5 Steps That Will Make Your Site Immune to Algorithm Changes
March 21, 2011
Are you alarmed about the recent Google algorithm changes?
Here’s the deal in a nutshell – follow the rules and you won’t have to worry about algorithm changes and updates. 99% of the time they only affect websites that are trying to get rankings by cheating in one way or another, or that are so poorly designed and optimized that they seem spammy to search engines.
It pays to do things the right way. Follow these 5 steps and you won’t have to worry about changing algorithms:
- Build a site that is valuable for visitors
Check your navigation, content, photos, forms and landing pages - Ensure that your code is search engine friendly
Review your titles, descriptions, content, alt tags and contextual links - Make it easy for visitors to convert
Make certain your phone number is easy to find, contact form works, your shopping cart works smoothly to completion, your download links aren’t broken - Build links the right way
Write meaningful articles that are interesting to read and add value, then syndicate them for keyword links as well as encouraging potential customers to visitor your site - Post to your blog on a regular basis
Keep it fresh and interesting with valuable information for the reader, and avoid sales pitches
This can be a considerable amount of work, but if you’re serious about your business you’ll do it. If you’re not SEO savvy, hire someone who is. You want a website that is the best it can be – ranking well in search engines and converting visitors to sales.
Keep Your Google Rankings While Updating Your Site
February 3, 2011
With a new project ahead, I have been concerned about how to keep my client’s awesome Google rankings while updating her website to one that is more current and functional.
Consequently, I was very happy to find this article in the Axandra newsletter, and have received permission to publish it in full.
How your web page changes influence your search engine rankings.
It’s a no-brainer that changes on your web pages influence the position of your website on search engines. However, it’s not so clear how search engines react to the changes on your site and what exactly causes the changes in the search results. A new search engine patent might have some answers.
Several search engine patents deal with the changes on your site.
Google published a patent that described how the changes on your web pages influence the rankings of your site 6 years ago. Last month, Microsoft was granted another patent that discusses the influence of web page changes on search engine rankings.
This new patent shows which elements on your web pages might be monitored by search engines.
Which web page elements are monitored by search engines?
According to the new patent, changes of the following web page elements can influence the position of the page in the search results:
- Keywords that are included in a web page.
- Keywords that are associated with a web page
- The anchor texts that are used in links on the page.
- The colors and the sizes of images on the page.
- The position of text or images on the page.
- The frequency of document changes over time.
- The amount of the web page content that has been changed.
- Tags that are assigned to the page.
- Search queries that are used to find the page.
How exactly do changes in these elements influence the rankings of a page?
According to the patent, searches are classified into the two categories “informational” and “navigational”. The effect of the web page changes depends on the category of a search query.
A navigational query is a query that is used to find a particular site. For example, a search for “ny times” will lead to the home page of the sites. Examples for information queries are “how do I fix a broken bicycle tire” or “who won the 2011 XYZ awards”?
If the searcher is looking for information about a recent event (2011 XYZ awards) then pages that recently added the keyword could be boosted in the search results.
For navigational queries, pages with static content might get a boost. This methods works fine with some type of sites but it could cause problems with home pages that update their contents regularly (for example nytimes.com).
What does this mean to your website?
This patent was granted to Microsoft but it’s likely that Google uses similar methods. Search engines don’t just look at the current version of your website.
They also remember how it was in the past. The changes on your website could indicate a change of ownership, they could indicate that you try to keep your website up-to-date, they could be a signal for spam and more.
When you change your web pages, consider which signal you might be sending to search engines.
When you optimize the pages of your website, do not optimize a page that already has high rankings for one of your keywords. Better optimize another page of your site for the new keyword.
The more pages of your website you optimize, the better. Optimize different pages of your website for different but related keywords to show search engines that your website is relevant to a particular topic.
Keep some of the pages fresh and leave others as they are to offer search engines different kind of pages for different search queries.
“Copyright Axandra.com – Web site promotion software“
The Importance of Landing Pages
February 3, 2011
To make your business website as effective as it can be, it should have landing pages specific to what a prospective customer is looking for.
A landing page is dedicated to one thing – serving up exactly what a person is seeking and making it easy for then to obtain what they want.
Landing pages are extremely important if you are running a PPC campaign. When someone clicks on a link they want to be taken to exactly what was promised in the ad, not to your home page.
The PPC landing page should be simpler in design than your other site pages, with fewer options and a distinct “call to action” – meaning a way for them to easily contact you / download / purchase your product from that page. It should be designed for your PPC campaign, and my advice is to block search engines from it, since you will have other pages you will want to rank in search results.
Landing Page Effectiveness
The Sherpa marketing chart below shows how effective unique landing pages are for websites.
Effectiveness of Website Design, Management, and Optimization Tactics
If you are not running a PPC campaign, should you still have landing pages on your site? Definitely! In your link building efforts, such as article marketing, your keyword link should connect to a page on your site that is specifically about the article‘s topic.
Sculpting Your Pages
For instance, let’s say you have a site that sells pet products. If you have written and syndicated an article about dog harnesses, the link should lead directly to a page that is about nothing but dog harnesses. Your visitor should be able to get all the info they need about the product from this page, as well as be able to place an order.
You don’t necessarily have to add more pages to your site to do this. Just make sure that the pages on your website that you lead people to are designed to encourage a prospective buyer to do just that – buy your product. It may mean refining some of the pages on your site or breaking down a page that is covering too many products into separate pages for each distinct product.
In other words, don’t have regular collars and leashes featured along with dog harnesses. This is not to say they should not be able to move on to those products. It’s smart to have a “related products” box in a sidebar, but the main page should be about the harnesses you carry…sizes, colors, styles, along with information on how to put them on a dog and why they may be better than a regular collar for your dog.
Along with helping your sales conversions, it will also help the page rank for dog harnesses, since it’s the focus of the page; there is content about the product, pictures of the product with keywords in the name (i.e. cane-corso-dog-harness.jpg) and of course you have used keywords in your title to help the page rank, as well as carefully written a Meta description to encourage searchers to click to your site.
Review Your Website
Your homework for today is to go through your website and see if you need to break down some of your pages into product specific landing pages. Making changes like this is not usually hard or terribly time consuming – especially if you have a template in place. You do need to spend the necessary time it takes to determine the best keywords to use for your title and H tags, write some great content, and again, create a Meta description that will make searchers want to visit your site.
Your reward will be higher search rankings, more visitors, and higher conversions (sales).
