By Search Engine Guide : Small Business Search Marketing
by Stoney deGeyter
Search engine rankings are always in flux. In my last post I mentioned three things that can cause your search engine rankings to change. 1) Your site changes, 2) a competitor's site changes, or 3) a search engine algorithm changes. I addressed the third one here and then in the next installment I'll discuss the second.
(How to) Deal with Changes Made to The Search Algorithms
Search engines are constantly changing. These changes are mostly compromised of small, subtle shifts in how certain on and off page "signals" are interpreted and scored, or by the addition and/or removal of other ranking factors all together. In some instances more extreme algorithm or structural changes are made which can cause more than the usual upheaval of search results.
Changes in weighting and scoring
For the most part the normal everyday algorithm adjustments are not meant to "rock the boat." The search engines are simply fine-tuning certain areas in order to enhance and improve the search results. Most sites weather these changes easily enough, but some don't.
With every change made, each site in the search engine's index is subject to be scored according to the new algorithm in place. If there is something in your site's profile that runs afoul of the new algorithm then your site can get dropped due to the offending issue, whatever that may be. Or it may drop because it's no longer being weighted (considered as valuable for that given keyword search) the same, or another site is weighted as being more valuable.
(How to) Deal With It:
You first need to figure out what is causing the change. Did the search engines change their link scoring? Did they adjust how the view content in bold or italics? Does something new factor in that didn't before? This isn't always easy and is sometimes nearly impossible to know for sure.
The next best thing is to look for things about your site you can improve. You need to get rid of anything that might have fallen into questionable territory, fix issues that you've been putting off, or maybe improve your internal link structure. If your site has no issues then you might need to focus on obtaining more quality links, or producing more valuable content that attracts new visitors.
Hiccups
Every now and then we see search engine hiccups. These hiccups create an unexplained--or unexplainable--drop in rankings that seem to have come from nowhere and have no real purpose, but only for a short period of time. In some cases I've seen sites lose rankings for a few terms and in others they lost rankings for almost all previously ranked keywords.
I've seen sites lose all their rankings for as much as four weeks only to see them all come right back to their previous positions. No changes were made to the site to warrant the drop or return, and no major search engine updates were made. Why does this happen? Who knows. They are likely caused from any of the issues mentioned above, or perhaps a ghost from the historical profile making an appearance in the current algorithm.
(How to) Deal With It:
Whatever their cause, hiccups can be extremely frustrating. But ultimately they are nothing to fret too much about, you simply have to wait them out. The key is to know the difference between a hiccup and a genuine algorithm change. So do you research and make sure there is nothing questionable on your site that may have caused a trigger. If you're confident that you're in the clear, making no changes at all to your site is often the best course of action.
The key to dealing with algorithm changes is keeping up to date with what is going on in the search engine landscape. If you don't know what's happening then you can't know what to do. Sometimes the worst thing you can do is to make changes to your site before fully understanding why you are making those changes.
If the ranking change is a hiccup any changes you make can prevent your site from coming back. If the ranking change is due to the algorithm, you may inadvertently change something that had nothing to do with the shift. This too can prevent your rankings from returning because instead of having one thing wrong, you now have two.
Ultimately, its never so cut and dried as all this sounds, which leads me back to what I said above, knowledge is key. Without that, you're really just lost in a sea of changes.
By Search Engine Guide : Small Business Search Marketing
by Stoney deGeyter
Many small businesses owners keep a more watchful eye on their search engine rankings than a Trekker keeping up with the timeline changes in the Star Trek universe. Search engine rankings can change for one out of several hundred reasons. Your site may gain or lose rankings on a daily bases due to algorithm changes, a dropped or added link, or a site is added or removed from the search engine's index. Some ranking changes can be traced to a particular event while others occur for what seems like no particular reason. In essence, rankings change because change happens.
But understanding what causes typical loss of rankings can give us a better insight into sea of search engine ranking fluctuations. This insight can help you prevent serious long-term effects caused by a sudden drop in search engine rankings. While we can never prevent all losses of search engine rankings, understanding the reasons why changes occur can, at least, help you make your presence in search results more stable.
Reasons for ranking changes can be boiled down to three basic events: 1) Your site changes, 2) a competitor's site changes, or 3) a search engine algorithm changes. Or it could be any combination of the three. Let's look at each individually.
(How to) Deal With Changes Made to Your Website
On site changes
To keep current most businesses must make frequent changes to their websites. This could be a matter of adding new products, removing old products, changing pricing, publishing a blog post, removing out-dated information, adding current information or even something as significant as a total site re-design.
While minor maintenance edits are necessary to make your site better for your visitors, if improperly executed they can have a severely negative effect on your rankings. In most cases small, routine changes will have a minimal effect whatsoever. You'll likely see minor fluctuations in your search engine rankings depending on what was changed and on which page.
But in some cases, even small changes can have a profound impact. When it comes to keyword, or other more significant site changes, you need to proceed carefully and consider the impact any of your planned changes may have. Things such as changing title tags, re-writing content, moving or deleting pages, full site re-designs, or site architecture changes can really screw with your rankings if care is not taken.
(How to) Deal With It:
Don't make drastic site changes unless its absolutely warranted. And if you do, be sure to consult with an SEO. Big site changes don't have to hurt as bad as they often do. Your SEO can help you ensure the process is as easy on your rankings as possible. When making smaller changes, be sure your changes carefully consider your rankings and optimization efforts already in place. Don't make changes you are unsure about how it will affect the engines without consulting someone who knows.
Incoming link changes
Technically, inbound link changes are changes made to other people's website, but it directly changes your site's profile so I'll include it here. Unfortunately, unlike changes made to your website, you don't have direct control over your incoming backlink structure, but that's not to say that you can't have some indirect control over them.
If you've done a good job earning natural links then drastic changes in your backlink profile are rare. More typically, however, your backlink profiles can change significantly when large numbers of paid or bartered links suddenly appear or disappear.
A sudden influx of new links can help out your rankings tremendously. However if those links are determined by the engines to be "paid," or if you lose those links because you do stop paying for them, then this can lead to significant ranking drops. Even worse such a sudden change in your link profile may flag your site for further examination and/or filtering in the search results.
(How to) Deal With It:
Don't buy links unless you're absolutely sure they are undetectable. And if you do, make sure that they will be in place for an indefinite period of time, not set to "expire." Work on building your content to provide information others want to link to naturally, and share that content in your social media circles (without being a spammer.)
Server down time
In some cases ranking drops may be due to nothing more than your website being inaccessible when the search engines try to spider your content. Generally a few single instances of inaccessibility won't have any long-term effect your rankings. However if your site goes down repeatedly while the search engines attempt to spider your pages, your rankings will undoubtedly be harmed.
A good web host provider is essential to prevent this happening. While all web servers have occasional down time, if it happens too frequently you are increasing the odds of it happening at the same time a search engine is trying to crawl your site. Some web servers are slow, this not only reduces visitor performance but also can encourage the search engines to "move on" sooner than they otherwise would.
(How to) Deal With It:
Make sure you find a reliable web host for your site. Ensure that the bandwidth and speed they provide is acceptable and that they not only guarantee up-time, but they back that with proof, not just refunds.
Only you have control of your website. You can oversee all changes being either informed or uninformed over what the affects of those changes will be. Being informed can help you make better decisions in what changes to make, how to get more links or where to host your site. No one else can make these decisions, but once made the overall effect is out of your hands. But thankfully, you can always go back and change things if you don't like the result. That's something you can't do when a competitor's site changes, which I'll discuss in part II.
By Search Engine Guide : Small Business Search Marketing
by Stoney deGeyter
If you run a blog you probably already know all about RSS feeds. If you read a blog, you probably do too. If you don't know what an RSS feed is then I'll give you a few minutes to go read Wikipedia's RSS page. Go ahead, just come back here when you're done.
OK, everybody caught up? Good.
So now you're wondering what this has to do with you. Perhaps you "just" sell products. Or maybe you "just" have an information site. Or you "just" do some other thing that doesn't require an RSS feed. In your line of work you don't really get into the whole blogging, news headlines, audio, or video thing, so this post isn't for you, right?
Not so fast. While every site may not need an RSS feed, you may still benefit by having one or more RSS feeds available for your audience.
To Feed or Not to Feed
I frequent a handful of sites on a regular basis that would significantly improve user performance if they added RSS feeds. Let me give you a few examples:
I have a Netflix account and I am often adding new movies to my rental queue. Every week I see what's new in the theater and then search Netflix so I can get it in the queue, often times six months before the movie is released on DVD or blu-ray. Netflix does a great job of adding these new movies into their database, but a terrible job of letting people know about them. As near as I can tell, they don't provide any kind of list of new theatrical releases.
So I visit Fandango on a weekly basis. Fandango has some nice RSS options. You can get a feed for movies hitting the theater of your choice each week, or a feed for all new theatrical releases. For a long time I was going back to Fandango weekly, but with RSS the specific information I want is provided to me in my feed reader.
Fandango does a great job of integrating their feed with their site. Each feed item allows you to view the movie poster artwork and click a link that takes you to the movie details page. From there I can get movie details, local show times, fan reviews, play movie trailers, or buy tickets. Fandago could improve their RSS performance if they provided a better description of the movie in the feed, but this is a decent start.
Wikipedia is another site that I try to keep track of. Not the whole site, just a few pages that I like to know when they have changed. Unfortunately Wikipedia only offers an RSS for all pages that have changed. With all the pages that change on a daily basis it is cumbersome to sort through, especially when I am only interested in a small handful of topics. Wikipedia could create an RSS feed for every page so frequent visitors can be notified when their topic of choice has been changed, without going back to the site all the time.
DrudgeReport has no RSS feed, which is terrible for a news site. If you visit the mobile version of Drudge you'll get the closest thing to an RSS feed, though you can't import that into your feed reader. But seriously, a news site without an RSS feed? Guess he really wants to rack up those impressions for bragging rights.
Bookins has RSS feeds, but I've never been able to get them to work, at least not the one's I want. I have a number of "saved searches" that I'll go back through on a daily basis to see if anything becomes available, but I have to make the regular effort to do that. They have an RSS feed for this but it's never worked for me. It would also be handy to have an RSS feed for new additions allowing members to see new books and movies that are added each day. This type of feed would likely create many more trades.
I get regular emails from LiveNation which tell me about concerts coming up in the area which is nice, but I could do without the extra junk mail. I'd like to get their updates (no-fee ticket days, etc.) and concert information via an RSS feed. They do provide a feed for upcoming concerts to each venue, but I find this overly cumbersome. What would be nice if they allowed you to customize your RSS feed, adding all the venues you are interested into one feed. As an alternate, they could provide a feed for a geographical area.
I should point out that TicketMaster fared far worse when it comes to RSS feeds and concert updates by area.
Now on to music. I visit two music sites regularly, YourMusic.com and Musichristian.com. Both of these sites would benefit from a new release RSS feed. Even better, if you're interested in specific bands it would be great to have individual RSS feeds so you know when new albums are available by those bands specifically. Amazon provides this with book authors, sort of. You can tag items and get the RSS feed for a tag. It's not perfect but it works.
(RSS) Feed Your Faithful Visitors
With RSS feeds you provide people a way to get specific information the want on their time. You are pushing them content that they care about without having to wait for them to come back to you to see what's new. Most people won't visit your site on a weekly basis to see if you have any new products. But they will be willing to subscribe to a feed that let's them know when new products are added.
RSS feeds work wonders for all kinds of sites. While not every site needs an RSS feed, take a look at what you do to see if you have any information that your audience would benefit by receiving frequent updates. Feeds are easy to create and they provide new options for your visitors. Giving visitors more of what they want is a good thing. Because if you don't, your competitors will
An Alternative When There is No RSS Feed
If you're reading this and you have the same issue as I do, finding sites that don't provide RSS feeds, then I have an alternative for you. I created a program called CodeMonitor that we use for monitoring changes to our client's and client's competitor's websites. But CodeMonitor also does a decent job of notifying you when certain pages of your favorite sites have changed. I use this to monitor Wikipedia pages, Google labs, industry research sites, and all the other sites and pages I mentioned above that don't have an RSS feed.
Just beware, it's a buggy program. The "notify of text only changes" actually ignores changes in text took, so I don't recommend selecting that option. In some cases, pages change on a daily basis for no reason, which gets you looking only to find nothing has change. and that can be problematic as well. CodeMonitor is not perfect, but it's a decent enough alternative when no RSS feed is available.
By Search Engine Guide : Small Business Search Marketing
by David Carberry
Where to Next? A brief summary from SES, the panel topic was the future of search. Anne Kennedy from Beyond Ink moderated the session with a group of prognosticators on what they believe we will see on the horizon for search marketing. Anne's primary question to the panel is "What is on the search radar for 2010 and beyond?"
Carla Borsoi- from Ask.com starts off the conversation and believes that the future of search is based on semantic and variance. "Engines will be able to tell what the user intent is, when they ask the question and type in the keyword and query. The engines will determine every possible way that someone will find that proper query. It goes well beyond the ten blue links, beyond contextual and will involve location. For example if someone asks, what is the best school for my kids? Question and Answer technology will determine the best answer."
Stephan Spencer - Founder Netconcepts states, "You have to look at the Law of Accelerating Terms, we think in a linear fashion and it doesn't appear on the radar. Look at the last five years in tech improvements and how rapidly we have forged. The amount of innovation will not be the same. At the rate of change the next 100 years will actually be in 20."
"LUI - or linguistic user interface (which has been a topic since the early 2000's) is taking search from a GUI to a LUI environment. The computer will determine your next action and you won't need to plug into the keyboard. We will stop texting with our thumbs because we can speak into it."
Pavan Lee, a Research Manager from Microsoft adds, "Voice recognition in certain markets is available. The focus is the consumer wants and needs across multiple devises of mobile. Making a determination at point of purchase will grow, and help the advertisers understand the multi screen digital strategy in years to come."
"Research has shown, by adding Mobile to Mobile display it enhances the overall display and there is a 4x lift on the brand and ad recall adding Mobile Display and Search gives it a 6.5x lift on aided recall."
Heather Dougherty, Research Director at Hitwise claims, "Eighteen percent of search Queries had 5 or more words and those queries are becoming more complex. Relevancy has become great importance. It's good for consumers and bad for the business because as the variables grow there can be more personalization in ecommerce. She goes on to mention that a company like Amazon will be able to offer more granularity on the recommendations it offers and many people don't want to share information. Dougherty states, "They still want to be anonymous and it can be dangerous."
Chris Boggs - The SEO Director at Rosetta points out. "What is the action point or the hidden keywords that users are searching for with the semantic intent? Include hidden keywords and the engines became smarter and hopefully with the smarter snippet they will catch up with the human logic. If you have the gear and the semantic connection, the content and the crawlers grab the data, they will serve the proper result."
By Search Engine Guide : Small Business Search Marketing
by Sage Lewis
I sat down with Tom Demers to talk about WordStream. WordStream looks to organize and update your key phrases in a new way. This is a very affordable tool that might help you continue to expand your key phrase universe.
By Search Engine Guide : Small Business Search Marketing
by Mack Collier
One of the great things about social media is how quickly an idea can
spread via truly 'social' tools and networks. But even though it's
becoming easier every day to share social media content, you still need
to create content that people WANT to share.
Here's a great example I saw this morning. This post on The Bespoke Wedding Company's blog lists '10 Things We Do on a Wedding Day'. Now I'm sure the company thought this post would be a great way to give readers a 'behind the scenes' look at what they do during a typical wedding, which at the same time would act as a promotional tool for their company.
But if you are reading this blog, do you really care what this company does during YOUR wedding day? Or do you want to know HOW they will give YOU the perfect wedding?
What if this post's focus was changed, and instead the post was 'Ten Steps to Creating the Storybook Wedding You've Always Dreamed Of'? THAT makes the post MUCH more valuable to anyone that's in the market for a wedding planner. Which, indirectly, also makes the post much more valuable for The Bespoke Wedding Company, because it means that more people will share the post, and link to it via social media sites and tools. It also helps establish the company's expertise, as being one that CAN create the perfect storybook wedding for its clients!
So if your company wants to make its social media content more shareable, first position it from your customer's point of view. What's the BIG IDEA that's important to the people you are trying to reach? Do your blog readers care about what YOU do during the typical wedding, or do they want to know how YOU will create the PERFECT wedding for THEM?
Focus on creating valuable content, and it will be shared more often!
By Search Engine Guide : Small Business Search Marketing
by Stoney deGeyter
A little over a year ago I wrote an article about how sometimes you have to break a website in order to fix it. This isn't always the case in SEO but there are those situations where a site is so bad that you pretty much need to burn it to the ground before you can build it right.
The other day I reviewed a site that confirmed this premise. It wasn't a bad looking site on the surface but once you looked into the architecture a bit you found problems compiling on top of problems. Nothing short of demolishing the entire site and building it from the ground up would allow it to gain any traction in the search engines.
Navigation that doesn't lose the visitor
The first thing we noticed was that the navigation was inexplicably created using unspiderable JavaScript. JavaScript navigation has it's place, but in this case, it served no real purpose. All the navigation links could easily be changed using standard HTML without changing anything about how the navigation works or appears.
In this case the JavaScript navigation was preventing the search engines from spidering beyond the home page. Changing the navigation into HTML would allow the rest of the site content to get spidered and indexed which is crucial for site findability.
As we dug further into the navigation we found it even more confusing than upon first glance. We'd navigate to a page and additional navigation links would show up on the right. Click into one of those and another set of navigation links appeared in place of the previous. This structure left no real way to navigate back to choose a different path except to use the browsers "back" button.
The site could use not only some good breadcrumb navigation, but also a more consistent navigational link structure. Without having FTP access to the site it was impossible to tell how many pages the site has (I tried to run Xenu and it couldn't get past the home page,) so there was no real way to tell how best to re-structure the navigation. As it stood, the navigation confuses the visitor, causing them to get lost and providing no real way back to deep pages without starting the navigation process over or keep hitting that "back" button.
Keep the code lean and clean
As we looking into the code of each of the pages the most obvious coding issues we found were with title tags and description meta tags. These would all need to be re-written and keyword focused.
But as we dug further we found that the site coding was convoluted and bloated. Fixing the navigation could have been fairly easy, however when looking at the code I realized that the best course of action is to gut the site and start over. Cleaning the code up, would allow the pages to download faster, eliminate potential spider-stopping errors and increase overall performance of the site for the visitors.
Don't use images for headings
Throughout the site the names of the company's products and services were placed in images instead of text, rendering them unreadable to the search engines. In most cases no special fonts were used for styling the heading so there wasn't real reason to use images instead of text. Clearing out all the product/service heading images and replacing them with text would be simply enough. Add a line or two of CSS and you can have great looking headings that are image-free.
Take the time to build a solid information architecture
Our first plan of action for this site would be to rebuild it's IA. Getting FTP access is essential so we can figure out how many pages the site has, and how the site is currently organized. (I use the term 'organized' loosely.)
Just from what we could see I knew the organization of the site was a mess. Pages need to be clearly grouped and separated into folders. We noticed the category pages provided information on multiple product and service, but clicking deeper into the actual product page provides less information than was available than on the category page! And much of what was there was duplicated. That's backwards from how the pages and content should be laid out and organized.
Plan out your wire framing
Once the architecture is mapped out the next step would be to wire frame the sites. The most important issue here would be to create a consistent navigation, but also to make the site more visitor friendly overall. There are many usability issues with the site that we would address with any new wire framing to ensure content is easy to find and the visitor won't get lost in the process.
Optimization isn't first, it's Last
Until the above is done, any optimization being implemented on the site would be a waste of marketing dollars. SEO, without proper architecture is really nothing more than a stop-gap measure. This is a common frustration for both SEO and site owner alike. The site owner spends thousands of dollars on a new design and then the SEO can't do anything with it. I get the frustration of the business owner that basically has to pay to have the site re-developed yet again.
We've run across this issue several times over the years and it boggles my mind how often the site owners don't want to do what is necessary, but instead want to forage ahead with the SEO. It's like putting frosting on a dung pile. You may be able to "SEO" the site, but if the underlying structure isn't sound, you're just wasting good money on a pile of crap.
But for those who understand the need and desire to perform in the engines, as frustrating as it might be to have to re-build the site, that becomes only best course of action, saving time and money in the long run. With the foundation in place, the SEO has the opportunity to be an effective marketing tool.
By Search Engine Guide : Small Business Search Marketing
by Eric Brown
So, Your Marketing Budget is shrinking with the contractions of the economic conditions, are you sitting back or are you rising to the occasion with something Remarkable, something worth talking about, and something that may Enhance Your Customers Experience? There are lots of ways to break away, take a look at how JetBlue Airways "Repackaged" by offering an "all-you-can-jet" pass for $599 in which passengers can book an unlimited number of flights within a one-month span. Pretty brilliant marketing wouldn't you say? As Reported by CNNMoney.com -- JetBlue Airways will offer an "all-you-can-jet" pass for $599 in which passengers can book an unlimited number of flights within a one-month span, the airline said Wednesday. Pass holders can fly to any of JetBlue's (JBLU) 56 destinations between Sept. 8 and Oct. 8, with no seat limitations or blackout dates, the company said in a release. Airline equities analyst Bob McAdoo, of Avondale Partners, said he "has never seen a promotion like this before."
So What Are You Doing Look, there is a lot of opportunity just like what JetBlue did, but sometimes we are so darned stuck in fear mode we are not able to see or even think about an opportunity, Set some time aside each day or week to "Think Outside the Lines, what can you do to Reinvent The Space?
From my old days at Village Green Companies
I built somewhere between thirty five and forty clubhouses for them. In
the early days a Clubhouse, Pool and all the Jazz went for a little
under a half a million, (I am showing my age here LOL). The last few I
did were up to a few million, without the pool. While they seemed
pretty cool at the time, they never really got used much once residents
are moved in. And, what to do with that space as they age. Co Work Space. What
if you could transition part or all of your tied old clubhouse into a
hip and cool Co Work Space that generates revenue, and potential
prospects for your apartments. This is taking the old idea of a
business center to an entirely different level.
Coworking is an emerging trend for a new pattern for working Typically
work-at-home professionals or independent contractors or people who
travel frequently end up working in relative isolation. Coworking is
the social gathering of a group of people, who are still working
independently, but who share values and who are interested in the
synergy that can happen from working with talented people in the same
space.
At Urbane Apartments
we are getting ready to launch our first Co Work Space in Birmingham
MI. We are building out the space now. I have no idea how to operate a
Co Work Space, but have been interested in it for awhile.
Here are two examples of Reinventing, One with Airplanes, the other with Apartments. Both can be looked at as commodity, However, when you create something Remarkable, You Break From the Pack of Commodity, where the Grass is Greener.
You too can do the same things with your Small Business, It only takes an idea, let us know what you are doing, we would love to hear from you!
By Search Engine Guide : Small Business Search Marketing
by Sage Lewis
Digg is rolling out a beta program of a new ad platform. The ads will appear along with submitted content, except they will clearly be marked as sponsored advertising. The more an ad is voted up, the lower cost-per-click (CPC) the ad will enjoy. The more the ad is buried, the higher CPC.
If you run a blog you probably already know all about RSS feeds. If you read a blog, you probably do too. If you don't know what an RSS feed is then I'll give you a few minutes to go read Wikipedia's 