Avoiding SEO Disasters

At the end of May Google made an update to its search algorithm which upset quite a few people. This update has been well documented and it is clear the “May Day Update” as it has been dubbed, has affected a lot of companies’ natural search long tail keyword traffic. The feedback from the SEOs on the original May Day thread run on webmasterworld.com has highlighted people claiming to have lost up to 75% of their websites traffic due to this update.

For the affected companies who have lost this traffic, they are cross at Google for the change. The problem with this is Google is not here to keep changing the algorithm to suit SEOs, its here to make search more friendly and comprehensive for the user. So whilst it is a temporary problem for these companies that they have lost their rankings, it can easily be fixed by going back to the basics and ensuring the SEO strategy employed meets the basics that Google looks for when ranking a website for a particular keyword.

My article today focuses on some things to take into account to help you keep and maintain rankings for longer tail keywords. Econsultancy have produced a top 5 tips article on a how to improve your ecommerce site which overlaps some of my points so it’s worth checking this out as well.

Ok but what happened on “May Day”?

Whilst the article is not focused on the algorithm changes as this has been covered to death over the last month and a half by numerous places, it is worth discussing the changes people believed were made and the constant problem of optimising for the perceived search engine algorithms compared to optimising on what the search engines are ultimately looking for.

Speculation on the particular algorithm ranking factors that could have caused the drop have been debated on numerous forums and the main suggestions are:

- Google crawling websites deeper and more frequently that were previously ignored at that level

- The weighting Google gives to internal links has changed meaning site structure is key

- Google placing more relevance on site speed and page load times

The main problem I have with people complaining about losing rankings when these sort of algorithm changes have come in is that most or all of these changes are more than fair from Google’s point of view and will certainly encourage better search. To be annoyed because a competitor has had their site “discovered by Google” or because a slow site is suffering in the SERPs is a bit much.

The best way to SEO your site!

Whilst SEO is at times a game to give the search engines what they want at the current time, there are core fundamentals that have been around for ages and will continue to be dominant in having good rankings because they prove useful for a user’s search. If you want to be at the top of the rankings for a particular term then you should be basing a lot of your SEO theory about having the best site on the web for that term.

Whilst it is easy to say this, the work involved with making your site the best is obviously not easy and will take time. In some cases, a really long time! So it is a valid argument that you may want to support this work with optimisation but like with the May Day update, don’t be surprised if this work is just temporary and comes to an end next time Google updates. All that aside here are some tips for good SEO.

Onsite Content

If you want to rank for a term then your website should offer the best place on the web for users searching for this term. The best way to achieve this is to look at the competition and also decide what you can get together within your budget to enhance this even further. If you have the capability on a product page for example to offer a good selling description, technical information, delivery and returns information, excellent imagery, 360 degree shots, video, colour swatches, customer reviews, staff recommendations, industry guide reviews, glossary, comparisons and manufacturer information then do it. If you can really get all of those things you will set yourself apart from the competition and offer something no one can hope to match. Even with the most basic SEO work your site will have a good chance of ranking reasonably well just on this work alone.

It will help you for a number of reasons, the main one being that Google will associate all the content with the keywords you are trying to rank for. Another big factor for ranking is click through rates and exit rates on web pages and having good content in place will mean you have features to promote your site with and plenty of reasons to stop people leaving and needing to find related information elsewhere.

Onsite Optimisation

It’s one thing to have your site full of good content, but you need to play the SEO game to some level as well. All the onsite basics need to be covered here. So having relevant, unique META descriptions, keywords, title tags and search engine friendly copy are all key. H tags used properly and effectively will go a long way to making a difference as well. Something that is often overlooked is the navigation, if the wording used is inconsistent with the keywords you want to rank for or you have too many layers etc you are not helping your search engine optimisation efforts.

Once you get this done you can look to the slightly more advanced tools and ideas. Adding an xml sitemap to your website directory will encourage the bots to crawl the site fully and not miss pages. This should be dynamic and regenerate every day to account for the constant updates you make to your site. Robots text files should be added setting out crawling permissions across your site as well as taking advantage of the very useful and free Google webmaster tools application. Here you can find out dead urls that will need 301 redirecting, assess your websites speed, set canonical tag rules for duplicate pages and identify malware or problems on your web server.

Offsite Optimisation

Link building and link baiting needs to be done and will again always be part of the Google algorithm as it’s a good indication of the popularity of a website online. The strategy you use to get your links can vary greatly but should rely on getting the majority of your links from free sources. Encouraging free links through viral promotions, social media campaigns and online interaction from forums or blogs is the good way to start. Managing your profile on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube will help this process. As important as getting the links is the places you direct the links to on your website. As highlighted by the May Date update problem, a lot of companies have been linking to one location on their sites then hoping the internal linking on their website passes out the link juice to the final product pages that have been attracting high rankings on long tail keywords with little other work being done. Rather than simply relying on this, if you want a page to rank then consider doing some link building or baiting for that page URL directly as no Google update can alter this.

Check back soon for some specific guides on each of the three areas of SEO mentioned above.