Online Business Development Advice That Really Works » SEO Advice

Google Page Rank Update in June of 2010 Leave Some Site in the Dumps

Chris Rizzo — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 14:52:57 +0000

Many site owners have been reporting a huge drop in reported Google PageRank recently. Google updates it’s PageRank report only a few times a year and it’s well known in SEO circles that PageRank is not a good indication of your sites SEO power, or success at ranking. Besides, Google is believed to misreport your PageRank just as it intentionally misreports your site’s backlinks for security reasons. Instead you need to watch your rankings and the traffic coming from Google to detect SEO improvements and growth.

Here’s Google’s official answer to PageRank related problems:

"Don’t worry. In fact, don’t bother thinking about it. We only update the PageRank displayed in Google Toolbar a few times a year; this is our respectful hint for you to worry less about PageRank, which is just one of over 200 signals that can affect how your site is crawled, indexed and ranked.

PageRank is an easy metric to focus on, but just because it’s easy doesn’t mean it’s useful for you as a site owner."

If you worry too much about PageRank, please don’t. Even Google admits it’s a non factor.

Best WordPress Plugins for SEO in 2010

Chris Rizzo — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 20:23:13 +0000

It used to be that there were just two plugins everyone used for SEO in WordPress: All in One SEO, and the Ultimate Tag Warrior. Times have changed and these two are no longer at the of the heap in my book. I like having as few plugins as possible and so I regularly search for the best solution. Here’s my three favorite SEO plugins for 2010, and these do not overlap in functionality.

Greg’s High Performance SEO
Configure over 100 separate on-page SEO characteristics. Load just 600 lines of code per page view. No junk: just high performance SEO at its best.
http://counsellingresource.com/features/2009/07/23/high-performance-seo/

Keyword Statistics
The Keyword-Statistics-Plugin checks the content of a post or a page for keyword-density (single words and optionally 2- and 3-word phrases; for each the 1-10 most commonly used can be displayed). It can update its informations automatically while the author is writing his content in a variable interval (every 1-10 seconds) or manually by clicking on a button. The script comes with english and german stopwords, which optionally can be filtered out before calculating the keyword-densities. Moreover the commonest keywords are extracted in a list as a meta-keyword suggestion. Based on this list a description can be created and automatically set.
http://www.keyword-statistics.net/wordpress-plugin.html

Simple Tags
Extended Tagging for WordPress 2.8 and 2.9 ! Suggested Tags, Mass edit tags, Autocompletion, Tag Cloud Widgets, Related Posts, Related Tags, etc! No nonsense and get’s the job done.
http://redmine.beapi.fr/projects/show/simple-tags

Does SEO Really Work, or is it Smoke and Mirrors?

Chris Rizzo — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 18:48:23 +0000

To those of us like myself who have been doing search engine optimization (SEO) for around a decade, and for anyone with even a little SEO seasoning this may seem like a very odd question! Well the truth is many people are still asking it—many people who aren’t familiar with the online world are naturally skeptical about whether it works or not, and haven’t experienced the results businesses can achieve with SEO—and so it’s a perfectly valid question.

Is this an "old skool SEO technique"?… Nah, SEO has always been much more earthly than this.

Here’s how I like to answer it:

Yes, SEO does work. Here’s why.

Google and any search engine is looking for the best site to rank for your particular target keyword phrase. When you understand how Google chooses the best site you can then manipulate your site to take advantage of that. You accomplish this by doing two things:

You make changes to your site to help clarify what your site and pages are about, and
you make changes to other sites. With other sites, you’re creating links that link to your site—because every link to your site is a vote for your site.

When you’ve got both clarity and votes, and do so without trying to trick or cheat the search engines, then you’ve got effective SEO.

Does Making Changes to Creative Elements of a Site Hurt SEO?

Chris Rizzo — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 18:14:05 +0000

I recently had this very good question from one of my marketing consultant clients about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and thought others would find the answer valuable:

"Say you have a site and it ranks very high in natural search. If you revise the site creatively, but keep the content, but it’s reorganized, will you maintain your ranking? In other words, what does changing your site creatively do to your ranking?"

The bottom line is once you’re doing SEO and you’ve earned some search engine rankings then any further changes to the site must be considered from the SEO standpoint. However, some things are pretty safe and continuing to develop and grow the site is never a bad thing–you must continue to develop your site.

What is generally pretty safe to do without causing SEO problems is:

adding or modifying images/graphics,
adding new copy,
adding new pages

Don’t sweat this stuff above.

What can cause SEO problems is:

removing copy,
revising copy completely,
removing pages,
changing page file names,
changing the site architecture (if your site has a single tier directory architecture then no big deal here)
duplicating existing content

Anything that could cause a search engine to either lose track of an existing page, or assess a page as being less strongly centered around a keyword phrase is potentially bad for seo. Removing and changing content can certainly cause this problem and should be done carefully.

A Simple SEO Road Map for New Site Launches and Local Businesses

Chris Rizzo — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 05:52:44 +0000

If your looking to get started with SEO but don’t know where to start, here’s a road map I’ve found works well for local businesses. The nice thing about this road map is that it starts simple and as you progress in your SEO efforts it expands to more complicated projects.In reality this SEO road map also veers into social media marketing as you’ll see.

The Simple SEO Road Map

Deliverin’ the SEO goods! Consider doing at least the first 3 steps in this SEO road map for optimal results on a small budget.

Always start with keyword phrase research and on-page optimization of your home page. What this means is find the one to 3 keyword phrases which are most searched for in your niche and that incorporate the name of the nearest largest city or metro area. Then optimize your site with this keyword putting special emphasis on your homepage.
Next carry out a thorough link building campaign generating links to your site from blogs, articles, online social bookmarking sites, website directories, and even other local business websites. This will generate hundreds and sometimes thousands of links into your site. Make sure the links to your site contain your target keyword phrase. Remember, every link to your home page is considered by search engines a vote for your site.
Get your site listed in the major online local directories, and yellow pages, such as Google Local, and Yelp.com. This will help your site appear in geographical search results, generate quality links to your site, and traffic.
If your product or service has a medium to large profit margin or a long and profitable lifetime value then consider pay-per-click advertising, particularly Google Adwords. You’ll want to setup a campaign and have a minimum budget of $1000 a month. The goal with PPC should be to spend some and make much more. If you’re spending and not recouping the costs then your PPC campaign needs optimization, your profit margins are too small, or it may simply be that PPC isn’t right for you. When it works however, boy does it work well!
After PPC consider a professional social media marketing campaign. This can be as simple as blogging and social bookmarking, to community building and viral video product. Some of this you can do yourself, but if you want a full blown campaign be ready to get some help. You can easily spend 10 hours a week just working your social media campaign. Once it’s rolling though it can bring new and residual business for years to come.
Eh? Let me know below if you have an idea of where you’d take it from here, or if you feel there’s a strategy that fits into this list that has worked great for your business.

It’s important to note that throughout all these campaigns you should be measuring and monitoring your results. Be sure to track your search engine optimization effort by reviewing your target keyword rankings monthly, and reviewing the amount and source of incoming traffic to your site from search engines and social media outlets, this will tell you how well your efforts are working and what if any adjustments may need to be made.

SEO isn’t a one shot deal, and there are many different approaches, though good solid rankings can last a long time. Ongoing maintenance and strategy is strongly recommended so that you preserve the rankings you earn and strengthen them over time.