Posts tagged search rankings
Five Reasons Your Site Might Have Been Google-Banned
Mar 11th
Much like the God of the Old Testament, Google’s ways are mysterious. Also much like the old God, they are not always fair … sometimes they’ll smite a website that yea, verily, was practicing pure and innocent SEO 
. If you’ve been a victim of Google’s megalomaniac streak (or just their inability to actually check and assess every site that gets banned from the index, I suppose), here are the top five reasons why it might have happened.
1. Check Robots.txt
If you have an SEO company looking after your site, they have probably done this already. If you don’t have a consultant already, check this before calling anybody. It’s the website equivalent of calling the TV man to find out why your set won’t turn on, only to have him put the plug in the wall, charge you $100 and leave.
2. Duplicate content
It really sucks that Google penalizes both sites when duplicate content is discovered – because another site could steal your content without your knowledge quite easily. It like when your big brother hits you, and your Mum comes and puts you both in the corner. Big meanie! Regularly check that no other site is using your content. If you find they are, write to the owners and ask them to take it down … but change yours in the meantime.
3. Cloaking
If your pages are set up to deliver a different version to the search engine than to a real user, Google considers it cloaking and will permanently ban you. There are some legit reasons for cloaking – but if Google finds out, they won’t care about the reason. That big red, blue, green and yellow hammer will come down mercilessly.
4. Hidden text
Making your text the same colour as the background was previously thought to be a good way to get more keywords onto your page, without making your actual copy sound unnatural to visitors. Then the search engines figured out the trick, and the party ended.
5. Keyword stuffing
Even if visitors can see it, Google still doesn’t like keyword stuffing. You will certainly NEED to use keywords to help get your page in front of the people that want it – but Google is getting better at semantic interpretations, so you can use variations of your words quite safely, without hurting rankings too much.
Eight On-Page SEO Magic Bullets
Mar 5th
In SEO, if your competition is savvy, top search rankings comes down to time, creativity, dedication and persistence. However, if your competition is not savvy, or you are just starting out in the field, there are a few things you can do to make a big difference in how search engines view your pages. Today we are looking at the simple little on-page tasks that everybody (or their SEO firm) can do in less than a week, to instantly gain kudos with the search engines.
Magic SEO bullet breaks the Google front page barrier
1. Ensure internal links contain anchor text
Your own website is the place you have the most control … use it! Ensure that when you link to another page on your site, it is with relevant, keyworded anchor text.
2. Use your H1 tag
This is a must on all pages! The H1 tag is one of the major ways that Google decides what a page is about – one of the strongest ways to ensure that it matches a page up with a user search.
3. Use your H2 and H3 tags
Same as above. Not using these tags is a massive wasted opportunity.
4. Move the keywords to the front of the title tag
In some sites you will really have to prioritise the pages that you do this activity on … because it is a bit transparent when every one of your page headings starts with ‘Melbourne hotel‘, or ‘hotel in Melbourne’ or ‘Luxury Bangkok hotel’ or ‘Discounts on Bangkok hotels’ that you care more about the search engines than you do about accurately describing content for your readers. A good page structure, created with SEO in mind, is obviously of help here.
5. Bold your keywords
Use the <strong> code to bold at least one instance of the keyword that you are targeting. No point overdoing this one … so it takes very little time.
6. Use hyphens instead of underscores in URLs
Google indexes punctuation, including underscores. It will recognise the words “Bangkok_hotel” within a URL as a single word. However, if you write “Bangkok-hotel” the page will rank for Bangkok, for hotel, and especially for Bangkok hotel.
7. Put alt tags on your photos and images
It doesn’t make a huge difference, but if you don’t add your alt tags, it is just another wasted opportunity. SEO has become such a big game that every one of these little things is absolutely necessary … if you wan to be competitive.
8. Don’t put anything more than three clicks away from the home page
Three degrees of separation is the golden rule for both users and search engines.