What Happens When SEO Stops Working?

SEO or search engine optimization is the act of altering certain key aspects of a page to help the various search engines understand what the page is about and rank it accordingly.  Each page needs to have a specific focus and there are various elements on each page which need to be fine-tuned in order to ensure the web page is found, and ranks well, for specific search queries.

Some companies feel that this is a one-time job and once done, it should last forever.  There are several reasons why this is not true and why as a business, you need to ensure you are keeping up with the changes your site undergoes.

The algorithm Google uses changes daily in little ways but frequently in big ways.  All search engines running their own algorithm (Ask, Yahoo, Bing and Google) change the way they calculate rank associated with keywords to combat spammers.  This means that a sudden dip in orders or visits may not be due to seasonality, but in fact a shift in where your site ranks for its desired keywords.  There are programs to help monitor ranking on keywords both free and paid for.  When changes happen, being immediately aware will help you recover more quickly and save thousands in lost sales.

The delicate balance that is maintained by the search engines regarding ranking relies on several factors.  For a number of years, one of the factors with most importance has been incoming links and their anchor text.  The act of “Google bombing” was when numerous links with specific anchor text were pointed at a page, and that page ranked for the anchor text.  One famous example is the White House ranking for “miserable failure”. Since this exploit was discovered, the value of links has been steadily diminishing.  If your site suddenly stops ranking for a specific term, it could be due to changes to the way links are handled.

Search engines often reward freshness and so keeping your website content fresh and constantly changing could benefit your rankings.  These changes need to be carefully managed and should be overseen by an expert.  Simply adding content is not enough.  The content needs to be targeted, with proper optimization.  Adding the wrong content in the wrong way could harm your rankings.

Mistakes are sometimes made when changes are rolled out and it can often take an expert significant time to fix the mistake of mere seconds. This can affect rankings and depending on the frequency of your site being spidered, the damage could last months.  Monitoring ranking is essential whether through searching manually, or using a software package.

There are several things you can do without incurring significant costs to your business to monitor your site and be alerted when more SEO is needed.  For a road map of necessary changes, it can be beneficial to invest in a technical site audit however these can cost thousands.  They will often supply a roadmap of required changes as well as a severity ranking and guidance on what and how to make changes in the future.  For the long term, these are a solid investment.

Register your site in Google’s Webmaster Tools.  If you receive a penalty or if Google has a problem with your site, this is where they will leave a message for you.  It is free to register and validate your site and the interface is relatively simple.  Once your site is validated, Google offers helpful pointers to dead/missing pages, problems it encountered or other issues.

Check your web analytics at least once a week.  Ideally you should be spending an hour a day with your web analytics to assist with the understanding of flow, conversions, bounce and related information.  Your web analytics may be where you first discover a problem.  Google offers an excellent free web analytics package.

Read, if possible, publications available free online which communicate important news and information about search engine changes.  As an example, a recent article alerted readers to a possible change to Google’s search results that may include “favicons”.  These images, seen when bookmarking or surfing to a site, can be made for free.  If search result pages include them, it could have significant impact on click through rates in organic results.

Awareness of changes to traffic and associated ranking changes for targeted keywords can alert you to changes as they happen.  These changes still need to be countered by professional search engine optimization experts however by monitoring and having a road map of necessary changes in a site audit, you will be better placed to keep your SEO, and your site, always at the top.

Source:What Happens When SEO Stops Working?

3 Skills You Need To Be An SEO

Being an SEO’s not the easiest job in the world. It’s certainly not as simple as understanding, “I need links, and optimized anchor text, keywords and META tags.”

How can you develop those links? Why are links important? How does Google actually work? Why does your ranking change in the SERPs?

To answer these questions and more, you need more than just knowing the ‘rules of the game.’

There are three very important skills you need to be an SEO, and without these skills, you are at a real disadvantage in the long-run.

1. Communication And Eloquence

You have to be able to effective communicate strong thoughts and messages. Your communication skills will allow you to be a good copywriter, which means you can easily generate content that is link-worthy. Even if you have a great idea for a blog post or an incredibly powerful message to send, you have nothing unless you can properly communicate your ideas in a way that’ll evoke an emotional response from other webmasters. Hopefully the response is links to you!

Advanced communication skills also come in handy when you are pitching yourself to other webmasters, bloggers and journalists for links back to your website.

2. Critical Thinking

You need to be able to understand the logic behind Google’s algorithm, website architecture and the interconnectedness of the web to be a true SEO. You might know the basic rules for SEO, but you can’t be advanced in SEO for a very long time by only knowing ‘the rules’ as they are set today. This year, Google will change their algorithm about 550 times. That’s more than 1.5 times each day!

Mastery of SEO means understanding why Google ranks the way it does, and how Spiders crawl websites and properly index and rank pages. By critically thinking about the How? and Why? you will learn to build your strategy for long-term SEO potential, rather than building your SEO power according to short-lived rules that Google may deem ‘adds little weight’ to a website’s authority.

3. Patience

You also need to understand that your rankings in the SERPS will not always change overnight. A few factors involved in your ranking include i) aggregate traffic and ii) search traffic relative to your search ranking.

• Aggregate Traffic

You can certainly have a spike in traffic one day or one week, but that doesn’t mean there will be a consistent demand or growing trend to find you in the SERPs. While your ranking may somehow fluctuate to the front page for a relevant search term (when you were formerly on a deeper page, perhaps the 3rd or 4th) this is may only be temporary.

Unless there is a consistency or growth in the traffic to your site following a traffic spike, you are not likely to maintain those rankings because the SERPs are time sensitive. They mean to show results that people are looking for when they are looking for it, but if the trend of searching for you and your content dies, so will your ranking. Staying on the front page will mean maintaining the traffic you had during your spike or continually growing your traffic.

• Search Traffic Relative To Your Search Ranking

When you’re ranked in the SERPs, there is an expectation that you will get X% of the clicks from the number of searches for that term that week or month. For example, let’s say (arbitrary numbers) you are ranked 3rd for the search term “Las Vegas SEO.” For the 3rd position in the SERPs, you are expected to receive 12% of the clicks for that search term every month.

But if somehow, people are searching “Las Vegas SEO” and click on you a disproportionate amount, or neglect to click on you, your ranking will change. So if you received 20% of clicks for that month, Google may place you in the 2nd position to see how well you perform there – if will you receive the amount of clicks consistent with the proportion of clicks a 2nd position ranking should receive.

If you received 4% of clicks for that term that month, your ranking will drop and you will be ‘tested’ in that new, lower position to see if you are the right ‘fit’ for the 5th position in the SERPs.

How To Use Video SEO To Jump To The Top Of Google Search Results

As most search engine optimization (SEO) experts are aware, getting a first-page Google result is harder than ever. Not only do Google’s search and indexing algorithms continue to evolve in complexity, but Google has given over more and more of its search results real estate to “blended” search results, displaying videos and images towards the top of the first page, and pushing down—and sometimes off the page—traditional web results that would have otherwise competed for top rankings.

But where problems arise, so do opportunities. Although Google’s newfound enthusiasm for video has created more competition for fewer traditional search results, it has enabled sites with video assets—even sites that would otherwise score poorly in the Google index—to successfully achieve first-page rankings. In fact, Forrester Research found that videos were 53 times more likely than traditional web pages to receive an organic first-page ranking.

Here’s what a blended search result looks like for the search query “777 built in 4 minutes“:

Those images at the top of the search results are video thumbnails, and today, there’s only two ways to get there:

1. Upload your video to YouTube.

The advantage of this is that you are 100% certain to be indexed into Google’s search engine. This does not guarantee you’ll get a first-page result, but at least it ensures that Google knows your content exists.

The drawback, of course, is that anyone who clicks on a YouTube result will be taken to YouTube, which may be fine if your goal is branding (i.e., you only care that people watch your video). If your goal is driving traffic, as is typically the case with SEO, this won’t be a successful strategy.

Your other alternative is:

2. Video SEO

Video SEO is a set of techniques designed to make sure that:

• Google finds your video content
• Google successfully indexes your video content
• Google will display your video content when specific keywords are entered as search terms

Here’s how to make it work:

You Need Video Content

Google is fairly flexible in what it considers to be video content. You can use actual video footage, but screen captures, slide shows, animated PowerPoint slides, and other content will work just as well. Google can’t actually “see” what’s inside the video content, so it relies on title and other meta-data to determine what content your video actually contains.

Submission, Not Discovery

With traditional web pages, Google utilizes crawlers to discover and index web content. Unfortunately, Google can’t read Flash very well (although it is trying), and as a result, most video content is invisible to Google’s search crawlers. Therefore, the best way to appear in Google’s blended search results is to submit your video to Google using a Video Sitemap. This is similar to an XML sitemap, but is formatted specifically for video, and only contains information about your video content. It is submitted using Google’s Webmaster Tools.

The most common error in Video SEO is to assume that because you have submitted the web page on which a video resides, that the video content itself is being indexed.

You’ll also need to make sure that you have a robots.txt file on all video pages, to ensure that Google can easily verify that the locations on the Web you’ve submitted do in fact exist, and that they contain embed codes which indicate the presence of a video.

Title and Title Tags

When ranking videos, Google primarily considers the match between search keywords and the video title. Although Google allows you to submit other meta-data such as description and keywords, these currently don’t have much influence on your search ranking. Google likes it when the title tag of the page matches the title of the video, and will give a higher weighting for results where this is the case.

Video SEO is Long Tail

Like traditional SEO, you’re much more likely to see results with Video SEO if you target more specific, or longer tail, search terms. A video titled “Dog” is unlikely to produce a first-page ranking, while a video titled “German Shepherd Police Dog” will be more likely to score well in Google’s algorithm. Since Google can’t determine the actual content of the video, you might consider submitting the same video multiple times with different titles that match potential search terms.

New and Small Don’t Matter

With traditional SEO, the age of a website is an important consideration for Google in deciding its ranking. Google also considers things like the number of pages on the site, and the number of links to the site, along with the importance of the places those links originate.

In Video SEO, none of this matters. This means that even new sites and small sites can compete on equal footing with larger and more established players. Publishers who are too small or too new to even consider traditional SEO can still be taking advantage of Video SEO opportunities.

For the Foreseeable Future, Video SEO is a Winning Strategy

As time goes by, Google’s discovery and indexing of video content will no doubt become more sophisticated, and as competition for video results increases, it will become harder for sites to achieve these first-page rankings. However, the number of web pages still massively outnumbers indexed video assets, and for as long as that continues, publishers will have an opportunity to jump to the top of Google’s search results through Video SEO.