There exists a misconception among many business owners that SEO is a process that once done is done forever. This can lead businesses to fail to extract the maximum benefit from their online presence. If we truly consider search engine optimization a continuous process, businesses might be losing out.

Their competitors likely have a more aggressive and nuanced approach. These competitors are refining and adjusting their strategies constantly. Consequently, the businesses with a less dynamic approach risk falling behind.

We’re going to take a look at three major reasons why business owners should consider SEO as an ongoing part of their marketing and promotion.

First we should define our terms. In this article we are conceiving of SEO as not just optimizing for keywords and traditional link building. Since the Panda and Penguin updates, high-quality content has become the bedrock of effective SEO strategy. SEO and content marketing go hand-in-hand.

It’s a cliché to say we live in an age of impatience, but that doesn’t make it any less true.
Internet users expect immediate information delivery. Research indicates they won’t wait long.

Bounce rates increase with page load times. Slower loading pages lead to more users clicking the back button. These users will then return to the search engine. They will likely choose the next link, which could be a competitor.

Google, in its effort to direct its users to the sites most likely to satisfy them, uses page load times as one of its signals for determining ranking. All else being equal, you could be losing ranking to a competitor because your site loads less swiftly.

There are various strategies site owners can implement to make sure that their users get the pages they want as quickly as possible, and we’re going to have a look at some of the most important ones here.

Seo Target

Google is secretive about its ranking algorithms. They are a complex mixture of over two hundred carefully weighted signals that contribute to deciding where on the search engine results pages a particular page appears.

People don’t like complexity and secrecy, especially when their income depends on the information that’s hidden. They yearn for quick and simple solutions, and so naturally there arises a group who will sell them spurious peace of mind. In our industry, that place is occupied by the bad SEO, who promises a quick-fix ride to the top of the SERPs, often employing many of the methods we’re about to discuss. No SEO worth his salt is going to rely on these techniques, or promise an easy and simple solution to the problem of ranking well.

These techniques might have worked before. But now they are useless. Or, they will damage a site’s ranking long-term. This is because they don’t improve SEO. Or, the search engines will penalize the site.

Often, Google doesn’t penalize sites that use these strategies. However, they frequently ignore those links. For sites, this means they invested a lot of money in SEO. And that SEO brings no benefit.
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Cut the Links?

Since the Penguin algorithm changes, SEOs have been worried about a couple of things in particular. Firstly, they are concerned that all the illicit link-building tactics that their client’s previous SEOs engaged in (because, of course, they would never do such things themselves) are now going to have a negative consequence on a site’s ranking. The second major concern is that competitors can take advantage of Google’s scrutinizing of backlink profiles to deliberately create “bad links” and incur a penalty.

To allay some of those fears Google have released a tool

that will allow webmasters to disavow those incoming links that might be causing their sites to be flagged by Google as engaging in bad link-building practices.

The Disavow Tool allows webmasters to upload a text file of domains and URLS that Google will then disregard, in much the same way that they disregard nofollow links. This is a somewhat out of character move for Google, who, as acolytes of the algorithm, prefer to rely on machine intelligence to winnow out the chaff. As usual, Google will take these link lists as a strong signal, rather than as an instruction that they are bound to follow. Continue reading →

That wily fox Matt Cutts once again set about the clucking SEOs this month with a Twitter announcement that Google were making changes to their algorithm focusing on page layout.

Google uses aspects of page layout as one of the signals that determines SERP ranking. They are especially concerned that, all else being equal, they don’t rank pages highly when the ‘above the fold’ portion of the page does not contain useful content for visitors. What that generally means is that they would rather web site owners didn’t fill the part of the page that first appears to visitors with adverts and bury the content further down the page.

Unfortunately, Google, with their usual lack of clarity, has failed to stipulate exactly what constitutes good content ‘above the fold’, but the common sense approach is usually best. Google tend to attempt to put themselves in the place of their users, and ask what is that user likely to find most useful. They may get that wrong fairly frequently, but absent any better data, this is probably the best approach for website owners too.

Duplicate content is a problem for search engines, and that makes it a problem for SEOs. Google  strongly dislikes including the same content more than once in search results, and if content exists in more than one place on a site, search engine algorithms have trouble determining which version they should include or exclude.

They also have difficulty knowing where to assign link juice and authority. This confusion can lead to sites experiencing a loss of traffic and reduced SERP rankings. Therefore, the “rel=canonical” element intends to help search engines. It does this by telling them which page is “the page” for specific content.

Search engine crawlers can create duplicate content in a couple of ways. First, sites might have the same content on different pages. Second, they might have different links. However, these links point to the same content. Consequently, both situations appear the same to search engine crawlers.

HTTP 501

Anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock in recent days will be aware that GoDaddy recently suffered an outage that left millions of its client’s websites inaccessible. While this sort of downtime will obviously affect a site’s traffic and therefore revenue, many people are asking whether it will have an effect on their SEO.

The short answer to that question is no, probably not. Google generally isn’t happy when they find a site has disappeared from their index. However, they know problems happen. As long as these problems aren’t regular, a site’s SERP ranking likely won’t drop. Reliability is important. Therefore, a site that is often down will be ranked lower. But a short period of unavailability is unusual. It’s not a useful signal of a negative trend.

With that specific case dealt with

it might be useful to consider the more general case of downtime and how it should be handled. It’s occasionally necessary to take a site down for various reasons: making large scale changes to the software or server, for example. How are we to handle this?

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