Ten Best SEO Practices to Follow to Help Your Business
The Problem
Recently an individual was trying to understand why their website had been dropped from the search engine results. There are several factors that can cause your website to lose placement completely or drop significantly enough that you may need to search several pages back in the results to find your site again. There are some common reasons it can occur to website’s that should be checked in order to resolve the problem.
How to Solve the Problem
First, have you received alerts from Google telling explaining to you that there are problems with your website? If yes, then sign in to Google Webmaster Tools determine which errors are in need of attention. Assuming you already have established a Webmaster Tools account.
Second, you will want to check some other areas as well pertaining to your website. You might start with a website analysis which can aid in finding bad errors on the website. Some of the issue’s could be duplicated meta descriptions and titles, or sitemap has not been submitted. If you can not run an analysis you can also find out these same factors through Webmaster Tools as well.
Third, check for proper canonical usage on pages. This will help with indexing and allow your website to be more crawler friendly. It will also help remove chances of duplicated pages from been indexed by the search engines.
Fourth, take a look at the sites robots.txt file to make sure it is properly written. A properly written robots.txt file can provide guidance to the crawlers for indexing. This file essentially allows for more control over the crawlers by providing it some instruction on what not to index. By disallowing files and directories you can be assured the search crawlers will not send data back to the search engines for indexing.
Fifth, although tedious; remove any bad inbound links leading to your website. This is a time intensive process but will be to your advantage. There are various software vendors online to help you locate these unwanted back link’s. You might try Removeem or LinkDelete to resolve some bad links by getting those links removed.
Sixth, utilize the disavow tools available through Webmaster Tools to make suggestions to the search engines that you would like to have certain inbound links listed as non-valued links when determining your ranking in the results. This does take some time to complete but is another great way to notify the search engines you are being linked to from places on the web that you would rather not be linked from because of various reasons.
Seventh, check for duplicated content on other sites. us the sixth suggestion to remove links from those sites and you might take the next step to resolve the issue by notify the search engines that a site is violating policies. File a complaint through the process of completing a DCMA. If all else fails and the site webmaster is un-reachable or just flat-out not responding, the DCMA is the last possible solution to get it done.
Eighth, this is a simple one. Make sure your pages are being cached by the search engines. You can find this out by doing site:www.domain.com in the search box. Also you can use Webmaster Tools to control page caching and links pertaining to your site that need to be removed from indexing by the search engines.
Ninth, check for parameters inside of Webmaster Tools as well. By listing parameters inside of Webmaster Tools, you can notify the search engines that you do not want certain pages the utilize page parameters to be listed in the index. For example, .html is the same as .html?id=1. Although this is the same page, the search engines will treat it as two separate pages because of the parameter attached on the end. By listing this parameter in Webmaster Tools you are going to eliminate the duplicated page content, which of course will produce better results.
Finally, number ten. If you have migrated a website your might be more prone to check for proper page redirects. Proper redirects can provide several thing’s. It can help eliminate duplicated content, send old pages to the new pages and notify users of site changes. Such as; Page Not Found (404) or Server Error (503). This also gives the search engines some directions to follow.
Conclusion
Okay, there are ten areas to cover that will go a long way in providing a solution to achieve better search results. Some of these problem solving suggestions are technical and very time-consuming. So if you believe this is above you or you just do not have to the time to do it. Hire a professional to take care of it.
Problem Resolution List
Eliminate Duplicate Descriptions, Titles & Pages
Check for Correct Canonical Usage
Check for Properly Written Robots.txt File
Check Link Sources (Disavow) as Needed
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How to Improve Your NAP for Better Local Placement
Okay, Hopefully you are Awake.
The article is for sure helpful, especially if you are looking to increase your SEO Local presence. Some simple strategies for finding out more about your competition is to just simply locate the competitors on the local 7-Pack listing in the results and copy and past the address in the Google search window with quotes around it; like this:
“Link Worx Seo 2325 W Thompson Rd, Indianapolis, IN (317) 614-7383”
This will produce a ton of results for the company being searched assuming the company you search for has done local SEO work. But something I noticed when using this technique to locate local citations of a business. When using the above method wrapped in quotes, the quotes are stripped off after you navigate away from the first page results. But rest assured, the results are still providing a powerful way to locate critical SEO citations.
Just make sure you use the correct company information for the results and do not worry about the quotes being stripped off. You will get different results if you do not use the correct NAP listing and quotes as listed above. An important part of the NAP is to make sure the address is the same on all of them, as this provides better results and no strength is lost. You will learn more about this farther down, so keep reading.
Local Keyword Triggering
You can locate a competitor through keyword triggering. The closer you are to a downtown areas, the better your local possibility will be on the 7-Pack results. Otherwise you are going to have to do more link building and put more effort into getting that local listing to the top 7-Pack.
Finding the Right Niche
You may be able to locate a niche when using different keywords during your searches. For example, when you search and no local 7-Pack is displayed in the results or a low amount of results in the 7-Pack are produced. You now know the niche because no results or little results are produced. To further add to this, you can use great keyword tools to locate niches and then try those niches in the searches to find out what is triggered for the 7-Pack.
Although the strategy above for finding out what the competitors are doing is great, there are some companies out there that can make it easier to find out what your competitors are up to. A few years ago I come across an article on SEOMoz and saw a company named White Spark. Great place to learning more about your competitors and local citations.
But for the freebie way of doing thing’s from the method above is the way to go if you are running on a tight budget. Although the service provided by White Spark is a not a free service for the most part, it is well worth the money spent.
Geo-Graphical Location
I briefly covered the ideal of business location and proximity to downtown areas. The “centroid” is the way Google identifies the radius from the center focal point starting from the center and going outward. This basically is how Google determines your point of business from the center of downtown. So, the closer you are to downtown the greater chances you will appear in the local 7-Pack search results.
Okay everyone, move your businesses to downtown…
Local Business Listings
There are all kinds of great websites to get your business listed in. You should be able to locate several of these sites by simply doing the searches on your competitors and paying attention to their listings. Of course the higher the quality the better the results. The relevancy is another contributing factor for these citations along with getting those much-needed local reviews. Not only does this provide stronger 7-Pack placement but building your brand reputation is extremely important.
Those local reviews can provide great insight to your customers as well as provide activity the search engines require when new reviews are posted. There are all kinds of ways to obtain reviews for your business, just take your time at it.
For all you drinking and driving people out there, here are you local check points to remember for local placement.
Local Check Points
As for NAP, I am about to find out what happens to local listings when you go through and update the entire address to a new one. Have been doing it slowly over time to try to keep it natural looking, but limited data at this point to confirm any negative effects. Trying to prevent link churning. Link churning is when you change the anchor text on links. Link churn is allowed but you must do it at a slow pace to look natural.
An example of link churning, about a year ago I went through local business listing’s and the local search engine placements and changed a telephone number for Link Worx Seo. There were some unusual ups and downs to my placements. It was done fairly quickly and believe it was done to fast. These up and down fluctuation’s in the results were probably because of link churning. Not all business listing changes are going to directly affect anchor text, so just pay attention to the listing’s that change your anchor text and browser titles.
Hopefully, this gives you some good in-sight on how to change out your local listing’s or build on your local presence. If you need help working on your local business listing’s, as always just dial or e-mail.
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