SEO Hosting Blog

We’ve written a lot here about how to effectively run a website or what NOT to do to avoid being red-flagged by Google.  What about if you are red-flagged by Google or other search engine?  The answer: your doomed.  Entry over.

Actually, all is not necessarily lost, but it’s not going to be easy, and it depends just how egregious your bad behavior was.  Think of your website’s standing like a credit rating.  While you can fix a credit rating, it’s going to take some time – despite any words to the contrary you might see tacked to a telephone pole at the side of the highway.  It’s going to take some time for Google to trust your site again.

Again, this depends on the nature of your flagging.  Just like your credit: if you’ve filed for bankruptcy, it’s going to be a bit harder to dig yourself out of a hole than if you’ve defaulted on a credit card a couple of times.  The goes if you’re running an obscene link farm with a layout from 1998, or you’ve been given a warning based on what is perceived as keyword jamming in content

Checking if You’ve Been Banned

First, you’ve got to check on your status.  If your like most web owners, you’re checking your stats and rank religiously.  And if you’re not, you should – not because it’s good to be obsessed, but because you should be monitoring how certain keyphrases and pages are performing.  One day, you could step up to your analytics program and see a major drop in traffic.  You plug the domain name in Google (including .com, or whatever the case may be) and you can see how many listings the site is showing.  Next, look for some direct content you have housed on the site – content that was previously indexed. So, with quotes around it, search for “Next, look for some direct content you have housed on the site…”

If your site’s not being listed, it might not be a disaster.  Check your server records.  The server might have been down when Google came to spider the site, which is why it ranks differently (why it’s important to have a host with server redundancy).  You may have also recently lost some high PR links.  You’ll have to contact those site administrators and see why this is so.  Finally, it might just be a mistake: Google is not infallible and mistakes with spidering do happen.

What If It’s Not a Mistake?

OK, we’ve covered things that might lead to a banning by accident.  What if you are 100% guilty of something that’s led to a banning.  Basically, to get back into Google’s good graces, you’re going to need to eliminate everything that led to you being banned.  Are you linking to poor-quality sites.  Delete the links.  Do you have duplicate content?  Delete it.  You’re going to need to give your site a good spring cleaning.  After you’ve done this, write to Google at help@google.com with the title “Re-Inclusion Request.”

Cleaning house is extremely important because it could be a one-shot deal.  If you’re banned and then ask for an inspection after leaving bannable offenses in place, Google’s going to put you well back on the waiting list to check it again.  Even the first time around, it could take three months, or even more, to have your site looked at for re-inclusion on Google.  People are going to be hand-studying the site, page by page, so the whole process is a lengthy one.

If you’ve really broken the rules – and you know it if you have – you might be better off just starting over from scratch.  These are the sites that are based purely on fooling Google and scraping bannable offenses off the site means scraping just about everything.  A spring cleaning is only good for those sites that have made a few mistakes – perhaps even innocently.

It’s important to realize, though, that getting banned by Google isn’t the end of the world, as much as the word “ban” is terrifying.  There are many, many cases where a ban is temporary, rather than “banned for life.”  However, if the same web administrator is falling guilty to the same problems over and over again, Google is not going to be all that sympathetic.  That said, even long-term bannings aren’t too common.  The point of the red-flag system is to put the fear of God (also known as Google) into website administrators’ heads so they make their sites as clean as possible.  If they effectively clean up their sites, Google’s happy because this is the point of the red-flag system in the first place.

You’re average website owner just doesn’t have to deal with being banned outright.  Still, cleaning up a site and having it re-checked by Google takes a long time – too long – which can severely cut into your yearly profit line.  So obviously it’s recommended that you try to avoid it whenever possible.  This means reading up on Google’s – and other search engines – terms of service to make sure you’re never breaking any rules.  Remember, these rules are always changing, so what’s allowable today could be bannable tomorrow.

Resource: Check out SeoHosting’s Banned Site Check Tool.

Whenever you hire an SEO provider, you do so with the hopes they can help implement strategies to improve your ranking in the search engines. You assume the SEO supplier is devoted to building your online presence, but have you ever questioned whether they are engaging in a conflict of interest?

While the majority of search marketing companies have standards to prevent a conflict of interest from arising, there are some SEO businesses who don’t take such precautions. A conflict occurs when a search marketer helps more than one company from the same niche. These companies are seeking after the same customers and keywords; therefore, it places the optimizer in a compromising position.

How can an SEO firm truly be looking out for your best interest if they are helping one of your competitors rank well for your target keywords? They can’t. It’s understandable for a professional SEO company to seek new clients. However, business ethics should prevail over the desire to make more money.

So, how can you check to see if your SEO provider is helping the enemy? The first step is to ask the company for a list of clients they are helping. They may be unwilling to do this for privacy reasons, but if you tell them your reason for the request, they may oblige. Next, to guarantee your optimization specialist won’ be sleeping with the enemy, you should include a clause in your service contract stating they can’t help your competitors while you’re a customer. If they refuse to agree to this condition, you should consider looking for a more ethical SEO provider of search optimization services.

Most SEO companies really are there to help you outrank the competition. However, the SEO industry is just like any other; there are a few bad apples who put business ethics in the back seat. The best way to protect yourself and to get the most out of your investment is to educate yourself on the basics of search engine optimization. If you have a basic understanding of SEO, you can better choose who you want to help with your SEO services.

If you are new to world of search engine optimization and haven’t heard of the name Matt Cutts, it’s a name you should get to know very well. Matt works for Google’s quality group, and over the last few years, has become the unofficial liaison between Google and the SEO community. He has a personal blog, and if its not already in your feed reader, it should be.

Now that you know who Matt Cutts is, you can probably understand why it would be in your best interest to pay attention when Matt does an interview. Fortunately for you, Eric Enge posted his interview with Matt Cutts last week, and I’ve got all the key information you need to know from it right here:

Google likes links that are given voluntarily: Matt told Eric that links that can stand the test of times are ones that are given voluntarily from someone that is informed. He emphasized that the key is avoiding any type of deception or bait & switch method. From a detailed report to a funny article, the key to getting people to voluntarily link to something is making it “so cool, so useful, or so helpful that they want to make little sign posts so that other people on the web can find that out.”

Paying for a social media consultant and paying for links are two different things: In the eyes of Google, those two topics are viewed as:

Paying for a social media consultant to create a piece of content that people want to link to: Good

Paying someone to add a link to their website without the nofollow attribute: Bad

As Matt said, when you pay a social media consultant to create a piece of on topic linkbait, “you are not paying for links. You are funding some creativity; you are sponsoring your page for some creativity.”

Not all widgets are created equally: Widgets have become a popular method of gaining links. However, there are well-documented cases where Google has completely dropped websites from their index because of their widgetbait.

So, what’s the key to increasing your backlink with widgets without getting booted from Google’s index? Matt mentions several different factors for creating Google approved widgetbait, including no hidden links, no links to other sites and avoid using spammy anchor text (although you may be tempted to use anchor text you’re trying to rank for, it’s much safer to your website’s name). Once again, Matt emphasized “we wanted people to be informed of what they are linking to and we want the links to be editorial.”

Welcome back to our two part (maybe more!) series that talks about simple and essential methods that you can use to start gaining a respectable rank in what’s called the “local” search engine results from Google. You know what I mean – when you type in a geographical location keyword – then followed by some sort of service, e.g. “Los Angeles Pizza Delivery”. Google returns a list of ten local businesses depending on what you typed in, with a map to the left of it.

The reason it’s important for your business to appear in these listings for all the services or local products that you sell, is because your average internet user, who is searching for something in particular, will typically click within the first range of results that the see. In the case of local searches, chances are, they’re going to click one of those ten local results that come up – and that’s what we went over in the first part of the series, along with different tactics you can use to get your business ranked within those ten phrases on keywords and keyphrases that are important to you.

In the first part of this local seo series, we talked about three aspects of local SEO:

1. Make sure to include the phrases you want people to find you by, on your actual website. For example, if you want consumers to find you by typing in “Boston Italian Restaurant” – then it would be in your best interest to work that phrase in your site somewhere.

2. Update all of your business listings in the big online yellow pages sites. It may take a days work to do it, but its well worth it to have accurate listings.

3. Encourage, but don’t demand reviews of your business. Google provides customers a way to review a business that they’ve used that shows up in local results. Not sure what kind of a factor it plays in rankings – but it doesn’t hurt, mainly for giving a potential customer piece of mind AND it helps them decide on which service to use. For example, if your listing has 4 good reviews, and your competitor has none, who do you think they’ll pick? You!

Photo Courtesy Of A30 Tsitika

So, today, let’s talk about other important factors of getting ranked in the local search results. I’ll do these in list form so that it’s easier to scan and pick up key points.

1. Make your address well known. Make sure to include your business address and telephone number on your page (usually in the footer) of every possible page of your site. Mainly, you want this text to be crawlable, and a general rule of thumb is – if you can highlight it, Google can see it.

2. Google Local Business Center – Have you actually taken the time to add your site to the Google Local Business Center? This is perhaps one of the most important steps you can take to get listed, and even if you are listed, make sure to sign up and edit your business info so that it’s completely accurate.

3. Longevity is key. The longer your business is ranked in the local results, the higher you’ll rank over time. Fly by night and new businesses don’t have a real chance at outranking the vets. So if your business is new, you’ll have to suffer through a period of time where Google decides to trust if you’re in it for the long haul or not. Editing all of your local listings should help – as it shows you made an effort to get everything right, telling big G that you’ll be around for the long haul. Another trick that comes from the regular SEO world – register the domain name of your business for the maximum term. It’s been said that Google checks WHOIS data, and if they see you’re registered for a long time, they may lend more trust to your site.

4. Incoming links are like big shiny diamonds. Probably the most important part of this entire ordeal, especially for the long run, is the amount of people linking to your website. Just like in regular SEO, links are what puts you in the top seat. The more, the merrier (well, usually) - especially, if you manage to get strong incoming links where the other site uses a localized anchor text. For example – I own a Florist in Chicago, and on my website, I link to my favorite local pizza place using the anchor text “Chicago Pizza Delivery”. That’s going to help that pizza places’ website in the rankings tremendously. A local incoming link, using a geo targeted anchor, is like gold. The more of these you can get, the higher you’ll rank, I promise you. If you know other business owners in your area, do whatever you have to do (legally, of course) to get them to link to you. Remember, one way links are 100 times more powerful than reciprocal, so if you don’t have to “trade” links, don’t. You just want them to link to you, using specific anchor text.

With the above four tips, and the ones from Monday (which are also listed above), you should be able to get your website listed in the local results rather easily. This is going to make a noticeable difference in the amount of business you do over time, and for most small business owners, hiring someone to perform this on your site is well worth it. But that’s the thing – all of the things I listed above? Anyone can do it! If you have even novice internet skills, with a little research, you could probably knock out everything I’ve told you in a matter of a couple weeks. I can’t say this enough, but, it’s well worth your time, and may make a significant positive impact on the books.

Although local SEO isn’t anything new and revolutionary, it certainly seems to be a very hot trend these days, especially as we breeze through 2008. Many small businesses are realizing the amount of extra business they could have, if only their sites were optimized and showing up in local search results. SEO companies around the world are taking notice, and many are selling special “Local SEO” plans and gaining thousands of new clients by doing so.

Having said that – what about your average Mom and Pop pizza joint that operates on an extremely tight budget, and often relies on family or friends for all of their technology needs? These types of businesses (and there are tens of thousands of them), definitely do not have the resources to hire SEO firms to run a local SEO campaign for their websites that were designed by their grandchild that got a degree in graphic arts. With the exorbitant cost of gas, supplies, advertising, and everything else these days, SEO just doesn’t seem to fall on the list of top priorities – although it should.

Photo Courtesy Of Atelier Teee

So to ease the pain, and make things easier, we’ll talk about easy ways that the small business owner can optimize their website for local search results. Truth be told, it’s not all that difficult, and anyone with access to change and/or add information on their site can get it done relatively easily.

Let’s start today with a few simple things that you can do to your website that’s so easy, it seems almost silly. There are obvious things that you can change or modify, that you may not have thought were important. But trust me, they are!

Okay, a lot folks learn and understand better by visuals, so take a look at the image below. I simply did a search for “landscaping service Indianapolis”, and the results in the image tell us a few things right off the bat.

First of all, besides the number one listing (who probably got their through more advanced means, which we’ll talk about later), notice the first couple of listings and what they have in common?

Well, if you can’t notice it, I’ll tell you. Remember how I typed in “landscaping service Indianapolis”? Notice the 2nd and 3rd results are the only ones that actually contain the keyword “landscaping service”. Why is that interesting? Well, it works in sort of the same way a regular yellow pages ad would work. You want to specifically list what your business does. Google is smart, don’t get me wrong, but they often look to the obvious things to determine and return the most relevant results for a search. The businesses that used the keyword “landscaping service” were picked to be near the top simply because they used that search term (which is a typical keyword that someone would type in when searching for this kind of business, with the geographical reference in front of it).

So in other words, somewhere on each individual’s site, they list exactly what they do. While most business owners would say “well, duh” to this – you would be surprised at how many small businesses don’t list everything they should on their websites. But, this isn’t the only place that Google will determine what your business offers. As a matter of fact, Google often turns to local search outlets, such as YellowPages.Com, Yahoo Local, and many others. You want to make very sure that each of those kinds of sites that list your business info has the exact information you want people to find you by. If you’re a 24 hour dry cleaner service, you want to make sure people find you by typing in “24 hour dry cleaner service”, right? In other words, if you want people to find you by that term (because a lot of people search for specific terms like that), you wouldn’t want Yellowpages.com listing your site as “ABC Cleaners”. Because even if ABC cleaners offers 24 hour dry cleaning services, if it doesn’t boldly state that in the title, then you can count on zero local results for it, and we don’t want that to happen.

So, you need to check up on and probably modify your listing in all of the big local search websites. Trust me, its well worth your time!

If you’re curious as to which local search outlets have your business listed, you can usually find out just by typing in your business name in Google. Typically, the local search outlets will be the ones ranking towards the top, but just take a few hours, go through each listing, and modify it to what you want people to find you by. Most, if not all of those types of sites allow you to register for free and “claim” your business listing, so that you can modify it to your liking. Of course, the change in the search results won’t happen overnight (nothing does in the SEO world), but it’s better to start now instead of letting it sit. Once you optimize everything to your liking on the local search sites and your own site, you may be pleasantly surprised after a couple months go by at the new boost in customers and traffic.

Reviews

One last thing that I’d like to point out in the image above is the customer reviews. I can’t confirm how much this helps your actual rankings, but I’m sure it plays some part, even if it’s a tiny one. I know the picture is cut off towards the right, but the listing at the top is the only one with customer reviews. Coincidence? Who knows, but it sure doesn’t hurt to have customers leave reviews about your business. Think about this though, even if the amount of reviews didn’t affect your local search rankings at all, if you were a consumer looking for a business, and you had a choice of 10 businesses, and only one had customer reviews, which one would you probably check out first? Exactly, the one with reviews. Consumers like to find out everything they can about the business before they spend their money with them. It’s the same thing that made Amazon a pioneer in selling products – they allowed customers to leave reviews for everything they ordered. I know I’ve personally bought many items simply because I was able to find out what other people thought about it. It makes perfect sense, and plays a huge psychological role in the consumers buying mindset. Don’t ever coerce your customers to leave a review simply to look good, but it may be very smart on your end to approach your best customers, and kindly let them know that they have the option of leaving a review of your services for others to read. This alone may make a significant impact on the amount of business you receive. Afterall, nearly 70% of online activity is related to local content. And with hundreds of millions using the internet each day, that’s a lot of business.

Stay tuned for the next installment of Local Search Engine Optimization Basics to learn more about optimizing your website for local search results.