SEO Hosting Blog

This checklist provides 50 simple ways for you to make your website even better!

1. Use .htaccess to redirect the non-www version of your website to the www version.

2. Extend the registration of your domain for at least five years.

3. Make sure that when a visitor clicks your website’s logo, they are taken back to the homepage.

4. If you think your font is too small, make it bigger!

5. Remove widgets that aren’t directly enhancing your website.

6. Include an easy to find contact link, e-mail address or phone number on every page of your website.

7. Use a CSS stylesheet to make your website printer friendly.

8. Fix or remove broken links (external and internal).

9. Add ALT tags to all of your images.

10. If your website is using frames, get rid of them!

(more…)

Does your search engine marketer wear a white hat or a black hat?  If you’re outsourcing optimization to a private firm, you’ve got to be very certain that the marketer used optimization techniques you find ethical.  If you hire a black hat optimizer, you run the risk of getting your site banned.  This is no skin off the black hat optimizer’s back, because, aside from putting a ding in his reputation, he’ll be able to find new willing clients looking for the services of a shadowy black hatter.

Though there are constant warnings against black hat practices, black hat optimization services are rampant.  Where else do you think all that spam comes from?  Black hatters are the hackers of the search engine optimization world: always looking for a way to bypass a captcha, spread links automatically (not manually), or other black hat tricks.  Often this is done through software or code: such as a program that automatically stumbles a page on StumbleUpon.  I’m not advocating it by any means, but you’ve got to know it’s out there.  You need to know if your SEM is using these programs or is ranking organically.

(more…)

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.”