Last updated by at .
What Is This SEO All About?
SEO – What is This SEO All About Today?
Everyone is talking about SEO. Just exactly, what is this SEO all about? And how does it affect your website or blog? I came across a great quote this week and I had to share it. It really rang true for me.
SEO Now and Future
When applying SEO to your website or blog it’s not so much about what is happening now on Google but about what will be happening on Google. It is constantly changing. I am always reading about the latest Google updates and checking rankings of keywords, products or pages. I must admit not as much as I used to as traffic was going up and so were sales on our retail website. Until a week or so ago. And then I found the missing sitemap and broken links that were taking time to re-direct.
The good thing is that Google crawls websites faster than it did just 2 years ago with their caffeine update. One thing I have not totally figured out is how a new page can rank near the top in the beginning and then begin a descend sometimes. Other times it can remain high in the rankings. Google always leaves some things a mystery to me. But not for long. I continually do research. It’s a good thing I do not need much sleep to learn SEO all about what it can do for us.
Years ago SEO included using many of your keywords throughout the copy and meta descriptions. Now you can have to be careful not to overdue it with Google’s latest Penquin update. Yes Penquin – not Panda this time! I learned yesterday it should be around 2.5-3.5% keyword density.
What is the penquin up to?
So what else has that penquin been up to over on Google? Here are some of the highlights:
- Multiple Sites – Do not make multiple sites with the same content. That just saved a lot of people a lot of work!
- Multiple Pages – The same goes for pages – Why would you have 2 pages alike to begin with?
- Images – Label all images appropriately and make sure they are related to the content.
- Image Sitemap – Upload image sitemap – They help Google to crawl your images.
- Link Schemes – Glad to see this one going bye-bye. Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging. This was big when I first build our retail website and was very time consuming. I’ve dropped old links like those and kept only relevant ones.
- Paid Links - Gone! Buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results. Glad to see this one gone too – money can’t buy you organic page rank through links anymore.
- Doing No SEO? Did I read that right? Here it is from Google’s Webmaster Blog: “We want people doing white hat search engine optimization (or even no search engine optimization at all).”
Is Your Web Traffic Going The Right Way?
Web Traffic Going The Right Way!
Do you find what you have been looking for on the web? Or do you Google something and find “this page is no longer available?” Sometimes a funny image will appear or a clever lost page.
I’ve been spending some time recently in Google Webmaster tools and analytics on our retail websites and then went to visit this blogs tools. It all started last week when I noticed a dip in traffic with a lot of broken links on the retail site which is a Stores Online platform. I daily fix the broken links in their dashboard but was still continuing to get the same ones over and over. Traffic began to dip. Sales went down. Their customer service for tech support is wonderful but someone gave me mis-information for submitting a new sitemap. They thought the sitemap may be causing the issue. When I went to look for the sitemap yesterday in my Google webmaster tools I found it was missing and a message that it was submitted wrong. I got another person on tech support. No need for FTP anymore. It’s so easy now to submit – just grab the URL and put in the webmaster tools and you are done!
It will look like this: http://www.yoursitecom/sitemap.xml
So as I fixed the broken links over there I had not done any here on this blog. I hadn’t used the WordPress’s tool for that until this morning. Many of you may already do this but I’m sure many new bloggers may not have. So I wanted to show how to do it and it’s easy!
Click to Enlarge
So where you do find the broken links? In your Google webmaster tools. It’s under diagnostics and crawl errors. You can download the file. Copy the broken links – find the correct URL from your blog or website and paste it on the second line. It will make a difference in your website traffic too. Once fixed the amount of traffic should increase to your site.
Have you been fixing your broken links and re-directing the web traffic in the right direction?
