.
I take it you didn’t redirect the old URLs to the new ones? It used to be the case that this was a cardinal sin for SEO!
Back in the old days, “fresh content” was the big thing - that’s why many SEOs recommend adding new content to pages as it would rank well for a while. This process still happens with new pages to a certain extent, but I’ve noticed that certain pages will drop entirely out of the index after ranking initially well.
If you look back at this post: Sandbox Clarification (which was posted exactly 1 year ago today funnily enough), Matt Cutts is quoted as noting that the “sandbox effect” is more a collection of effects because some types of data take longer to get processed (rather than a “new site penalty” as was thought by some at the time). I think it’s usefull for people to know how to take advantage of certain nuances of Google indexing and rankings. Temporary content can be treated in a very different way in terms of on page optimisation (internal link structure), whereas more permanent content should look at ways of overcoming / avoiding these issues.
Scott
I didn’t redrect the old URLs as I didn’t even take them offline, I just loaded up 32 new pages with exactly the same content on them. I then changed the main 10 links on the old URLs so they linked to the new ones and left all 64 pages up. It’s not something I would do for permanent content, but as I was only really targeting the build up to the world cup, the world cup, and the 2 weeks after I decided to do it.
I quite often play on the freshbot for news related content, if there is something in the news which will bring in traffic I’ll throw a brand new page up and make the most of the 24/48hrs that it ranks high.
I have a UK site that dropped 30 places recently. It’s now on the way back but I’ve noticed that there is a difference of about 45 between google.co.uk and google.com - any thoughts on why this should be?
I have seen a dop this last week by about 6 places which has had a big effect I am about to do a wide range of things like.
301
new pages
content
links
anchor texts
blog posts
Hopefully this will have an effect.
Hi Jim,
The differences between .com and .co.uk are what you would imagine - regional preferences. Which ranking is higher (.com or .co.uk)?
If the .co.uk is higher (it usually is for UK sites) it’s simply because there are less UK focused competing sites than would be included within the .com results. If the .com is higher then it could be down to your targeting - stuff like hosting in the UK, links from .co.uk sites, setting regional preferences in Google webmaster tools can all help with this.
Kevin,
I’d be wary about making too many changes to the site if you’ve just seen a major shift in rankings. My thoughts about your site would be to layout a link building plan because you aren’t doing any regular link building just now. From there you can go on to look at some on page optimisation stuff like we discussed (just minor things).
New content, blogging and so on can be helpful in the long term, but you need to think about it carefully. If you are adding new pages to a site these essentially eat into your “link weight” quota - that’s fine if the content is attracting natural links which would compensate for this (and probably help overall), but without regular link building and definite new links, the new content might hold you back. Of course if we’re only talking about a few pages then it’s not a big deal so don’t worry about it.
Also just “301″ is a bit vague. What are your plans?
I do think the best thing you can do is start a small lin building campaign and plan to keep it going regularly. The rest might be jumping the gun a little at this stage.
Scott
Scott the thing with link building is finding sites to link to! we used to build 500 per week and about 5 recipical links per week
You don’t need to link to sites for SEO!
You just need to get sites to link to you. If a large part of your link building has been reciprocal links then that could explain the drop in rankings - those may have been devalued.
500 per week is quite a lot - how were you sourcing the links? I wouldn’t recommend that many links each week - the key is to keep links coming into your site on a regular basis. Think of it this way - if you have a short term burst of links to your site, then that might tell Google that your content is popular in the short term, so you get a short term boost in rankings, but in the long term that will drop off. On the other hand, if you have a constant flow of new links to the site that might tell Google that your site is so good that people keep finding it and linking to it, so rankings will be more consistent over time.
Your link profile is important - it’s not just how links point to your site just now (and where they are from and where they point to), but also how you accumulate those links over time.
Scott
Well I was using an auto program which we dont use any more. Now I find sites from Google and ask them for a link which is Recipical.
is there anyway I can get more images indexed by Google?
More images indexed for Google Image Search? To be honest, I’m not entirely sure - it’s not an area that I have particularly much experience with. Some key points I would look at though:
1. Ensure your image folder is available to the Google Image bot (user agent “Googlebot-Image”).
2. Ensure all your images have unique and descriptive file names and ALT tags.
3. Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools and opt in for “Enhanced Image Search”.
4. Ensure your website has reasonable amounts of “link weight” - for larger sites, link weight can determine crawl depth / quota so potentially this could impact images as well (although it’s a different crawler and may work on different factors / quotas / etc).
Scott
Thanks for that. Any tips for ways I can tidy HTML code?
Ooh well that’s a more indepth question probably more appropriate for web design forums.
CSS is a good way to reduce your code and improve the load time of your pages - it enables you to format your pages centrally instead of having to apply HTML markup to specific areas of your page.
It really depends on where you are just now - if you are using a common CMS then you’ll probably find forum threads and blog posts on how to tidy up the code. Sorting out your own work can be a more time consuming affair!
Scott
Thanks Scott I have managed to get my page to 130 errors now not bad considering it was at 339
Bad news is I have just been told the site is built in frames 
SEO HORROR