Tag Archives: Search engine optimization

Marketing

Google Penalties?

How to do seo for a website
How to do seo for a website (Photo credit: SEOPlanter)

You work hard on your website. You hire good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts. You write good content and are careful to make it organic. You know content is king and you do your best to make it so. You are ranking high for your key terms and words. Things are great. Sales are coming in and good traffic finding your website. All is good with the world.

One day visits to your site drop a bit. The next day, the visits are done more. Sales start to drop. The content must be getting stale you surmise, so you make more. You go about making back links to your site from others that make sense. You do more SEO. Surely this will help, it doesn’t. Your page ranking goes from the top of the first to last on the twentieth. Soon you are on the hundredth page. What is going on?

Google’s Changing Algorithms

Google does its best to make searching work for the general user. There are many spam sites out there that generate machine readable content, but to the human they make no sense. This only serves the marketer, not the genuine business owner. Your site doesn’t have this content non-sense, but it still drops. Why is Google penalizing your site?

Let’s take a look at a few things.

That Darned 404 Page

Are there pages that have changed or gone out of use? Are there still some links out there that are no longer valid? Do some searching and update them. If they cannot be updated, provide a redirect. What about internal links? Are they all valid? No, get them updated and corrected. Google will mark your site when there are dead links.

How Good Is Your Content?

Do you copy and paste your content? Perhaps change a few words here and there? Not good. Make your pages unique. Repeated content will get a bad mark.

Where did you get your content? Is it yours? If it belongs to someone else, did you pay for it? Not only is copy and pasting within your site bad, copying it from somewhere else is bad as well. It is one thing to hire a copywriter. It is purely another to steal it.

Keywords are a great way to give more meaning and value to your pages, but be careful. Stuffing words into tags can get a mark against you. Keep the keywords relevant to your actual content. One guideline is to use 160 characters in your page description. Don’t get all blabbery and write a book there.

What Of Those External Links?

Back links are not necessarily bad, but follow two ideals. First, make sure the sites relate clearly to your site and the content. Don’t just start stuffing links everywhere, make them count. Second, are these other sites in the same language or in the same country as yours? Unless you are posting in German, don’t visit German sites and plant links. Stick to the related and familiar. Otherwise, Google may smack your efforts.

Don’t Get Cute

Some people will buy links and believe this will help their ranks. In the old days, yes. Perhaps even now it may work for a short time, but Google does not like the practice as it is seen as gaming the system. Don’t fall for the slick ads and keep away from buying links.

Page content is only a part of the solution. How your pages are constructed also matters. Just as keyword stuffing is not good, neither is using the H1 tag too liberally, lots of anchor text, or hiding content or links. With each new generation, Google’s algorithm is trying to read content more like a human that a machine. This means your structure is being reviewed and graded. Think hiding content full of great keywords will help? Wrong! Don’t get cute with the content nor the structure. Make the page good for humans and stay away from phoney keyword tricks.

 The More Comments The Better, Correct?

Those who do not follow these guidelines will find your site and leave comments. These are spammers looking to push all manner of crappy products and sometimes they are pure scammers. Moderate your comments for these very occurrences and deny them. Have some there already? Mark these as spam and delete them. Sure, you do not control the comments people leave, but you can control whether or not these are published and seen by the search engines.

But, wait. Don’t I want the comments? Isn’t it great that people have found my site? Yes, it is nice they found you, but Google may hold their comments against you. Be the site moderator and let the comments help you, not harm.

Go Do It

There are other items too, such as sitemaps and slow loading times, but this is a good list to get started. Websites cannot just be built once and let be. Each week, there should be some updates to your site and they should be meaningful. Moderator your traffic and understand from where it comes. Put attention into those paths ways and look to find more link them. A little bit each week goes a long way to keeping your site ranked high. When your site drops, don’t panic and understand what is happening. Then take action to properly fix the bad marks and improve your rank.

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Internet Marketing

When Will Google See Me?

English: a chart to describe the search engine...
English: a chart to describe the search engine market (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Writing a blog is a good way to attract potential customers to your business, but there is an art to the science. The web is crawling with all manner of experts who claim they know how to do Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and that will rank you high on results for terms your potential customers use. Great. But they all claim it and they all can’t be correct. After all, how many different websites will be using the terms you want?

Do a keyword search using Google’s tool and you will see how popular certain search criteria are. Really think these experts will get you ranked high on those? They will say choose different ones that are not so competitive. If your are selling jackets and sweaters on your site, why would you want to rank high for terms like wool thread or outer clothing? The terms need to be relevant or it will nor work properly.

Regular readers of this blog will start to wonder if I’m repeating myself as there are several posts here lamenting the plights of SEO and the rip-off artists that prey upon those who have new domain registrations. True and this is not a repeat as much as it is a flow of consciousness rant. Google keeps changing their search engine rules and staying up to date on the latest techniques is exhausting. My blog doesn’t even rank highest for my name, Bryon Lape. Why is that?

A few weeks ago, I moved all the content for my blog to a domain that is my name. I’ve had bryonlape.com for quite some time, but I was using a permanent forward to the old domain. The content was exported and then imported to a newer WordPress server. Several of the posts have been pushed to Twitter and the old site has been redirecting to a BlueHost capture day for weeks.

And so what?

Searches for phrases from the old site reveal that Google has not yet followed the content. The results that are shown are still the old domain and must be fetched from Google’s cache to be viewed. I even searched for my name this domain was nearly at the bottom of the list. How is that? My name is in the title of this blog and in the domain. Surely that should rank higher. My nickname of Brainmuffin ranks worse with Google still believing I’m really wanting bran muffins. Arg!

I’ve had several nicknames over the years, with Brainmuffin being the most recent and given to me nearly 20 years ago. Two others of mine, Ropeman and Schnurmann, go back to high school nearly 30 years ago. Perhaps I should blog on their meaning and origins too and see if Google ever ranks them high enough to recognize.

There are times I truly do not understand Google’s algorithms and why pages rank as they do. Microsoft uses this lack of understanding on the part of users in their Bing ad campaigns. It is not too infrequently that Google will return a mismatch of pages and one has to use the phrase remove feature to remove them. Search for a business opportunity review and it gets worse.

This latter inquiry is not all the fault of Google though. Remember those SEO experts? Some of them have a service behind them that puts your content all over the web, with changes made here and there to make the search engines believe the content is different. It is this manner of inorganic content that Google is trying to combat with all their algorithm changes. Sometimes it works, other times it really hurts the small business website.

So, now here I am. I make new content and post in different places. I wait a day or two and search for terms in my content. Often the pages returned are irrelevant and the old site continues to be returned. I have moved. When will Google see me?

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Marketing

Claiming My Name

English: "Golden girl" – Horses (unk...
English: “Golden girl” – Horses (unknown breed, Isabelle or Palomino coloured): Mare with a foal, somewhere in Surrey, UK (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Formerly, I have written about Search Engine Optimization and how I was able to get the results from Google for a former classmate of mine, Edwina Marquand, to have my blog at the top of the list. That’s great if anyone should come looking for Edwina or want to know more about her love of horses, but what about my name? What happens when one enters Bryon Lape into Google?

For years, doing a personal search brought back the oddest of results. Often, Google would search for each term separately and the list contained links to everything but me. As the algorithm developed, old USENET postings came up first. Even as I started blogging, it took quite some time before Bryon Lape was me. What does it take to claim yourself?

Knowing how the various search engines optimize indexing plays a key role in getting Search Engine Optimization to work. At one time, deep linking was the way to go. The images. Video. Crosslinks. Deep crosslinks. Links with better titles and meta-data. On and on it went. The more recent algorithms started to look at text as a human reader. The days of producing what looks to a human like random text so the keywords, in this case Bryon Lape, turned up a pertain percentage of the time are quickly coming to an end. Marketers still find ways around it, but content, real, human readable content, is truly King.

So, what about Edwina Marquand? Well, she’s still out there somewhere. I’ve not spoken to her since near the end of the 7th grade at Hayfield Intermediate School (June 1981). I imagine she’s been married for 20 years or more, has several children and probably doesn’t full remember Bryon Lape from 6th and 7th grade. No matter. I will hold a memory in my mind and heart till I cannot and remember her stories of horses.

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Commentary

Hit Capturing SEO

Serinda Swan as Zatanna Zatara on Smallville.
Serinda Swan as Zatanna Zatara on Smallville. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Getting the right Search Engine Optimization is crucial to any website. Have the wrong key words and your site will generate the wrong traffic. Content is king and SEO is how the people find the king. It is not something to get wrong.

I have long wondered if it is possible to use SEO as a method of subterfuge. That is, choose words that are not actually correct for a website, but pull in interesting traffic anyway. What to do though is the question.

I wrote an article about a date with Nikki Dial. The story was based on a long reoccurring dream. Perhaps more correctly as a day dream. I’ve held Nikki in high esteem for years. Did having Nikki Dial in the site content bring in more visitors? Yes, it did. As my site is not geared to making conversions to sales, it didn’t mean more money. It did mean, however, more spammers found the site and have left crap comments that do to bogus selling sites. Not really what was meant.

What about using other names? Perhaps an article about Serinda Swan? Write about her loveliness being in TRON: Legacy. The wonderfully tight outfit that showed her curves to every 12 year old boy living in us all. The eyes. Oh my, there is much there.

Not into movies? Serinda Swan recently posed for Maxim. The pictures are hot, of course, and Serinda looks marvelous in everyone. Makes for wanting her to pose in other, more revealing magazines.

Serinda Swan isn’t the only lovely lady one could use for some SEO. The overly boobed German model Jordan Carver is another. She augmented her 5’6″ frame with implants that give her 32HH breasts. Even without her surgery, Jordan is still very lovely and could easily make a post about her. That is, if you want a great deal of traffic from people looking for pictures of Jordan Carver nude.

Don’t like any of these names? It is easy to choose more. Keegan Connor Tracy played in Jake 2.0, Battlestar Galactica and Once Upon A Time. The lovely and cruel character Regina Mills as played by Lana Parrilla would make a good article. Her ass is enough to write about for days. A Lost fan? Emilie de Ravin was a lovely blonde on Lost and is now a lovely brunette on Once Upon A Time. There’s an interesting twist.

Search Engine Optimization is a sticky wicket. Finding the right mix is key. Finding the right mix is the hardest portion. Play with them all.

 

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Commentary, Marketing

Content Is King

Lifesize Religious King Statue with Spear
Lifesize Religious King Statue with Spear (Photo credit: epSos.de)

When it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), there are two main ways to go: do it yourself or hire someone to do it for you. The techniques used by either path are the same, though the professional may have access to more tools and options. Create content all over the Internet that points back to your site. Use the proper keywords the right number of times and SEO will be yours. Spam them too much and Google will ignore you.

Many people go at the keywords with reckless abandon. They use Google’s Adword Keyword tool and make list and after list of good keywords. They do all the can to work these keys words into articles to make them look like Search Engine Optimization wizards. They create content that seems odd and fantastic. They forget a key element.

Content is King.

In the early days of Internet marketing, it was easy. Find several blog sites and copy the same article to them all. Perhaps change a few words here or there, but that was about it. Post the article and let the search engines find them. Leads poured into business opportunities and people made money. People also complained and Google struck back: the infamous Google slap! Leads dried up overnight. Adword accounts were closed. The money makers had to find a new way.

The content makers realized they needed to create a few different versions of the same article. Someone figured out to use a formula to the paragraphs of the article and them made a routine to randomly swap them out. Those posted all over the Internet lead to hit rates climbing again. Come across one of the pages though and they were not humanly readable.

Google got smarter. Along came Panda.

More and more, the search engines look at context, as well as, the content. Does the content flow? Is it human readable? Is it duplicated? Is it just greeking? With each update, both Google and Bing learn the context. Along cam mobile and raised the bar again. Google search on an iPhone is not only optimized for text, it is also optimized for time and place. Google knows where you are and what the time is. In the same spot it may return different first pages depending on if it is 10am or 6pm. Your content needs to reflect such changes.

Content, after all, is King.

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Craft Beer Talk

Pushing The Reviews

Perhaps I’m learning more about Search Engine Optimization or perhaps I’m lucky. My article about former classmate Edwina Marquand is now the first link when searching for her name. In a future article I’ll be sure to do the same for another former classmate by the name of Kevin Pelch. After all, he is the one who gave me the nickname Ropeman in the 10th grade. It is a name I used proudly for years until Anne Langley gave me the one of Brainmuffin. That, however, is writings for another time.

As many readers know, I also write as the Cincinnati Craft Beer Examiner. As the Cincinnati beer scene is going crazy these days, it is quite a bit keeping up. Several breweries have opened over the last few years, including Listermann’s (yes, the home brew supply place), Mad Tree and Double Barrel. Oh, what to do.

Well, it is time to do reviews. Not of one beer from each brewery. No, that wouldn’t feed my OCD very well. It is time to review everything available. Oh great…more text to read. Yes, but also video reviews. Pictures of beer (posted to Flickr too). After all, it is time to combine all my passions into a single, directed future. It is time time to combine beer, photography and writing. After all, Charlie Papazian was the one who pushed me to start on Examiner and it is high time his recommendation was rewarded.

 

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Commentary

A Coffee Shop Millionaire Review

English: Roasted coffee beans photographed usi...
English: Roasted coffee beans photographed using a macro technique. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Over the years, I’ve tried all manner of business. I’ve been in Amway. I did the iMall when it first started. I’ve tried Russ Dalbey’s real estate notes business. So naturally I had to try Coffee Shop Millionaire.

Like many people who have fallen so this scam, I came across a video narrated by Anthony Trister. Here he claims to show ClickBank accounts that he “hasn’t touched in 3-4 months” and are on “autopilot”. The numbers look impressive. A few thousands dollars in sales everyday can really add up. Wow. Tell me more.

Anthony goes how to say how this video will not be on the Internet for long and that it could be taken down at anytime. This is, of course, total bunk and is there to make you turn your purchase into an impulse buy. This is the take away maneuver.

The Coffee Shop Millionaire video continues to show sales by “ordinary people” who are using the system. The next phases being how much the program is worth. Anthony claims it is worth thousands. The truth? Simple searches using Google will show you all the Coffee Shop Millionaire program will teach you for free. Want to know about Google adwords? Search for it. Want to know how to use YouTube or FaceBook to generate leads? Search for it. The Internet has all this information for free. Why buy the Coffee Shop Millionaire to get free information?

This is why the price for the program drops the longer you watch the video. The value is given in thousands of dollars, yet the price starts in a few hundred. Then it drops to $97. Then $37. Some links will give you $10 off the price and therefore the worthless program can be had for $27. If this program was really worth thousands of dollars, do you really think it would be sold for $27? Image if this was a house and the bank claimed it was worth hundreds of thousands, but they stated it could be purchased for only $3,000. Would you wonder what is wrong with it?

Oh wait, there’s a users’ forum. Oh goody. Here people who have no idea what they are doing can exchange worthless ideas with one another. Yeah, no thanks.

In all, the Coffee Shop Millionaire is a worthless program. Want to do affiliate marketing? Spend some time searching the web for information, blend it together and find your path. Want to know SEO? Search on adwords and SEO, do it in your blogs and test the results. You surely don’t need some worthless Coffee Shop Millionaire program.

 

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Random Musings

Good Content Makes For Good Conversation

Girl with smirk
Girl with smirk (Photo credit: BrainMuffin)

My marketing mentor Gregg Davison is found of many phrases. Many would be quick to recite his “It is always sunny when you are making money” quip. He is also keen on another important phrase when it comes to successful marketing “Content is King”.

There are many blogs out there on the Internet. Many of the are popular and do bring in some money for their creators. Many of them bring in no one and don’t make a penny. Why? Simple: bad content.

Creating good content is more than bringing up the Google adword tool and finding good keywords to use. Sure, if you want trying to sell a business opportunity about making money on the Internet, the usual advice is to look for those keywords and get them into your content. Gurus will tell you that your content should have somewhere between 3-5% of your “making money” keywords so that Google will like your content and rank it high. When it comes to a phrase like “Making money on the Internet,” how many websites could Google possibly place on the first page? Exactly.

Having a good blog that attracts readers is more than just good use of keywords in your content. The content itself needs to be good. You want to attract readers. You want them to return. You need to find you niche.

Finding your niche is about your story. Who are you? What are your interests? Forget about the awesome Internet money making opportunity you have and tell the readers more of you. They want to believe they know you, so tell them. Don’t let every article be on some new marketing technique you learned on the previous night’s call with Jay Kubassek.

Here’s a great for instance. A classmate of mine from college has her own blog. Always wanting to keep a few extra pounds off, she embraced her struggles and shares her story. The result? She attracts like minded individuals who are looking to achieve results. Her readers like that she is not trying to use the blog to hawk particular products, so they see her openness and candor as refreshing. They also celebrate each others victories. That is what blogging is about! Take hold and triumph!

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Commentary

Welcome to everyone

What a week this has been! More people registered with the blog this past week than ever

Pedaling Through the Past
Pedaling Through the Past (Photo credit: brizzle born and bred)

before. It would seem people are finding their way here and it is so much fun! Welcome to all the new people!

When I started this blog, the whole intent was to publish who I am so people could know and understand my story. This was going to be a means to making money. Marketing after all, is all about making relationships. How little did I know.

The journey over the last year plus has been an incredible one. I’ve started and closed an LLC. I’ve joined other programs. I’ve made many videos. I’ve learned much.

I’ve learned SEO is more an art than science. I’ve learned Premier Mentoring is a total scam. I’ve learned Marketing and getting results is hard. I’ve learned I love it all.

Normally, the postings on this blog have no I statements. Today this is being broken to show that behind this blog is a real person. A person with dreams and ideas and goals and wants and needs. A person with flesh and blood and a heartbeat. That is what makes this blog personal. That is the power.

Upcoming will be discussions on mobile marketing and getting your website ready for the mobile wave. Expecting users to pinch and expand to view your website is the past. More forward or get left behind.

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Internet Marketing

Search Engine Optimization – It Moves

The beginning

Search Engine Optimization. What is it? Does it work? How can it be used? Where is it? Why does it keep changing? Is SEO a verb or noun? What about? What about? What about???

In the early days of the web, search engine optimization was nearly unheard of. Websites were grouped by audience or subject. Business sites over here. Research sites over there. Government sites on the shelf below. Yahoo felt more like a library or a book store than a search engine. Ideas for indexing content was in its infancy and WAIS databases were king. The most used protocol was Z39.50, not e-mail, ftp, telnet, gopher or web. Times were about to change.

The Middle

Along came Alta Vista and the proverbial genie was out of the bottle. Now someone did not have to look through a endless sea of categories for a website, but could now enter words and phrases. Ask Jeeves allow the user to take the next step and ask in a question form: “What is the color blue?”, “Why is the sky blue?”, “How is beer made?”. The web and Internet were becoming synonyms, even though the Internet is more than the web. People were getting dial up accounts in large numbers. The web was growing exponentially. Thousands of sites were being added each day. How could a business be heard in all that noise?

By studying the algorithms of the search engines, content started to be created that took advantage of it. Pages did not necessarily have to be human readable. All it had to be was consumed by the spiders and seen as optimized by the search engine. When a page is optimized for say “the best home business” or “make money now stuffing envelopes”, it gets pushed to the top of the page. A business’ voice is heard the best and loudest. They get more traffic, others get less.

As pages become flooded with keywords to create better search engine optimization, the spammers took over. Site after site of pure gibberish was created. The charlatans started to win. The snake oil salesmen gave everyone a bad name. Something had to give. It did.

Panda Me

The largest search engine, Google, changed their algorithm. Panda went live and search engine optimization changed overnight. Content became king again. Real content. Not machine gibberish. Articles started to become relevant again. Blogs mattered. The sun came out.

Google continues to change their algorithm. Search engine optimization has become both an Art and a Science. Good content, good social awareness and backlinking all play their part in making sites rank higher. Sure, the spammers will now hire armies of writers to earn their top spots again, however, their efforts and expenses will greatly increase. In the meantime, actual individuals will be able to have their voices heard.

Learn to move with search engine optimization or get left behind. Know what the changes mean. Create your content to adhere to the new standards. Be heard. Be seen.

Bryon Lape can also be read on HubPages. A longer form article entitled SEO: the moving target can be found there. Read. Comment. Share. Together we grow.