Whether you’re currently using an SEO company to improve your website optimization or not the first thing you need to do is be able to monitor and track where the visitors are coming from, what frequency and through what sources and search terms.
We recommend a good reliable tracking system like:
www.statcounter.com
Tom Peary is the director of SEO21 Ltd. Offering SEO, Website Design, Digital Marketing, Google Places Optimisation, Guest Blogging, Copywriting and Link Building Services.
I love it when a plan comes together……
We were approached by a company last May who’d been hit by the Google Penguin update after their SEO expert had done some questionable link building.
Well after almost 10 months of applying to each offending site to remove the back links and cleaning up the on page content and 4 reconsideration requests today we received an email from Google with the good news.
I didn’t think responses happened as our last reconsideration request was submitted at the beginning of December.
But here it is:
Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.******.com/,
We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www.******.com/ for compliance with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Previously the webspam team had taken manual action on your site because we believed it violated our quality guidelines. After reviewing your reconsideration request, we have revoked this manual action. It may take some time before our indexing and ranking systems are updated to reflect the new status of your site.
Of course, there may be other issues with your site that could affect its ranking without a manual action by the webspam team. Google’s computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users. If your site continues to have trouble in our search results, please see this article for help with diagnosing the issue.
Thank you for helping us to maintain the quality of our search results.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team
Tom Peary is the director of SEO21 Ltd. Offering SEO, Website Design, Digital Marketing, Google Places Optimisation, Guest Blogging, Copywriting and Link Building Services.
In the news today we see one of the largest public attacks on Google from failing search engine Bing. Although Bing is a great search engine it’s always going to be difficult for Microsoft to take on the search engine giant. But their recent public slag off that Google Shopping has been corrupted by paid for results is a pretty big one.
In the beginning, Google preached, “Don’t be evil“—but that changed on May 31, 2012. That’s when Google Shopping announced a new initiative. Simply put, all of their shopping results are now paid ads.
In their under-the-radar announcement, Google admits they’ve now built “a purely commercial model” that delivers listings ranked by “bid price.” Google Shopping is nothing more than a list of targeted ads that unsuspecting customers assume are search results. They call these “Product Listing Ads” a “truly great search.”
We say that when you limit choices and rank them by payment, consumers get Scroogled. For an honest search.
Yes Google announced in May 2012 that U.S shopping feeds would not be shown within the search results unless you paid for it. That was always going to happen, I don’t think it’s a good thing for the user but for Google, hell wouldn’t you? I prefer the old way it was organic, and honest results. If I wanted to get you to find my diet drug I could now simply pay for it to appear in any low grate, low competitive category for $100 per month. So there are some pretty obvious downsides and things that should be monitored to prevent this kind of misuse.
But this new paid for ad ruling is only in the U.S
We have thousands of live product items that we optimize our clients for, who are appearing on the first page right now. We can’t disclose this on our blog but if you get in touch we’ll give you more details and live examples.
Media Spin
The media has put a completely onesided spin on this story, it’s not always as black and white as you think.
I do feel this new direction Google have taken will continue to manifest in to other areas and countries. Whether it works or not is another thing, and whether they keep to this new format well, only time will tell.
For UK businesses wanting to monetize from Google Shopping, what are you waiting for? Do it before you have to pay per click.
Tom Peary is the director of SEO21 Ltd. Offering SEO, Website Design, Digital Marketing, Google Places Optimisation, Guest Blogging, Copywriting and Link Building Services.
If I can pass on just one piece of advice to anyone looking to find an approved SEO company is this.
You ideally want to see searches of a competitive nature and or if possible within the same industry sector as yours.
1.) Can you speak to your account manager on a daily basis?
2.) Is your account manager an SEO expert or just a salesperson?
3,)Ask for explanations in English, cut off the geek talk.
Actually there is no such thing really. Google don’t promote any SEO companies but they do offer simple guidelines for SEO’s to follow. Now this is where we do come in to ‘Google Approved SEO’. We don’t bend the rules, no grey areas as far as we are concerned. If it can’t be done ethically and through whitehat SEO techniques then we aren’t interested. But we’ve never missed a deadline or failed to hit a first page result in 8 years. You can talk all the bull you want in this industry but when the chips are down it’s purely who can deliver real results.
We’re not the only UK SEO you’ll come across who can deliver amazing results on Google organic search, but pound for pound you won’t find any that come close. Our closest competitor has over 100 employees in London and a huge turnover. Yet week on week we compete with their clients results. The difference with us is that we’re a small SEO firm, but we’re bad ass at it. No huge overheads, we’re based in Newcastle where it’s 1972 compared to London rates. Only last week I paid for a computer with coal 😉
If you are looking for a fast and effective way to double and triple your business then contact Tom and SEO 21 now.” – Mike Squirrell Harleystreetphysiotherapy.com
Tom Peary is the director of SEO21 Ltd. Offering SEO, Website Design, Digital Marketing, Google Places Optimisation, Guest Blogging, Copywriting and Link Building Services.
Another successful DMOZ entry this week. Although we don’r really rely on DMOZ these days as it’s so hard to get approved it’s still nice when we get a site approved in less than a week.
I’m not going to give the name of the site just yet just because I am paranoid about who checks these things. If you want to know email me and I will give you these details privately offline.
There does seem to be one rule that applies to all DMOZ entries though and it’s showing itself more and more.
I think that’s 4 out of 6 entries in the last couple of months, not bad really.
And in case you were wondering if DMOZ still had any weight behind it – from the update search engine results for this site I just indexed ‘YES’ it went first page after being hit with the EMD (exact match domain) penalty as the site had been baron and untouched for 2 years.
Maybe Google EMD penalty can be overcome with a good directory listing with domain authority????
Will look in to this more.
Tom Peary is the director of SEO21 Ltd. Offering SEO, Website Design, Digital Marketing, Google Places Optimisation, Guest Blogging, Copywriting and Link Building Services.
Recent updates to Google’s search ranking algorithm means you need to make sure you don’t consider your SEO as something to do every now and then.
There are a lot of people reporting on forums that their results are dropping. None of ours of course!
As in make your site be every where. Don’t think that a few keywords are enough these days, it’s important to look at different permutations of your target keywords.
The single most important factor in SEO right now is be regular. This includes:
“The Best Way to See Results Right NOW!”
“Cheaper than print advertising & Google Adwords”
Complete this no obligation form and one of our team will find a cost effective way of smashing the competition.
[contact-form-7 id=”783″ title=”Contact form 1″]
Tom Peary is the director of SEO21 Ltd. Offering SEO, Website Design, Digital Marketing, Google Places Optimisation, Guest Blogging, Copywriting and Link Building Services.
Okay so we’re not the biggest fans of ageing dinosaurs such as Yell.com who’s exorbitant prices to feature somewhere that no one looks for a postage stamp sized add on the back end of a search facility that takes more time to use than reading this introduction….
So I heard this week that Yell.com is no more and they are re-branding to Hibu, WOW! I am no branding specialist but as far as names go this isn’t exactly pretty is it. Wasn’t Hibu the name of Aladdin’s monkey? Not sure about that one anyway.
Whether you love Yell or not I think this is a pretty important moment in local marketing history.
It’s the moment that old school directories that boasted huge profits for years and years before the internet boom finally admit it’s over.
I am really more surprised they’ve left it so long. Ifg they’d adapted to Search Engine Marketing years ago and not just waiting until there was no other option it would look more credible.
So no doubt many of you will be pestered by the minions of this fresh face new kid on the block, armed to the teeth with buzz words to juice you up in to buying more stuff that doesn’t work.
Tom Peary is the director of SEO21 Ltd. Offering SEO, Website Design, Digital Marketing, Google Places Optimisation, Guest Blogging, Copywriting and Link Building Services.
If our recent posts about making sure your website is hosted securely and running fast enough hasn’t been the wake up call you need then hopefully this will be.
If your foundations aren’t solid then your search engine rankings are likely going to follow the same trend. Google more than ever wants to see people taking more ownership and responsibility for where they host they website/blog. If your site has been down mor than twice in a month and Google bot has crawled your site at that time then you might start to see your rankings suffer. We did a post on this recently see ‘Is my website hosting secure?‘
Tom Peary is the director of SEO21 Ltd. Offering SEO, Website Design, Digital Marketing, Google Places Optimisation, Guest Blogging, Copywriting and Link Building Services.
You may be all over your SEO in terms of quality link building etc but is your hosting looking after your reputation?
A lot of webmasters have reported their sites having been attacked and injected with malware, this is a bigger problem than one might initially thing. Not only because you are putting any user at risk who views your website. But even more importantly your reputation and rankings with Google.
A recent example of this was when a good client of ours had their site attacked. Through no fault of their own and in fact just bad luck. An old version of wordpress which had a vulnerability allowed the hacker to add some malicious script in to the .htaccess file. This then ran commands to create links within pages and even allow them to create hidden folders.
Have your rankings recently dropped, even though you know it’s not down to dodgy back link building?
‘This site may harm your computer’ – is a pretty clear sign that your site is infected. This by the way is what your site users will see if they try and view your website content.
Eventually if this is not fixed your pages will be removed from the index, after dropping off the top 100 results.
So if it’s not Google Penguin up to his old tricks, then maybe it’s your website hosting that’s letting you down.
More and more research is showing us that reliable hosting plays a big part in SEO success.
One of our Ebay Partner Network sites recently had a fault with a WP plugin we added (we’ve all been there) – Google saw this happen 3 times in 30 days and all of a sudden didn’t want to show us in the results as it had been for 18 months.
So again the simple logic applies: Fix, Optimize for performance and update sitemap in webmaster tools.
Bot crawls will return to as they once were very quickly, just a week or two depending on your domain authority and rankings will get back to normal.
I don’t think enough importance is put on reliable, fast, secure website hosting. But think about it, it’s the foundation of your website, SEO, everything. If that’s a bit rocky and unreliable then why should anyone (namely the Google gods) present you to it’s users as a priority?
Tom Peary is the director of SEO21 Ltd. Offering SEO, Website Design, Digital Marketing, Google Places Optimisation, Guest Blogging, Copywriting and Link Building Services.
Just a quick update from my first earlier today.
I have just been sent the email I was hoping for to tell me my eBay affiliate partner account has been activated.
Tom Peary is the director of SEO21 Ltd. Offering SEO, Website Design, Digital Marketing, Google Places Optimisation, Guest Blogging, Copywriting and Link Building Services.
