Imagine how much your heart would sink if all of a sudden, your snazzy new website, lost all its visitors, in fact you have to check twice just to make sure you have installed Google analytics correctly. This could be a reality if you don’t follow some simple rules to transfer across all your SEO juice from your old site to your new site.

Domains, Hosting, Redirect – If you have purchased a new domain for your site, whether it is a rebrand or a keyword rich domain, one of the best ways to preserve your SEO juice is to redirect it effectively. This is normally done with the search engine friendly way of a 301 redirect. This will effectively transfer all of your SEO goodness from your old domain to your new domain, including the less important page rank.

Keyword’s You Are Already Ranking For – It is very important before a redesign that you know exactly which keywords you already ranking well for. To do this use a ranking tool, and note the keyword, the page indexed, the position in the search engine result pages, and the date you checked.

Use Analytics – To make sure you are not missing your best money pages, use an analytics tool such as Google analytics and check which pages are getting the most traffic, to do this go to content>top content (set dimensions to source). Make sure that your new site has the same high ranking pages as your old site. Use the same keyword density, making sure the keywords are mentioned the same number of times in the title, meta tags, body text and image descriptions.

Beware Of the CMS – Don’t get me wrong I love Content management systems (CMS). However, the most frustrating part is because the pages are created dynamically the pages don’t actually exist. To conquer this and to give search engine’s something to index, the content is all pulled together and given a url, with lots of dashes, session id’s and other search engine un-friendly items. Make sure you url’s are nice and friendly. Most content management systems have a way of making the url’s search engine friendly and can help to create keyword rich pages.

Behind The Scenes – Here is where a certain tool called “Google webmaster tools” becomes your friend. To hurry along the indexing of your site within Google you will want to submit a new sitemap (this tells Google what pages you next them to index), robots.txt file (to tell Google which pages you want them to ignore, logins, private data etc) and don’t forget a nice friendly 404 error page. Even with the best planning in the world you may have a rogue page that no longer exists and to help search engines and users find their way back to your site, you’ll need a page which links back to indexed pages.

One point I MUST STRESS many web designers and web developers will set your site to “no index, no follow” whilst they develop the new site. This tells Search engines not to index your site. Once the site is live, make sure they put it back to “index, follow” or your SEO will have a heart attack as your suddenly disappears into the ether along with all the sweat, blood and tears put into your current rankings.

To protect Google.com logged in users, Analytics results will no longer show keywords that these users search for in its reporting data. This means that if a user checking your site is logged into their Google account and does a search the keyword they used will no longer be reported. The visit and data will still show.

Bearing in mind the amount of users logged in to their Google accounts and searching via the search engine, this could see quite a loss of keyword reporting data. Webmaster’s and SEO’s are upset by this, as part of the refining process of SEO’s is using analytics data to see which keywords users use to find a site and how long users spend on the site via a keyword compared to another.

Google on the other hand, see this is as a way of protecting the personalised search function and not reporting the keyword’s as a way to improve the security of logged in accounts. This arguement is flawed however, as analytics does not report the name of the user and the keyword searched, only the keyword data is reported, so the users details are kept completely anonymous.

Is this data only going to be allowed as part of the new Google analytics premium accounts?, or is Google really protecting the security of logged in users?

Now I am not going to tell you how to set-up Analytics or Webmaster Tools here, I am going to presume you already have done this or have the knowledge to do this. Although I may do this in a future post.

To bring up the new data you need to have your Google analytics account linked to your webmaster tools to do this:-

1. You will need the new version of Google analytics set up. To do this click the new version! button at the top

2. Click on traffic sources, then search engine optimization and you will be presented with the screen below

3. Here we need to associate our webmaster tools account. So go to back to your webmaster tools and you will presented with the following screen, click “manage site>Google analytics property> and link the account that matches your analytics account

And hey presto!. You will be presented with a whole new range of data to research!. Including impressions your keywords have made in the Google results, the percentage of these that have been clicked through (great for tweaking your meta description to improve click through) and the average position your site achieves.

This is an important breakthrough in Google history, as the search engine engages with webmasters and SEO’s by producing useful tools to help the ranking process.

Happy Searching!

Like anything good SEO is a system. Follow the rules and you have a good chance of not only increasing the ranking but qualified traffic and thus conversion.

Search Engine Optimisation is split into two sections onpage and offpage work. Onpage work consists of finding the right keyword phrases clients or customers may be searching for to find a website, optimising the website for these keywords, and checking the website is search engine friendly. Off page work consists of building links from other websites back to the target website.

On Page

The first part of SEO is finding the right keyword phrases. This is where the business needs to think about their business goals. Who is your customer? is it B2B or customer related? Can customer’s order online? Do you only cover a specific area, local or national business?. Let’s look at a real life example. Say we run an IT Company in York. We provide IT Support, Maintenance, Server Maintenance, Remote Support, Network Support within the York area.

How would we find the correct keywords.

Google Keyword Toolbar – A great FREE resource by Google. Type in a keyword phrase and the search tool will come up with combinations along with the monthly searches the keyword phrase is searched for.

Here I typed in “IT Support York” and it provides a selection of 100 keyword phrases related to my search phrase. Looking down the list I see “computer support York”, “IT Support In York”,  ”York IT services”. all keywords have three columns dividing them. Competition the paid cpc competitors for this keyword phrase,  Global monthly searches (searches around the world), and local monthly searches (searches for that particular country according to country selected).

However before we get too excited about the local monthly search of 2,490 I must point out that this is based on a broad search match. For an explanation of Broad, phrase and exact match searches see here Comparing Broad, Phrase and Exact Match searches. I would recommend exact search match for SEO.

So basically you can select relevant keywords you like and download search volumes just for these keywords. I would recommend going through each of the product or services you are looking to optimize for and follow the above.

Spy On Your Competition

Another good idea is have a look at your competition. If you aren’t sure exactly who your competition is grab one of the above keyword phrases say “IT Support York” and look at the top ten competitors and look at what they are currently optimising their site for.  For example “IT consultancy York”, “Computer Support York”, “IT Solutions York”. Take a note of these and enter these in the Google keyword tool and see what the search volume is.

Other keyword tools which are completely free are market samurai an excellent resource for long tail keyword strategies (long tail keywords are keyword around four or five phrases long which are great at converting) and produces a rang of great features.

Google Insights For Search a brilliant tool that looks at the trends for search over a country, county, and city level. compare keywords against other keywords.

SEO Quake – Plugins into your web browser and allows you to view all the data of your competition at a glance. For example page rank, links, keyword density etc.

Keyword Selection is the foundation of SEO. Finding the right keywords for your business effects the rest of the your SEO plan. Choose the wrong keywords and you will end up attracting the wrong sort of customers.  However, taking the time to research, can unlock hidden gems, and increase the visibility of your site putting you in front of buying customers for your products or services.

Interlinking is not only a great way to improve your SEO rankings but it’s also a great way to increase click through rate, as users move onto to other parts of your website.

Figuring out which posts to link to (especially older posts) can be a nightmare , this is why automation tools can make the  life of a webmaster a lot easier. If your using wordpress (Mine and Google’s most favourite CMS) then your in for a treat with SEO Smart Links.

SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog…

It does this by looking for post and page titles (including categories and tags) and turns these into links.

You can even exclude keywords, pages or posts from being linked for example your about or contact us pages and limit the amount of inner links per page.

Here’s a summary of what Google+ plus can do.

Google Circles

The first feature is Google circles and I think Google+ has picked up on a weakness of Facebook here and exploited it. Google Circles is all about sharing content to relevant ‘Circles’. These can be considered friends, contacts, or a group of people that relevant content will be shown to. For example business contacts can be dragged to the business circle and only relevant content to that group would be shown. However, personal contacts that wouldn’t be interested in the latest successes or news in your industry, wouldn’t be bored with your content updates and you can happily discuss, TV, books or the latest gossip!.

Google+ Sparks

Google+ sparks allows you to find fresh content and maybe even fresh contacts to share. For example my favourite football team is Sheffield United.  If I search this in the sparks feature I am then provided with related content. I can pin this interesting meaning I can read this later or share the content to all my users, or even specific circles, neat, huh?

The advantage of this means you can build authority about a chosen subject, or even find fresh users to interact with.

Google+ Hangouts

I love this feature. Skype is great for video chatting however, only being able to video with one person at a time, is a hassle, however with Google+ hangouts you can video chat with lots of people at the same time. This is an amazing feature for web conferences or webinars.

Google+ is still in experimental stage and you should expect to see more fabulous features in the future.

This is one of hundreds of comments I get on my blog daily :-

Thanks. My organization is wonderring basically if i should certainly give your own personal written piececheap coach bags during book marking with civilization,

Luckily, I have a spam filter setup but I still have to manually delete them. If you have a blog I’m sure you share my pain. Yes we could just turn off comments on our blog but that’s what a blog is for, to promote conversation around your chosen topic.

So why do these pointless comments appear. Is it done to be malicious? To bring down your blog? Or do they really feel that these type of comments add value. The point is its all about the link juice.

Some unscrupulous SEO companies trawl the internet looking for any blog to get there comment on and more importantly a link back to their clients site.

However wordpress like most blogs, makes this absolutely pointless. Let me introduce the rel=”nofollow”. This tag tells the Google spider that crawls pages, please do not pass on any of my hard earned work on SEO to this link juice grabber!! And so the Google bot responds, not always mind you this is Google, and ignores the link.

I will do another blog post about how to find relevant dofollow blogs at a later date but the next time you leave a comment on someones blog make sure

Happy Blogging!

Many web masters or SEO’s have complained that it is no longer an accurate tool for measuring indexed links within a search engine.

I decided to investigate this for myself and can indeed confirm that YSE is no longer picking up all indexed links meaning that your backlink count is probably considerably higher than YSE displays. It has been known for years that Google deliberately will not sure all the back links a site has obtained but now YSE seems to be following the same route.

For example check out the following sites under the google search for ‘Soil Stabilisation’. -

A top ten listing with only 11 links?. I decided to use a more thorough link indexing system called majestic seo. Majestic SEO reports over 70 links for beach stabilisation with no duplicate listings, while YSE reports the following:-

• 4 yell.com Listings
• 2 to the site Brit pave
• 2 to the concrete barrier
• 1 soilstabilisation.org

No software is infallible for checking out your SEO’s backlinks. My advice is not to become too obsessed with checking the amount of links that have been indexed, but rather check the rankings out for your chosen keywords. This is the main crux of SEO.

Increasing Page Rank can become a obsession for most website owners but with the last update in January, you won’t know if the if the fruits of your labour have been rewarded for perhaps another six months.

The factors behind page rank are not concrete however just like getting a good ranking in the search engines there are points to follow that can definitely increase your chances of achieving a Good PR number :-

Related backlinks from your industry – Yes I agree getting high authority links on the home page of an authority site isn’t easy, but forums or blogs can be a good source for theme related links

Fresh Content – Majorly important. Using fresh unique content on your site in the way of a blog or articles can be a great way to gain the interest by the Google bot

DO NO EVIL – Avoid spammy low level links.

I hope your site got rewarded in the latest Page Rank update. To check the PR of your site download you can download the Google Toolarbar in your browser.

]]> http://www.optimize-yorkshire.com/google-news/google-finally-updates-page-rank/feed 0 http://www.optimize-yorkshire.com/google-news/google-crushes-website-owners-with-panda-update http://www.optimize-yorkshire.com/google-news/google-crushes-website-owners-with-panda-update#comments Sat, 25 Jun 2011 16:28:17 +0000 Neil http://www.optimize-yorkshire.com/?p=219 A couple of months ago Google launched a new algorithm update known as “Google Panda” designed  to remove low quality sites containing duplicate content from the top of the search engine ranking results. The effects have been fairly devastating for many website owners who didn’t learn how to do quality SEO link building.

While the Google Panda update had had tragic effects on many well known sites, one company has been decided to track these results using their own visibility formula. The results of this research has been staggering to say the least!

Based upon keyword rankings, it shows that 2 of the biggest traffic sites in the world, EzineArticles.com and HubPages, have lost rankings on almost 90% of their keywords.

No one knows what will be the end result but one things for sure, at no point in search engine history has it been as important to play by Google’s rules.

What Google Wants
Howwever, there is hope!. Google spilled the beans on how you can take advantage of their secret formula to get better rankings. They wrote an important post on their blog that all business owners need to read and take notice of.

It discusses what they expect from webmasters and content writers and gives a clear understanding of how they “think”. If you follow these guidelines, you can’t go too wrong when creating a website or content that ranks.

Google Ranking Guidelines

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