How To Know What Keywords To Rank, New Warnings, Index Secrets Revealed…
Check the things you need to look after to keep your site appealing to search engines.
James Schramko, and welcome to the SEO news update.
How do you know what keywords you should be ranking for?
Here’s a couple of things we advise our customers. Now, we don’t charge extra for a keyword research report. It’s included in our packages making it great value.
First we ask the customer, please go and have a look at your analytics and see what traffic is coming to your site already.
Second, have you done any paid traffic with conversion tracking? Because if you have, you should know your money words. The ones that convert the customers.
Third, have you checked your search queries in Google Webmaster Tools? It will show you the words that are bringing traffic and your current position for those words and your click through rate. So that’s really good information.
If you don’t have access to that, use a tool like Ahrefs or SEMRush. Plug your website into those tools and let it tell you what you’re ranking for and of those phrases have a look at the cost per click value and the search query value for those phrases and perhaps target the ones where you are second, third, fourth, fifth, tenth, fifteenth. Those are usually going to be indicators if they’re relevant and if they have good cost per click. So that’s a starting guide for keyword research. But ask your project manager for help when you take any of our SEOPartner or LinkJuice packages.
Not All Warnings Are Equal
A little bit of news this week. Google via Matt Cutts via his Google+ page said that not all warnings mean that your site’s heavily penalized. It just means that you may have to look at some of the links that you’re getting that they might consider to be spammy. He said that now they will put a yellow notice if it’s something you should really be worried about in your Google Webmaster account. Otherwise it just means a portion of your links is not ideal.
What this means is you shouldn’t automatically panic if you get a warning but it is an indicator that something you’ve done in the past or something you’re doing now could be considered web spam and you probably want to take steps to remove that.
When Do Penalties Expire?
Now a different point, Matt Cutts has put out a video stating when penalties will be adjusted. Depending on the penalty, he said that at some point the action will be reviewed and the penalty should be removed. But if you haven’t made changes to fix whatever was causing the problem then or if they haven’t changed the algorithm to measure it differently, my interpretation of his video is that you’re likely to repenalize yourself so if you have been penalized, don’t just sit around waiting for the penalty to be lifted. Make changes to try and address whatever the concerns were. If it does get lifted and we have seen that a couple of our sites popped back in the last week. Our test sites that got hit earlier on have popped back and have been reindexed. If you see that but you haven’t made any changes it’s probably a good time to review the overall strategy.
Go and have a look at your link profiles and see if you can do something to make your site better. If you get hit again or slapped as they say put in a reconsideration request. We’ve seen now a number of cases where a reconsideration request has had a site reincluded in the index and away we go. We talked about that last week, one of our own examples.
If you do have a penalty, quite often the biggest cause is site-wide links to your site. If the links are to your homepage then it’s probably not a lot you can do about it. It’s very time consuming and now people are even charging for it to have links removed. That’s bad news if you’ve got a bad profile.
Protect Your Link Profiles
One way to protect yourself a little bit is make sure you keep adding new content to your site. I believe that freshness is a factor in the ranking algorithm and its good practice anyway and link to the most relevant page.
I do say this a lot but in most Penguin cases we’ve seen people have been bombing the homepage. You got to stop just building links to the homepage. It’s not natural or sensible. Link to the most appropriate page on your site. That is good SEO practice.
LinkJuice PRO Pack now Available
Good news for our LinkJuice customers. We are reintroducing our Pro Pack which is the entry level package. We’ve now increased the capacity of our team to add fantastic original content to relevant websites that are theme related to point back to your site. So now you can go and order a LinkJuice Pro from LinkJuice.com. It was a very popular package before, we couldn’t supply for a little while because we just got too busy and we had to make the starting point the extra.
If you’re interested in the Pro Pack go along and give LinkJuice.com Pro Pack a try. I think you’ll be so excited with the results you’d probably move up to an Extra Pack anyway but it’s great value and it’s back in the market. It’s now ready for you.
Index Data Revealed
There was an announcement on the Webmaster’s blog from Google. That they’re not showing you more index information so go into Google Webmaster Tools have a look on the health tab and check indexed and it will show you what pages of your site are indexed and it’s pretty cool.
Now consider this, every page you have on your site that is indexed is another entry point for someone to find out about you. So the goal is to keep adding pages to your site and you can track how often they get indexed in this particular Google Webmaster Tools section, in the health section.
Ask Your Project Manager
Remember our project managers are here to help you. We can help you with your site structure, we can show you where to adjust things like page titles and descriptions because they have to be unique per page on your site and keep adding fresh content.
I’ll catch up with you next week.
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