Archive for SEO
There have been a other posts here about the Penguin update by Google. Here’s another issue that has been raised by Penguin that you need to know about.
Do you know what anchor text is most used for links coming into your website? Do you know what anchor text is? Let’s start there. When you link words on your website to another page, the words you link are referred to as anchor text. So, if I added a link here to Build Real Estate Results, those four words are considered the anchor text.
Going back to the first question, do you know what anchor text is most often used for links coming into your website? My guess is that your answer is no. To be honest, I don’t know what anchor text is most used for links coming into my website either. But, it’s time to pay more attention.
I mention that this could cause you a problem without really trying because you aren’t always in control of that anchor text. If someone links to your website, they’ll use whatever anchor text makes sense to them. So, some of your incoming links are really out of your control.
But, for the links you build, make sure you keep an eye on the anchor text. Up until Penguin, the rule (if you can say there are any) was to use a variety of anchor text, but make sure a good portion of them are done using your keyword phrases. Your main keyword phrase for your website is probably something like “Atlanta homes for sale” or “Chicago condos for sale”, and so forth.
Now that over-optimization is such a big issue, that rule needs to change. As usual with SEO, everyone who talks about it has a different opinion. And, for you purists, there are a lot of related issues here, like the industry you’re in and the market you’re in and the competition in your niche. But I think it’s safe to say that we should work toward making sure we have as many, if not more, incoming links that do NOT use an exact match to our main keyword phrases.
So, that means more of your incoming links should be things like “great post” if someone is linking to your blog, or “Charlotte neighborhoods”, or just a plain domain name link like www.MyWebsiteName.com
The moral of the story is: to the extent that you have control over your incoming links, keep them varied and keep them “natural” by not focusing on exact keyword matches.
Here’s What Happens When You Do SEO Right
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There’s been a lot of talk around the Internet and on this blog about the Penguin release by Google. And, it’s a good idea to keep up with the changes that happen. We will be tweaking our approach to SEO to respond to the latest changes. But, if you do things right overall, it’s much easier to ride things out as the changes happen.
Here’s an example from one of our SEO clients. This website has been online for a few years, so the domain has some age, which is important to the search engines. The downside to the site was the lack of focused content. I’m talking about this particular situation because we only did the very first few steps of the SEO process back in November of last year. To continue the upward trend, we need to do ongoing SEO, but budgets are budgets.
We worked with this client to research and select keyword phrases that would be good for them to go after. And, we made sure that focused original content got on the site. Then, we did the first part of the “off-page” SEO work.
Here’s what happened to their site rankings:
| RANKINGS AS OF 11-21-11 | |||
| Keyword |
Google Rank |
Bing Rank |
Yahoo! Rank |
| Bay Area Foreclosures |
>100 |
>100 |
>100 |
| East Bay Property Management |
>100 |
>100 |
>100 |
| Homes for Rent Antioch CA |
>100 |
>100 |
>100 |
| Homes for Sale Antioch CA |
>100 |
>100 |
>100 |
| ————————————— | —————- | —————- | ——————- |
| RANKING AS OF 3-23-12 | |||
| Keyword |
Google Rank |
Bing Rank |
Yahoo! Rank |
| Bay Area Foreclosures |
9 |
>100 |
12 |
| East Bay Property Management |
13 |
>100 |
>100 |
| Homes for Rent Antioch CA |
15 |
63 |
94 |
| Homes for Sale Antioch CA |
9 |
7 |
12 |
| ————————————— | —————- | —————- | ——————- |
| RANKING AS OF 5-15-12 | |||
| Keyword |
Google Rank |
Bing Rank |
Yahoo! Rank |
| Bay Area Foreclosures |
14 |
18 |
18 |
| East Bay Property Management |
12 |
54 |
54 |
| Homes for Rent Antioch CA |
13 |
>100 |
>100 |
| Homes for Sale Antioch CA |
9 |
6 |
6 |
As usual, there wasn’t a lot going on in the first few months. Then, around the 4th month, the rankings started looking pretty good. And, even after all the Penguin furor, they’re still in good shape, and there hasn’t been any ongoing work done in quite a while. There will always be ups and downs, so you shouldn’t get discouraged. That’s just how it is.
You should treat your search engine rankings like your investments. If you check the status every day, you’ll drive yourself crazy!!
What will carry the site for a little while is the initial link building, the age of the domain name and the optimized content on the site. So, that just goes to show that if you do things in accordance with the guidelines, you usually don’t have to panic about changes as they come along.
Respond? Yes. Panic? No.
If you’re a real estate blogger, you have undoubtedly heard the experts sing the praises of hyper-local blog posts. And you may be a great hyper-local blogger yourself. But, I saw a post recently on (what a surprise!) Active Rain that was written by Jeff Dowler, and he gave me a new perspective on those type of posts.
After attending Ross Hair’s Social Media Marketing Camp, he came away with the following: Make sure your hyper-local posts are timeless. Naturally, you want your posts to stay in search rankings – forever, if possible. So, when you are writing a hyper-local post, think about what you can do to make it relevant now and in years to come.
What Makes a Hyper-Local Post Timeless?
What can you do to make your posts timeless? Here are some ideas:
1. Write Posts About Your Communities – If you write about a community, that information will still be interesting to people researching potential neighborhoods for years to come. So, don’t concentrate entirely on current events in your communities – talk about the communities themselves. People will really thank you for that. As one who is often involved in researching communities to write content for clients – trust me - information about communities and neighborhoods is sorely lacking on the Internet.
Don’t ever think that what you know about a community is “common knowledge”. I’m constantly amazed that even city websites don’t help promote the city. Seems odd that the city lists their departments and contacts, garbage pickup schedules and meeting times for the City Council, for example, but they rarely talk about the city itself. I just don’t know what their development folks are doing; they’re not reading the website for sure.
Think of what you’d like to know about an area before you’d buy a house there, and keep in mind that someone researching on the Internet will have a very difficult time finding out what it’s really like.
2. Keep Your Posts Updated – To be timeless, you can’t have information from 5 years ago and expect that people will continue to find that information useful. A comment on Jeff’s post talked about going back and updating hyper-local posts. That’s a great way to add new content to the post to keep the search engines interested.
You could also create a tag called something like Atlanta Community Updates, and assign that tag to your community overview posts. Then, let’s say you post an update about a community each year – each of those posts would have something like this at the top: Follow SmallTown’s Evolution With Our SmallTown Community Updates (a link to the related tag). That way, you can keep fresh information at people’s fingertips.
3. Date Your Event Posts - I guess this idea won’t keep all your event posts timeless, but you will be found easily for the latest one. Based on Google’s search suggestions, it’s obvious that people often attach a year to their searches where the timing is important. So, if your town has a Christmas Parade each year, write a post with the title: SmallTown Christmas Parade 2012. For events, things change. Different things will be happening each year, the event will be on different dates and may even be in different places. So, make sure that people don’t get frustrated trying to find the current information.
How do you keep your posts timeless??
If you’re not a member of Active Rain, you may not be able to access the post(s) mentioned above. So sign up for Active Rain now. If you’re not a member of Active Rain, you should be anyway.
Panda and Penguin – The Double-Whammy
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While some of the experts are saying that the Penguin update is affecting about 3% of searches done in English, there are still a lot of people who seemed to be negatively impacted. And, for many of those, they just don’t know what hit them.
As it turns out, Google also released another one of the Panda updates on April 19, 2012, Panda 3.5. If you’re not up to speed on Panda, you can review earlier posts on this blog about the Panda update.
So, it’s possible that some of the people who noticed negative changes in their rankings were hit by Panda 3.5, Penguin, or both. The tricky thing with Penguin is that it’s tougher to recover from. According to Google, the Penguin update was strictly automated. There was no human judgement involved. So, they are not going to act on a Reconsideration Request for people who think Penguin penalized them unfairly.
They have published a new “Penguin Feedback Form“. They’re not promising that they’ll make a manual adjustment, but it’s the only game in town right now. If you think you’ve been hit by Penguin, first go through your site and change anything that could even remotely be considered spammy. Then, complete the feedback form an keep your fingers crossed!
If you want more detailed information about Penguin recovery, visit this post at SearchEngineLand.com. It’s a great post and contains links to other posts on the same site that provide a lot of insight.
Have you seen your rankings change? Did they go up? down? Let us know what your experience has been!
Google’s Penguin update was launched on April 24, 2012. If you’ve seen a change in your search engine rankings, you need to understand the new update. And, if nothing happened to your rankings, you still need to keep up with Google’s changes to make sure you don’t fall into a trap in the future, either.
In case you’re curious, the Penguin update got its name from the Batman comic book series. The update was aimed at spammers, and Google draws an analogy between the short, fat, mean and miserable Penguin and people who are spammers. I must say I agree.
Penguin was intended to address what Google has been warning about: over-optimized websites.
What Is Over-Optimization?
As usual, Google didn’t get into specifics, but Rand Fishkin at SEO Moz identified what he thinks over optimization means. Here’s a discussion of the points he presents, but you can watch a video at the link just identified.
- Page Titles – Don’t think that you can stuff a page title with keywords and expect that Google won’t notice. The title is meant to be descriptive and it needs to make sense. Don’t forget that you need to have unique page titles for each page.
- Internal Linking – Internal linking can be very helpful to a website visitor. The rule I follow is that any time I refer a visitor to another location, there ought to be a link to it. So, if you write: “Check out our latest listings for some excellent deals.”, something in that sentence needs to link to where your latest listings can be found. But, you’ve probably seen bad internal linking, too. For example, links to the page you’re on using the keyword phrase for that page. Or, links on several pages, such as closing each page with: “Check out our Atlanta listings to find your perfect home”. You can link to your listings page, but don’t do it where it isn’t even in the context of the page, or always use the keyword phrase as the anchor text.
- Footers Full of Links – You know who you are. There’s everything in the footer that you think you can fit in there without getting caught. Well, you are going to get caught with Penguin.
- Content Just For Links – I’ve often seen big paragraphs at the bottom of every page, often disguised by a title like “Serving the following areas: Atlanta real estate, Chicago homes for sale…and on an on.”
- Incoming Links from Shady Sources – Now, you not only need to make sure you’re not getting links from gambling websites, but you need to review any site linking to you to make sure they’re not going to bring you down along with their site. Comment spam can be a problem if the person commenting on your blog has hired someone with a software program to place illogical comments on lots of your blog posts. I’ve noticed that there are also a ton of folks who must be doing the spam by hand, and they’re getting through my spam blockers. Get rid of those comments as soon as they hit.
- Pages That Target Similar Keywords – If you have pages about: Atlanta real estate, Atlanta homes for sale, Atlanta condos for sale and homes for sale in Atlanta, you’re not fooling anyone.
If you’ve been hit by Penguin, it is too late to an extent, but you’ll never recover without changing things that are perhaps the likely culprits.
