What To Do When Your Site Drops

It's happened to all of us. You wake up one morning feeling like a million bucks, you stretch and if you're like me, you notice the eye-rolling as once again your significant other catches you with a toothbrush dangling from your mouth and a laptop or iPhone in front of you while you check rankings and emails. And then it happens - you start your browser with a search phrase already set to display and you notice that your site no longer holds it's previous position and the move is not in the right direction. We've all faced it and the longer you've been an SEO or website owner the more times you've seen it happen. But still ... what do you do? To quote the immortal Douglas Adams, "Don't panic."

Believe me - I know how hard it is sometimes. It's easy for me to say this to clients when I see an engine fluctuating or a site has dropped only a position or two and we're working to react but it's a completely different thing when it happens to you and (might I add) a good reminder to SEO's as to what our clients go through. But I still haven't answered the question have I? What do you do? What ... do ... you ... do?

There are five basic steps one must take when their site drops (I like to keep things simple and a 5 step check-list is a great way to do that). These steps assume that to start with you had a well-optimized website with good SEO practices followed. If you don't then the reasons you dropped are pretty clear but if you've got a well-optimized site and your site has fallen - then this is for you. You should:

1 - Build Links

It's very difficult for people to not want to do something proactive when they notice their site drop. I know - I've been there. One of the easiest things to do to keep yourself busy while working on the other 4 steps below is to build links. Building good, solid links to your site will never hurt and will only help you out so even if one of the later steps might show you other actions you need to take (or not take) you'll never go wrong with some solid link building and if nothing else - it'll make you feel like you're doing something and stop you from doing other things that might do you more harm than good.

I'm not going to go into all the different types of links you could build or what the anatomy of a good link is. Many articles, forums and blog posts have been written in the past and are easily found online. I'm sure if you monitor a few good SEO forums you'll find more being written every day. If you can - find articles by Eric Enge. While he doesn't give it all away (who does?) - you won't go wrong taking his advice and even seasoned SEO's are likely to learn a thing or two from reading his work.

2 - Relax For A Couple Days

Before you rush to your favorite site editing tool - relax. Slight tweaks in content are unlikely to make much of a difference (if any) to your rankings. If you've got solid, well-optimized content and suddenly your site's fluctuating - cramming in a few more instances of your targeted phrase will likely do more harm than good.

Now - when I say relax I basically mean, don't touch your site. There are steps (such as link building) that you can work on including the analytical work noted below. Just don't go editing all your copy to try to chase some tweak in Google's algorithm. Relax.

3 & 4 - Analyze The Sites That Have Out-Ranked You (Onsite And Offsite)

One of the best things you can do is to take a look at the sites that are out-ranking you to find out what they've done. This will tell you two things: One - are there some good tactics that you're missing, and Two - are these rankings likely to hold or are they flawed? There are two areas you'll want to look at and those are the onsite optimization and the backlinks.

When you're looking at the onsite optimization you need to only briefly look at their keyword densities, H1 and title tags, internal linking structure, number of indexed pages and the amount of content on the page. Remember: I'm assuming that (as you were ranking previously) you have a solidly optimized website with some good SEO practices and content guidelines followed. If you look at these and compare the newly ranking sites with your site and with other sites that have held their positions and dropped you'll get a feel for whether there are trends. If there are common traits among the sites that have moved up then you may be on to something. Remember the common trends among the sites that have climbed and held and also remember what they have that the sites that have dropped do not. Remember: there may be no common trends or nothing you can find out with this small a sample. Once this step is complete it's time to move on to backlink analysis.

Backlink analysis is a good practice to undertake every few months regardless of updates but definitely necessary now that you're dropping. What you need to do now is to analyze the backlinks of the sites that are out-ranking you. Depending on the competition level this can be a brutal task in that it's not just about numbers. You should use Yahoo!'s link:www.domain.com command and visit many of the sites in your comeptitors backlinks. What you're trying to do is get a full view of what their links look like. You'll also want to download SEO Link Analysis (A Firefox extension you'll find at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7505/). When you're doing a backlink check it automatically displays the PageRank and anchor text of the backlinks though I'd still HIGHLY recommend visiting a good many of the sites to see what kind of links they are.

Once again you're going to be looking for the architecture of the backlinks of the sites that are moving up. What tactics they're using, what their links look like on the page, what anchor text distribution they've got. Once again you're going to compare that with other sites on the rise, your site and other stable sites to see what is common between those that are climbing and holding their grown vs those that have fallen.

Once we've collected this data it's time to act. Collect all the common traits that the climbing and holding sites have and ...

5 - Take Action

You're done waiting around preforming the tedious task of link building. You've got your data and you're ready to launch into action and get some stuff done. But wait (oh no - did he say wait again?) is action really the best thing?

When you've pooled your data you need to decide what it means. Let's take for example a situation where the newly ranking sites have very low word counts and tons of footer links (looks paid to me). Do you REALLY want to follow their lead? The question you need to ask yourself in this case is do the factors that are apparently working RIGHT NOW overall going to provide better or worse results? Is less content more or less likely to results in a satisfied visitor? Do paid footer links help Google deliver quality results over the whole of the Internet? In these cases the answer is easily "no" but your findings might be more subtle such as an extremely disproportionate use of targeted anchor text among the ranking sites or sp@mmy copy with keyword densities at 8 or 10%.

What you're in a position to do now is figure out a moving-forward strategy. If the common trends among the top and improving sites are bad or sp@mmy then you know the algorithm will correct itself eventually and you shouldn't chase it. If you need to do something – build some additional links and look for new phrases to rank for on other pages to help stabilize your traffic when individual phrases decline.

If you find that the factors that have created the new results are legitimate and will lead to better results overall you know you need to make some changes to what you're doing and fortunately – with the research you've just done you've got a great starting spot in that you can probably get some great resources and tactics from the lists of backlinks and onsite optimization you've just collected.

It may take hours or even days to properly perform this research but then – you needed something to do while your rankings are down. It might as well be productive.

Google Algorithm Update Analysis

Anybody who monitors their rankings with the same vigor that we in the SEO community do will have noticed some fairly dramatic shifts in the algorithm starting last Thursday (July 5th) and continuing through the weekend. Many sites are rocketing into the top 10 which, of course, means that many sites are being dropped at the same time. We were fortunate not to have any clients on the losing end of that equation however we have called and emailed the clients who saw sudden jumps into the top positions to warn them that further adjustments are coming. After a weekend of analysis there are some curiosities in the results that simply require further tweaks in the ranking system.

This update seems to have revolved around three main areas: domain age, backlinks and PageRank.

Domain Age

It appears that Google is presently giving a lot of weight to the age of a domain and, in this SEO's opinion, disproportionately so. While the age of a domain can definitely be used as a factor in determining how solid a company or site is, there are many newer sites that provide some great information and innovative ideas. Unfortunately a lot of these sites got spanked in the last update.

On this tangent I have to say that Google's use of domain age as a whole is a good filter, allowing them to “sandbox” sites on day one to insure that they aren't just being launched to rank quickly for terms. Recalling back to the “wild west days” of SEO when ranking a site was a matter of cramming keywords into content and using questionable methods to generate links quickly I can honestly say that adding in this delay was an excellent step that insured that the benefits of pumping out domains became extremely limited. So I approve of domain age being used to value a site – to a point.

After a period of time (let's call it a year shall we) the age should and generally has only had a very small influence on a site's ranking with the myriad of other factors overshadowing the site's whois data. This appears to have changed in the recent update with age holding a disproportionate weight. In a number of instances this has resulted in older, less qualified domains to rank higher than newer sites of higher quality.

This change in the ranking algorithm will most certainly be adjusted as Google works to maximize the searchers experience. We'll get into the “when” question below.

Backlinks

The way that backlinks are being calculated and valued has seen some adjustments in the latest update as well. The way this has been done takes me back a couple years to the more easily gamed Google of old. This statement alone reinforces the fact that adjustments are necessary.

The way backlinks are being valued appears to have lost some grasp on relevancy and placed more importance on sheer numbers. Sites with large, unfocused reciprocal link directories are outranking sites with fewer but more relevant link. Non-reciprocal links lost the “advantages” that they held over reciprocal links until recently.

Essentially the environment is currently such that Google has made itself more easily gamed than it was a week ago. In the current environment, building a reasonable sized site with a large recip link directory (even unfocused) should be enough to get you ranking. For obvious reasons this cannot (and should not) stand indefinitely.

PageRank

On the positive side of the equation, PageRank appears to have lost some of it's importance including the importance of PageRank as it pertains to the value of a backlinks. In my opinion this is a very positive step on Google's part and shows a solid understanding of the fact that PageRank means little in terms of a site's importance. That said, while PageRank is a less than perfect calculation subject to much abuse and manipulation from those pesky people in the SEO community it did serve a purpose and while it needed to be replaced it doesn't appear to have been replaced with anything of substantial value.

A fairly common belief has been that PageRank would be or is being replaced by TrustRank and Google would not give us a green bar to gague a site's trust on (good call Google). With this in mind one of two things has happened; either Google has decided the TrustRank is irrelevant and so is PageRank and decided to scrap both (unlikely) or they have shifted the weight from PageRank to TrustRank to some degree and are just now sorting out the issues with their TrustRank calculations (more likely). Issues that may have existed with TrustRank may not have been clear due to it's weight in the overall algorithm and with this shift reducing the importance of PageRank the issues that face the TrustRank calculations may well be becoming more evident

In truth, the question is neither here nor there (as important a question as it may be). We will cover why this is in the ...

Conclusion

So what does all of this mean? First, it means that this Thursday or Friday we can expect yet another update to correct some of the issues we've seen rise out of the most current round. This shouldn't surprise anyone too much, we've been seeing regular updates out of Google quite a bit over the past few months.

But what does this mean regarding the aging of domains? While I truly feel that an aging delay or “sandbox” is a solid filter on Google's part – it needs to have a maximum duration. A site from 2000 is not, by default, more relevant than a site from 2004. After a year-or-so the trust of a domain should hold steady or at most, hold a very slight weight. This is an area we are very likely to see changes in the next update.

As far as backlinks go, we'll see changes in the way they are calculated unless Google is looking to revert back to the issues they had in 2003. Lower PageRank, high relevancy links will once again surpass high quantity, less relevant links. Google is getting extremely good and determining relevancy and so I assume the current algorithm issues has more to do with the weight assigned to different factors than an inability to properly calculate a links relevancy.

And in regards to PageRank, Google will likely shift back slightly to what worked and give more importance to PageRank, at least while they figure out what went awry here.

In short, I would expect that with an update late this week or over the weekend we're going to see a shift back to last week's results (or something very close to it) after which they'll work on the issues they've experienced and launch a new (hopefully improved) algorithm shift the following weekend. And so, if you've enjoyed a sudden jump from page 6 to top 3, don't pop the cork on the champaign too quickly and if you've noticed some drops, don't panic. More adjustments to this algorithm are necessary and, if you've used solid SEO practices and been consistent and varied in your link building tactics – keep at it and your rankings will return.

Google PageRank Update Analysis

For those of you not yet aware, Google is currently updating the PageRank they are displaying in their toolbar. Each update causes a stir among the SEO community and webmasters trying to get their websites to the top of the Google Rankings.

What Is PageRank?
Without getting into too much detail, PageRank is essentially a score out of ten as to the "value" of your site in comparison to other websites on the Internet. It is based on two primary factors; the number of links you have pointing to your website and the value of the links pointing to your website. The value is calculated based on the PageRank of the page linking to you and debatably the relevancy of the page linking to you (there is no hard evidence to back up the relevancy factor in regards to PageRank that I have seen however it definitely is a factor in your overall ranking).

If you are interested in more information on PageRank you would do well to visit the many forums and articles on the topic and also visit Google's own description on their website at http://www.google.com/technology/ where they give a brief description of the technology.

What's New?
The most current PageRank update will undoubtedly cause a larger stir than usual in that many sites have shown drops in their visible PageRank while at the same time showing significant increases in their backlinks. This fact reveals that one of three things has occurred in this latest update:

1. Google has raised the bar on PageRank, making it more difficult to attain a high level, or
2. The way they are displaying their backlinks has changed, or
3. The way they calculate the value of an incoming link has changed.

Any of these are possible and has been noted in the past as something they are willing to do. Additionally, it is possible for all to occur at the same time.

As we don't like to use client's as examples I will use the Beanstalk site, backlink counts, and PageRank changes as the meter by which the following conclusions are drawn, however this information was attained through looking at a number of client websites and their competitors.

Google Raising The Bar To Lower Yours
In the past few PageRank updates it has become quite apparent that Google is continuously raising the bar on PageRank. In their defense, with all of the reciprocal link building, link renting, etc. going on this was a natural reaction to the growing number high PageRank sites that attained those ranks simply by building or buying hundreds and thousands of links.

There is no doubt that this is a factor in the changes in this current update. If your site has maintained it's PageRank, and the PageRanks of your second-level pages then you have done well in holding steady and if your competitors have not been as diligent their positions will slip.

New Backlink Calculations
I mention this one only to bring to light that it is a possibility for your future consideration during other updates. The Beanstalk website went from 750 shown backlinks on Google to 864. it should be noted that Google does not show all backlinks (if you want a more accurate backlink count go to Yahoo! and enter "link:http://www.yourdomain.com" (don't forget the http://)).

When the Beanstalk site showed 750 backlinks on Google we were showing around 12,000 on Yahoo! (about 6.5% showing on Google). The Beanstalk site is now showing 864 on Google and 15,500 on Yahoo! (about 5.6%). If anything then Google is showing less links then before which negates the possibility that a website's PageRank is dropping due to a decrease in links but being hidden by an increased number being displayed.

In short, while which backlinks Google chooses to display has certainly changed over time it does not appear to be a major factor in this update. If you see an increase in your sites backlink counts during this update you undoubtedly have an increased number of links.

The Value Of Links
Separate from the number of links you have is their value. This appears to be an area of significant change in this update. Areas that appear to have reduced value in regards to affecting PageRank are:

1. Multiple links from the same site or run-of-site links
   Intelligent and relevant reciprocal links do not seem to have been penalized, probably due to the increased relevancy factor. If you reduce the value of irrelevant links and raise the value of relevant ones then there is no need to penalize reciprocal links as, done incorrectly, they will penalize themselves.
2. Links with text around them that indicate they are purchased such as "Partners", "Advertising", etc.
   Google has and is actively trying to reduce the value of paid links. This appears to have been moderately successful where there is clear indication that the link is paid for.
3. Links from sites that hold little relevancy (this factor is based on educated speculation)
   The relevancy factor appears to have become more important. Links from sites with content related to yours is showing positive results while sites with larger numbers of less relevant links are showing drops in PageRank.

What Does This Mean?
For those of you who have been proactive in your link building, and focused on relevant sites using the Google Directory, searches or a tool like PR Prowler it means, "stay the course". Those of you who have been building or buying links based only on PageRank with little concern for it's location, or how it is presented - you will need to adjust your link building efforts accordingly.

What Do I Do - My PageRank Dropped ?!!?
The first thing not to do is panic. Take a deep breath, PageRank is one factor of dozens that Google uses to determine the ranking of your page, it is not the only thing. Now, visit your main competitors sites - there's a good chance you'll see that they too dropped in PageRank. The plus side to these kinds of updates is that they're universal. It's not as if Google has it in for you specifically and so when they do an update, the positive and negative impact is felt by all.

Now, if you've noticed that everyone around you has stayed the same or increased in PageRank try to remember this, there's nothing you can do about where you're currently positioned in regards to PageRank and it will probably be another 3 months before Google updates the public PageRank again so ... start building some good quality (high relevancy, solid PageRank) links, work towards and increase in the next update.

Panicking now won't help, intelligent reaction will.

What Happens Now?
Traditionally the search engine results will begin to fluctuate based on the new visible PageRank 3 to 7 days after they are visible. This does not have to be the case as Google's had these numbers all along but it's worked this way in the majority of cases in recent history. So monitor your search engine positions over the next week or two and watch for changes. Try to hold back on making major changes to your site during this time as often the final positions will differ from those that can be viewed during the shuffling. In a couple weeks time evaluate where you stand and tweak your site as necessary but don't spend too much time on that ... you have a solid link building effort to undertake.

Using PPC To Maximize Your Search Engine Positioning ROI

The quest for higher search engine positioning on the natural search engines is generally the quest to increase revenue from a product or service. It is not the rankings themselves that hold any special value; it is the visitors that they bring and the resulting increase in business. It is for this reason that the PPC engines and namely the secondary ones are a great tool in developing a campaign strategy for the natural engines that will produce the highest return on investment.

While tools such as the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool and WordTracker are great tools for helping to determine which phrases are most searched, they cannot provide you with which phrases will produce the highest return on investment and let's be honest, search engine positioning is not about traffic it's about money. While traffic can often mean money, knowing which search phrases are going to lead to the highest conversion rates will give you a great advantage going into your SEO campaign.

While testing phrases on the PPC engines will result in an increased timeframe for your search engine positioning campaign, this step can result in much higher conversions from the traffic you are going to get. For example, if you were a business owner who was promoting a brand new acne treatment and you were to simply look for the phrases with the highest numbers of searches to target in the promotions for your site, you would undoubtedly settle on the single keyword "acne" as your primary targeted phrase. Will this produce the highest ROI? Unlikely and lets take a look at why:

Keyword phrase: acne
Searches: 2,470/day estimated on WordTracker
Inbound links of #1 site: 2,642 on MSN
Number of pages of #1 site: 34,100
Approximate cost to optimize site assuming it is new with 50+ pages: $7,000 - $10,000 with guarantee.
Now, let's a take a look at a less competitive phrase such as "acne treatment":

Keyword phrase: acne treatment
Searches: 516/day estimated on WordTracker
Inbound links of #1 site: 216 on MSN
Number of pages of #1 site: 153
Approximate cost to optimize site assuming it is new with 20+ pages: $3,000 - $5,000 with guarantee.

Armed with this information you would then want to test these two phrases on the PPC engines. Engines such as Google and Overture provide great reporting tools that will enable a website owner to actually track which phrases are converting for them, however at $8.85/click on Overture to be #1 for "acne" or $2.90 to be #1 for "acne treatment", that option may be just a bit out of your price range. And so we have the secondary engines.

Pay-per-click engines such as Enhance Interactive (formerly Ah-ha) make a great testing ground for those choosing their keyword phrases. Ranking #1 for "acne" on Enhance can be had for $0.15/click and "acne treatment" is only $0.23 to be #1. Setting aside the money that could potentially be made from the PPC engines themselves, with bids this low this engine and others like it make great testing grounds for keyword selection.

To test your keyword phrases simply bid to be #1 or at least in the top three for a potential primary target phrase. Keep the site ranking for a couple weeks monitoring your traffic and the sales of your product/service. After a couple weeks remove the phrase from your list and switch it to an alternative phrase. Again, monitor this success of this phrase for a couple weeks. After you have tested all of your potential primary phrases you will be in a position to assess which one will produce the highest return on investment.

Selecting which phrase will produce the highest ROI based on these numbers can be a bit more involved, weighing a number of factors such as the cost in either time or money (or both) to optimize for the various phrases, the sales-per-click ratio, etc. Basically what you want to do is consider your budget vs. how much can you make per click and thus, how many sales you can expect per day based on the keyword phrase you have chosen to target. If a promotion can pay for itself over a 3 to 6 month period of time, thus producing a surplus after it is paid off, it can be considered a successful promotion.

It should be noted that this step is not an exact science. The number of sales you will get per day will be dependant on exactly what position you attain on the natural engines (your content is also important obviously, however you will have used your existing content on the PPC engines so for the most part you will be comparing apples-to-apples). There will be some guestimation but you will get a good idea of how many sales you would make if you ranked in the same position for all of the possible phrases.

While I have not tested the above noted phrases on the PPC engines and applied them to the natural engines I would feel confident in predicting the ROI would be higher for "acne treatment" based on two factors:

1. The competition is lower and thus the number of sales required to produce a return on investment is about half that of the phrase "acne".
2. The phrase is far more targeted. People searching for "acne" may be writing papers on the subject or just looking for information whereas people searching for "acne treatment" are far more likely to be looking for a solution to an acne problem.

While I have my instinct on the subject, were I to advise a client on the best possible strategy I would have to recommend testing these phrase on the PPC engines. It may extend the promotion for a bit but in the end the decision on which keyword phrase makes the best target will be based far more on statistics and facts than a simple guestimate.

The Search Landscape Reflected In Paid Results

Any of you who have read some of my past articles or who have visited Beanstalk's services pages will know – I'm not a PPC guy. Quite honestly, it's not in my primary skill set and it's something I would definitely prefer to leave to the experts. Now that said, following Google and it's health (which is tied directly to AdWords and AdSense) is something I'm keenly interested in. To this end, recent changes in Google's paid search display and ranking systems will have huge impacts on advertisers and, more important for the purpose of this article, on Google itself.

A couple weeks ago a friend of mine, Richard Stokes from AdGooroo sent me a PDF titled, “Search Engine Advertiser Update – Q208”. With this document they outline the changing trends in the paid search marketplace and many of the stats are surprising. If you're a PPC manager they're obviously directly important. For those of us in the organic optimization world they are still both interesting and important They're interesting for reasons which will become clear further below and they're important because anything that affects the economic health of the search engines affects the search landscape both inside and outside of the paid search realm.

Paid Search Market Share

What could be more important to the engines than their percentage of the paid search arena. Does Google really care about being the dominant search engine as far as organic search goes? Let me put this a different way, if Google was standing in front of their shareholders – would they prefer to announce that they held 80% of all worldwide searches and reported revenues of $7.8 billion dollars for the quarter OR would the rather stand up and say they hold 20% of all worldwide searches and reported revenues of $8.7 billion dollars? Organic results drive traffic which is turn results in clicks on paid ads. From a business standpoint that's the only reason that organic search even matters.

So which engine has the healthiest paid search environment? According to AdGooroo, Q2 results show a different world that one might guess (which is why I noted that it is interesting).

Over the past twelve months advertiser growth (or lack thereof) breaks down as follows:

• Google - -8.5%
• Yahoo! - +9.8%
• MSN - -6.7%

Advertiser counts have also changed (i.e. the number of advertisers on the engine). Yahoo! leads in this area as well with a growth of 0.03%, Google dropped by 6.4% and MSN dropped by almost 20% (good thing they have their OS revenue to fall back on).

And A Drop In Ads

To go even further, Google has increased the importance of quality which has resulted in a reduction of nearly 40% in the number of ads that appear on a results page. 6 months ago ~6.5 ads appear per page whereas now that number is closer to 4. This has the potential to significantly help or significantly hinder Google's revenue.

As Richard Stokes points out and I completely concur, this places Google in an environment where one of two things will happen:

1. Advertisers will realize that their clicks are converting much higher, search marketers will spend more time and resources creating more and more relevant ads and landing pages and advertisers will be willing to bid more as the conversions increase, or

2. The competition for the top spots will be reduced and so too will the average bid prices.

Google's Q2 Report

And what inspired the writing of this article was actually the release of Google's Q2 report earlier today. After reading it I immediately had to contact Richard and let him know that the results confirmed some of the predictions noted in his work. He writes:

“... the auction-based bidding system makes this a double-edged sword. As the number of advertisers declines, so does the competitive pressure for higher bid prices. If advertisers don’t step up to the plate and bid more aggressively for placement, then it’s possible that search revenues could stagnate.”

Google revenues were up only 3% over Q1 of this year and revenue from paid click was down by 1%. This is the first time in Google's history post-IPO that I can remember them showing reductions in revenue in one quarter over the previous. It appears that this new paid search model in not quite as effective at pulling in money as the old.

Now, to be fair, the new system of requiring higher quality scores and better ads and landing pages is new – only a few months old at this point and so there are likely still bugs to be worked out but Wall Street did not react favorably to the announcements today and I suspect that the situation isn't going to look better for Google at the close of day tomorrow (though what do I know about stocks).

What Does This Mean?

So what does this mean? This means that Google has a lot of work to do and those in the paid search space need to pay close attention (even closer than normal) as shareholders don't like to see losses and Google is going to need to make moves to recover and show significant gains by the time their Q3 reports come out.

One might guess that this also means that Yahoo! Is gaining ground (which is true) but it's definitely a case of too little too late. Also earlier today (it was a busy day in search) Yahoo! released a letter to its shareholders that on one hand referred to the alliance between Microsoft and Carl Icahn as a destroyer of shareholder value for Yahoo! and then went on to say that they would be willing to sell the company to Microsoft at $33/share (which is what Microsoft has offered previously and which is more than $10 above their current market value).

It seems that the one can't look at the stronger relative results in the paid search area that Yahoo! has achieved as a win when they seem to be backsliding on their initial position regarding the sale to Microsoft.

So Where Do We Go From Here?

For one thing, watch closely. Monitor resources such as AdGooroo's research library, and the Clix Marketing blog. Pay close attention as we're going to see a lot of changes to what's going on and these changes are likely going to have effects on both the paid and the organic results as Google strives to provide the better results they're targeting through paid search now but at the same time increase their revenue.

This may involve adjustments to the quality scoring (I can pretty much guarantee that one) and may involve adjusting how the paid ads appear on the page with the organic results. All we can really do is watch, wait and adapt.

Note: a big thanks goes out to Richard Stokes and the AdGooroo team for providing the research and stats behind this article. Your keyword research tool and compatition analysis capabilities are awesome !!!

How To Write For Search Engines

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) writing, as a distinct style, was born in the Internet era and has matured before our very eyes in a relatively short span of time. Although it is evolving and maturing still, and will continuously do so, we can define some of the tried and tested steps of content optimization to help unique pages place at or near the top of search engine rankings.

Some experts go on to say that the goal of SEO is two-fold, with the first objective to put out the appropriate "bait" for search engine spiders and the second to serve up useful information to people who want and need it. Debates about priorities continue among SEO professionals, but it is never a good idea to devalue the human factors in any success formula. The singular goal, then, would be to develop, position and refine content in such a way as to satisfy all visitors to the page and/or site, both human and bot alike.

Rethinking search engine content terms

"Content is king," goes the old saying – and not only is good content king, it is becoming more important with every passing day. But the term content is best taken in its broadest sense. Content is not simply the written copy placed in a document, assembled on a page, or aggregated at a site. It includes all this, of course, but content actually comprises titles, headings, tags, intra-site links and external links, as well.

All of these components need to work together and form an interconnected whole so that both search engines and humans find the right things, come to the right conclusions and, most importantly, make the right decisions. Good writing is always targeted to the audience, and you are writing for an audience of two readers, human and software. Remember these two components of the audience and find creative ways to reach both of them at the same time.

First things first

Titles are critically important – they are usually the first thing read by both real and virtual visitors. A title is the "primary topical identifier" and, as such, has an invaluable function – again, a dual-purpose one. It must contain keyword targets at the individual word level while stoking interest in potential readers at the phrase level.

When a person performs a search, the title is both their first indication of your relevance to their needs and your first opportunity to compel them to click through. Search engines, more clinical and objective, give the title importance because they see it as an indicator of the page’s main idea.

Yet many pages on the Internet have no title at all, or share "Home" and "Untitled" with several million others. There is no excuse for this oversight. The ignorant cousin of these mistakes, making the company name by itself the title of every page, is just as bad. Keywords relevant to the page should be part of every page's title.

Heading tags carry some importance too. Simply put, heading tags define the headings and subheadings of your article to both readers and spiders. By default they appear larger than normal text and are bolded. While not a magic ranking bullet, they are looked at with more importance than average text and are an opportunity to show spiders the themes of your content and what keywords you wish to rank for.

The H1 tag is the main heading of your article and carries the most importance, like a headline in a newspaper article. It should clearly convey the article’s topic to the reader and main keywords to the search engines. H2 tags are one level down in importance and structure. Use them to define subtopics under your main topic, and again use keywords where descriptive and useful. If you needed to break down your article to sub-sub-headings, you would use the H3 tags, and so forth.

For both human and robotic readers, it is vital to keep page content focused. The "one topic per page" rule is an unwritten one, certainly, and it's followed by most professional content developers. This has less to do with the intelligence of the readers (either kind) than it does with several other considerations. For one thing, search engine "crawlers" have algorithms that tend to work best on one concept at a time, and most humans work best this way, too.

In addition, limiting the focus eases the task of placing keywords in the meta descriptions, page title, body copy, tags and links. Finally, dealing with more than one topic necessarily means using more verbiage, which dilutes the potency of a site-wide SEO program and may negatively impact ranking. Better to give these other topics their own content, strengthening your site’s overall informational authority.

SEO copywriting balance

Much ink has been spilled and many pixels propagated in discussing SEO techniques, analyzing strategies, teaching "web content" writing, and chasing changing algorithms. Mentioned less but encompassing everything is that SEO copywriting, like all SEO, is about balance.

While articles such as this one can be helpful, it is important to understand that SEO will always evolve, change, adapt and improve. Study and implement tested techniques, but remain flexible and nimble. Writing for search engines and people at the same time is tricky and challenging at best, and can be frustrating and time-consuming, too. Approach the challenges in a businesslike fashion.

SEO content writing at its best balances art with science, blending the craft of engaging the reader with the dispassionate analysis of keywords on a page. Follow best practices, but fill each article to the brim with information useful to your demographic.

In simultaneously targeting a subject, an audience, and an algorithm, a great deal of creativity must take place to get effective SEO results. And, of course, it all has to happen in an environment that encourages short attention spans and constantly tries to lure people elsewhere. It is a major challenge to craft article titles and copy so compelling as to make people stop and read – or, better yet, stop and then click where you want them to.

Basics, opportunities, and consistency

The basic approach to writing for such a dynamic, ever-changing environment is to get to the point quickly. The "USA Today" news style – which relies on short headlines, descriptive sub-headlines and a few concise paragraphs – is perhaps the best analogy for good SEO writing. The important points (keywords) should appear early and often, and within a short period of time the human readers should know what they are supposed to do, while the search engines should be able to tell what the page is about from a consistency between your page structure and your body copy.

In the eyes of the search engines, everything that it can possibly see counts. That is, using image alt-text not only helps blind readers and people using phone- or text-based browsers, it also gives you another opportunity to add more descriptive strength to the overall page for the search engines. Do not miss any opportunity to further empower and refine your content.

And always remember when writing for search engines – keep writing. Write write write. Search engine bots gorge on new information, and if you consistently update your site with fresh content they will come around more often. While this gives you more opportunities to display your value, more importantly it builds the foundation of information that obviates it.

There's a lot to do, and it all needs to be done well. Use your numbers, metrics and analytics to point you in the right direction for creating more content. That’s some science. Your creativity and amount of useful information, on the other hand, will point site visitors and search engines in the right direction. That’s a touch of art. When both aspects of your SEO program are firing on all cylinders, you should soon be marching up the search engine rankings.

Picking A Web Designer

As an SEO we get two kinds of sites; those that were designed in the past and where the designer is no longer involved, and the sites where the design is either ongoing or we are working with the web designers from the start. Both of these have their pros and cons as an SEO but there is a clear advantage of one over the other for the client.

First, let's discuss the pros and cons to the SEO. If we are coming in after the design is completed there are more than likely (and by that I mean 99.9% likely) some structural and or major design issues that will need to be addressed. Unless the web designer is skilled in SE-friendly design we are going to have our work cut out for us just dealing with structural issues. On the positive side of this scenario, we're left to just work on the site with no designer taking it personally when we tell them we need to make changes (and that can lead to some issues).

Now let's look at the other scenario. Working with a designer has it's cons which is generally – we're going to have a designer taking it personally when we need changes made to the structure of a site or challenging us when we're arguing that while an all-Flash site is visually appealing, it leaves something to be desired from and SEO standpoint. This conversation generally goes something like this (and all you SEO's out there can sing along):

SEO – Flash cannot be properly read in the same way as HTML and we need to have easily spidered content for the search engines to see.

Designer – Flash can be read by Google.

SEO – But not in the same way. We need multiple pages of optimized content and Flash just isn't going to provide that.

Designer – Well I disagree (probably read in some forum somewhere that a misc. guy had no problem ranking for “bob wyverniuschuck artist” with a Flash site) but even if that's true – it's the conversion that counts and this Flash site is going to convert.

SEO – Yes we understand that conversions are important but so is traffic. If we can't get traffic to the site then a 100% conversion ratio is irrelevant.

Designer – There are other ways to get traffic.

SEO - Yes I understand that but this is what the client has hired us to do and has asked that we work together to build an attractive site that ranks well.

Designer – I'm going to have to talk to them about this ...

SEO -

So this is the down side and an extreme example of it (for humor as much as illustration). But there's a big upside and that comes when you have the opportunity to work with web designers who know how important SEO is (as an SEO who knows how important a good design is). Working to balance the two can be a daunting task and having the skills of the SEO matched with the skills of the web designer can be a true blessing. For example, I may have a great idea to make a site more easily navigated by search engines but an ugly solution to implement it whereas the designer may have a more attractive solution in mind if they know the problem and the technical solution.

Such a scenario has recently come about in our dealings with Moonrise Design. Moonrise contacted us in advance of their starting work for a client, had us sit in on conference calls to understand the client's needs and has since had us helping structure the site properly from the ground up. There is no resistance and we don't tell them what to do, we indicate the functions required – provide any technical background as necessary – and they implement it in a way that leaves the site FAR more attractive than if we had had to do it ourselves. Expert designers doing what they do best and understanding that what we do is SEO and the client wants to rank highly. Ah, it's a beautiful thing.

It is this experience and reflecting back on other web designers we've worked smoothly with in the past that inspired me to write this article. The article is more for potential clients of designers than for the designers themselves. So for those looking for a designer – if you want your site to rank highly and/or you'll be hiring an SEO – here's what to look for.

Picking A Web Designer

There are two main considerations that you'll need to make when you're picking your web designer. The first is, can they build an attractive site and the second is can they build a search engine friendly site?

Building an attractive site:

I am probably the last person to ask about what's attractive and what's not. When the Beanstalk site was up for a redesign a couple years ago I hired a professional web design company to build it. I can't create pretty things but I know how to test and I know how to monitor statistics to see if the traffic is behaving as I would hope.

Here's what to look at:

When you're choosing a designer take a look at their portfolio – put some of their designs past people in your target demographic and see what they think. It's also wise to view the sites of the leaders in your industry to see what they're doing (and maybe even who designed their sites). Just because you like something doesn't mean it's effective to your target market.

You also need to know if your designer is skilled at conversion optimization. Have they read such works as Enquiro's eye tracking studies. Have they done their research (or have you) regarding which colors make people act in which ways? These are extremely important issues to be aware of. If you look at the eye tracking studies - the Beanstalk site places our logo, the Hacker Safe logo and main title in the key zones. We also went with green giving a natural (easy on the eyes) feel that implies wealth and is strongly associated with money. When we changed to our current design the effects were immediately detectable in how our visitors behaved visiting more pages for longer periods of time and, most importantly, increasing our communication with us significantly.

If your designer is not aware of these things do not despair, they may be a fine designer indeed and may have this understanding intuitively (though a little research to back up any intuition is always a sound policy). That said, be aware of the information that is out there and ask questions when you're asked to approve designs.

Building a search engine friendly site:

This is crucially important but probably one of the areas we have to address most frequently. I can't possibly get into all the various areas of search engine friendly design so I'll simply list off a couple of the most common issue we encounter and then provide references to other reading.

Enormous amounts of code on the page. For some reason, even some new designs are coming to us as though they were out of 1998 as far as the page code is concerned. All skilled web designers should have a solid grasp of CSS and should be putting all the main formatting into this file(s). Way too often we're getting sites with dozens of font tags, color tags, size tags, etc. etc. etc. This just gives the search engines a lot more to dig through to find what they want – the content. I'm not even going to get into tables as that opens a whole other can of worms. If your site is table-based (your designer or SEO will be able to tell you this if you don't know) there are some basic practices to insure that the code these tables add is minimized. Unfortunately I can't get into the myriad of different situations this can entail and will have to save it for a future article (so be sure to bookmark our SEO blog to keep up-to-date on that and other developments in the industry).

Bad internal links. You want your internal pages to rank. Most sites will generally target the highest priority phrases on the homepage of the site but the internal pages are the ones that will rank for specific products, services and long tail phrases. To maximize the rankability of the internal pages you need them to be easily found by the spiders and you need to associate these pages with the keywords you're targeting. In short, you need to link to them with text and you need that text to include the keywords. This isn't some deep, dark mystery of SEO and has been well documented and commented on but we've seen tons of instances where internal links are image only or worse, an unspiderable script-based navigation system.

If your designer is using image or script-based navigation for aesthetic reasons that's fine. In fact, it'll likely leave you with a more appealing site visually however you need to make sure your key pages are linked to in the content of you homepage or from text in the footer to insure they get found and spidered quickly and easily.

Over-optimized pages. I love seeing websites that were developed by a web designer who “knows SEO” and has stuffed so many keywords and header tags into the pages that it reads more like an eye chart than sales copy. I can't list all the abuses that exist out there but here's a quick sample of what your page shouldn't read like (and I'll use digital cameras as the example again):

Digital Cameras

Digital cameras are very useful. When you need digital cameras to take digital pictures you'll want to look for our cameras first. Our digital cameras are the best digital cameras you can buy online. So when you want to buy digital cameras online be sure to visit our store and buy digital cameras online from us at the lowest prices.

Can you see what's wrong there? Well so can the search engines. Your pages should read like your writing for a visitor and not a search engine. Yes you need to make sure your keywords get in there (which should be easy since that's what the searchers is looking for information on) but you're not looking to cram them in with a density of 30%. If you can get a density of around 3% and kept the content easily read by your human visitors then you've done well.

I mentioned that I couldn't possibly list all the horrendous issues we've encountered from designers in the past but I also promised to list some other resources you can visit for additional information. Here they are:

• Great article by Sheri Thurow on the Clickz site titled, “Top Five SEO Design Mistakes
• A top 10 list on the Webconfs site, “Top 10 SEO Mistakes
• Another top 10 list – this time by Eric Enge on the Search Engine Watch site titled, “The 10 Most Common SEO Mistakes

If you see your web designer doing one or all of these then know in advance, you or your SEO is going to have some major hurdles to jump through.