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SEO: You’re Bound to Lose Website Traffic If…

Helen — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 11:41:20 +0000

Here at WebFuel, we love inviting guest bloggers. Why? Because they bring fresh ideas to the table, while providing great insights from a different point of view. Last February we invited Jill Whalen to blog about What SEOs do – and the whys behind it. We love the way Jill writes. Not only is she very knowledgeable about organic SEO, but she has the amazing ability to explain it in a way that anyone can understand – which is no easy feat when talking about SEO. So we have brought Jill back – this time she will be blogging about the ways to prevent losing traffic to your website.

Guest Post by Jill Whalen

You’re bound to lose website traffic if:

1) You make changes to your website without running them by your SEO consultant.

Website Owner View: “There are lots of changes needed on our website for branding, marketing, or technical reasons. We don’t want to run each and every one of them past our SEO consultant because they shouldn’t concern him or her.”

SEO Consultant View: Imagine this: Web analytics shows a substantial drop in visitors for some specific keyword phrases. So you spot-check some Google searches, but that reveals no sign of the website in the search results. You pore through the website and find that the pages that used to bring in tons of targeted Google traffic are now missing altogether, combined with other pages, or buried so deeply in the website’s architecture that the search engines no longer find them important.

How to prevent loss of traffic: Include your SEO consultant in any discussions about changing anything on the website, no matter how trivial you think it might be. While the changes may be necessary for corporate reasons that are out of anyone’s control, at least give your SEO consultant a heads-up and the chance to present an alternative that won’t kill your targeted search engine traffic overnight. Don’t worry about bothering your SEO with something you think is no big deal—it’s always better to be safe than sorry.

2) You think your SEO can work independently and not need (a lot of) your help.

Website Owner View: “I’m extremely busy running my business/department and don’t have time for SEO, which is why I decided to outsource to an SEO consultant.”

SEO Consultant View: While we’d love to be able to create an SEO strategy, research and choose keywords, make website architecture changes, write brand new sales copy, come up with and write blog posts that showcase expertise, open a Twitter account on your behalf, and gain thousands of followers overnight, it doesn’t work that way. If you’re too busy to help, your website will not receive the traffic it should.

How to prevent loss of traffic: Expect to spend a minimum of a few hours a week working with your SEO consultant on various tasks, be it reviewing their work, educating them on what you do, writing expert blog post drafts, or socially networking online with others in your industry. You have to be involved. If you don’t have the time or can’t make the time, then don’t bother to hire an SEO consultant because you’ll be tying their hands and not seeing the website traffic you hoped for.

3) You know enough SEO to be dangerous.

Website Owner View: “I know SEO, I’ve done SEO in a previous job and I read all the SEO blogs. I just need some help with implementation.”

SEO Consultant View: We love educated clients—really, we do. They are more apt to understand what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. But you may not know as much SEO as you think. If you had a website in the 1990s and used some SEO software to create doorway pages to just the right keyword density, I’m sorry, but you don’t know SEO! We don’t want to hear how you read a blog post that said that commas in the meta keyword tag are the latest and greatest of SEO techniques and that “Inktomi” uses them so they must be important. This type of SEO will lose traffic for your website before you have any idea what hit it!

How to prevent loss of traffic: Old SEO advice, and just plain bad SEO advice, is pervasive in our industry. Once you hire an SEO consultant, trust them to be up on current SEO techniques. It’s fine to ask their opinion on specific articles you may have read, but please respect their opinion on them and don’t go messing up their work based on what you think SEO is all about. Do keep reading and learning, and even attend a conference or two. But discuss what you’ve learned with your SEO to understand how it may (or may not) apply to your particular website and situation.

It’s clear that all of the above reasons for losing website traffic are predicated on a lack of communication between the client and the SEO consultant. I hope that shedding some light on these scenarios will prevent future traffic losses. Both clients and consultants have a vested interest in the SEO success of your website and your business, and want to increase the targeted traffic to your website, not reduce it! There are plenty of other scenarios that can cause a loss of traffic to your website, which I may write about in the future. For now, here are two more prescriptions for SEO failure that I’ve previously written about:

Jill

Jill Whalen, CEO of High Rankings and co-founder of SEMNE, has been performing SEO services since 1995. Jill is the host of the HRA SEO newsletter and the High Rankings SEO forum. Original article published on Talent Zoo.

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SEO: You’re Bound to Lose Website Traffic If… is a post from: SEO Ottawa | Search Engine Optimization and Internet Marketing Agency | WebFuel

SEO and Duplicate Content: Why should I care?

Helen — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 13:00:35 +0000

Sometimes the best blog posts are a result of day to day interactions with one’s clients. This past week was very odd inasmuch as I discovered the exact same issue with 4 of our clients’ websites. The stars must have been aligned or something. Who knows?

Duplicate content is alive and well on the Web! And here’s why you as a website owner should care.

Real life examples are great fodder for Blog posts. So let’s dig into the topic of ‘duplicate content’ and why it can be harmful to your website’s rankings with Search Engines. I’ll be using Google in my explanation. But my comments hold true for all Search Engines.

First and foremost, Search Engines are not “smart”. Blasphamy? No, they are not! They are too smart as in as they will index everything they can find.

Sidenote: Indexing is a related topic which I will cover in a future Blog Post. : “To Index or Not to Index, That is the Question!”.

Back to duplicate content. In the simplest of terms, duplicate content happens when the same website content is indexed via more then one URL. What do I mean? Let’s look at some examples.

Example 1: Canonical URLs
Here we are looking at the same website where duplicate content is hosted on 2 different URLs:

URL 1: www.myniftybusiness.ca
URL 2: www.myniftybusiness.ca/ home.html or www.myniftybusiness.ca/index.php

Looking at the above example, if you see the exact same content in your web browser with both URLs, you can be sure that Google will also. And that, dear reader is ‘duplicate content’.

Example 2: www and non-www versions
www.myniftybusiness.ca and myniftybusiness.ca. You should be able to reach your website by typing either example into your browser’s address bar. So far so good. Here’s a 2 step test to check if your website is at risk of being identified as having duplicate content:

Type www.myniftybusiness.ca into your browser’s address bar. The site loads and www.myniftybusiness.ca still shows in the browser’s address bar – okay. Now type myniftybusiness.ca (no www) into your browser’s address bar. If myniftybusiness.ca still shows up in the address bar, you have a problem that needs to be resolved. I call this the worst case of ‘duplicate content’ as basically your website’s entire contents are at risk of being double-indexed by Google (and Bing, and Yahoo… etc…). In short, your website should be able to be accessed by either the www version of your website’s URL or the non www version of your website’s URL. But not both!

I have also seen websites that are constructed in such a way as to allow duplicate content scenarios solely through the coding that is done when the site is built.

Example 3: Coding errors
A well laid out site has a form and flow to it that allows for expandibility. Most good website designers understand this concept. After all it is logical. Things, however, can fall off the rails in a scenario such as what follows. A designer is working with a client and they come up with a well thought out structure that categorizes a large volume of products: www.myniftywebsite.ca/product1, www.myniftywebsite.ca/product2, www.myniftywebsite.ca/product3, etc… You get the idea. Then, because of the programming language they are using they may end up having to do something like this www.myniftywebsite.ca/product1/index.aspx, www.myniftywebsite.ca/product2/index.aspx, www.myniftywebsite.ca/product3/index.aspx. In short each product page can be reached by keying in www.myniftywebsite.ca/product1 or www.myniftywebsite.ca/product1/index.aspx (1 example). Google could index both. Duplicate content!

Example 4: Duplicate websites
Another example, and one that really gets under my skin, are these cookie cutter websites that are being flogged all over the Internet. You know the ones I mean. The sales pitch is usually something like, “Let us build your website and fill it with relevant content. $XXXX and you will be off and running.” Sounds good eh? Not! Why? Because they will be selling the exact same content to everyone who is in the same line of business as you are. Google will eventually find it and will have to decide which content is more relevant (you don’t get a say in this). My favorite is real estate agents in the same city who buy into this scenario. In a competitive business such as real estate, you want unique and engaging content…. not duplicate content.

So why is duplicate content so bad?

Duplicate content is bad because it can dilute your website’s positioning within the Search Engines. How bad is that? This is tougher to answer as the algorythms that each search engine uses are constantly changing. So one cannot say something like: “My site has duplicate content and it has gone to page 400 on Google’s SERP!”. Rather you would say, “Thanks Helen for letting me know I have a duplicate content situation on my website. We better work together to get this resolved.” I say this tongue in cheek.

How to check for scenarios where duplicate content may be getting indexed by Google (and the other Search Engines)

Review the above examples and see if what I outline above is happening. Look at your Google Analytics reports. It will jump out at you. And if it shows up in GA, then you know that you have an issue that needs fixing.

How do I fix duplicate content?

I won’t tell you how to fix it as there are so many scenarios to take into consideration. However, the first step in fixing a problem is understanding what that problem is. So # 1: Identify whether or not you have a duplicate content scenario. #2: Work with your SEO professional (Me!) and your Webmaster to work through the technical issues that are causing your woes. Together you will get through it!

More information on solving duplicate content issues

If you aren’t pooped by now, here’s a great video (featuring Google Geek Greg Grothaus) on duplicate content and solving related issues. Grab some popcorn and prepare to learn some great stuff in the next 15 minutes!

Hint: Skip to about 4 minutes in for the real meat.

So…. do you have this SEO technical issue with your site?

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SEO and Duplicate Content: Why should I care? is a post from: SEO Ottawa | Search Engine Optimization and Internet Marketing Agency | WebFuel