As we all know, Google has come out with some pretty hard hitting
updates that have affected many (large and small) websites, both on and
off-page. In this post I would like to address the on-page side of
things. Google released a couple Panda updates and many sites (including
some of mine) were nearly mauled to death. Thankfully, I was able to
make several tweaks to nurse some of those beatings back to health. It’s
also nice to hear that Google may have scaled back and tamed these Pandas.
I
would like share what I have found to be successful when it comes to
post-panda on-page optimization. Some of the strategies listed below are
site-wide and some require drilling down to specific pages, all in
efforts to help your website’s overall trust and relevance scores.
Below
are the 10 tips any site that has experienced any recent drops on
Google or wondering how they can improve their website optimization
should consider implementing the below strategies.
1. Spell Check Top Traffic Pages
– Spell check your top 10 ranking or most trafficked pages of your
site. It's probably better to spell check your whole site. But if time
and software is an issue, at least spell check your top organic landing
pages. Both
Chrome &
Firefox
have extensions/add-ons to help you spell check specific pages. If you
would like to spell check a whole website, you can use something such as
Internet Marketing Ninja’s Free Online Spell Check Tool.
*This tip comes straight from Google’s Webmaster Central Blog post;
More guidance on building high-quality sites, where it says
"Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?" In fact many of the below strategies will come from there or
here.
2. Identify & Fix the Pages with the Worst Bounce Rates
– Pick your top pages with the worst bounce rate. (Not the 100% ones
with only 1 or 2 visits.) The pages that bring in at least 5% of your
total traffic with bounce rates higher than your site average.
When in Google Analytics, go to
Content >
Site Content >
Landing Pages, then click on
Secondary Dimension, go to
Traffic Sources and select "
Keywords".
This way you can see which keyword/page combinations have the highest
bounce rate. If you notice a keyword/page combination with a high bounce
rate, start thinking about why. Ask yourself
"If I was searching this term, what are all the possible things I could be looking for?" Then ask yourself
"Does this page satisfy all those queries?"
Make adjustments. Also try to figure out if there is any way to entice
visitors to click onto another page of your website. (Something more
alluring than the back button.)
3. Clean Up All Broken Links, Redirect Links & Crawl Errors
– Use Google Webmaster Tools, Screaming Frog, Raven Tools, Bing
Webmasters, or whatever tool-set you use to find all the broken URL’s in
your website. First make sure all broken pages aren't linked to from
other pages within your website or on other sites you own. If so, change
those links to point to the new URL, then redirect the old URLs to the
new URLs. Or you can do it the other way around. All that matters is
that you clean up all internally linked broken URLS and recognized
crawls errors, so that the bots can smoothly crawl your website without
any issues. While you are at, make sure your XML sitemap isn't
referencing any of your old/broken URL’s, then resubmit it to Google.
4. Fatten-up Unindexed & Thin Content Pages
– After you make those changes and resubmit your XML sitemap to GWT,
record how many pages were indexed and how many weren't. Figure out
which pages weren't indexed (either with a tool or site:search in
Google) and make sure those pages are 100% unique and have at least 250
words of content. In fact, make sure any pages with only a little bit of
content has at least 250 words. This may be hard for some pages like
your contact page, but if you look around, you’ll notice many top
quality sites have figured out ways to address that.
5. LSI Content Implementation
– If you are targeting a certain key phrase, make sure that the page
targeting that phrase has all the necessary contextual terms to back it
up. You can use Google Suggestion, UbberSuggest, Analytic Stats, Keyword
Tools, etc. to help you identify which terms you need for support. This
strategy will also improve your overall visibility and chances to rank
for long tailed phrases.
6. Google Authorship & Structured Data
– We are all noticing that Google Authorship, rich snippets and
structured data is taking over the SERPs. I don’t even think you can
type in a keyword without at least 1 result having some form of
microdata.
I’m
not sure how much this affects your rankings. But there are many
correlation studies showing that G+’s are ranking factors and pictures
and ratings increase CTR. But it is something I did incorporate into all
my recoveries. Plus, Google is making strides encouraging webmasters to
take advantage of it through GWT and by creating structured data tools.
It’d be crazy to ignore.
7. Eliminate All Duplicate Content Issues
– Run your website through an on-page analysis tool to help you
identify all pages with duplicate content. I use Raven Tools' Site
Auditor to help me with this, and for duplicate, short, long title tags
and meta descriptions (for sites up to 1,000 pages). You could also use
GWT for the latter (but not for duplicate content). Once you've cleaned
up all duplicate content within your website, use a tool like
Plagspotter or Copyscape to help you find other websites with your
content. Either send a threatening email to get that content removed or
change your content so that it's 100% unique and new. Depending on your
business size, budget, legal issues & cost to produce your content,
you could find yourself debating on if you should take further action. I
had one webmaster respond,
“what are you going to do about it? How about you change yours". Dang, really?
8. Re-examine Google Webmaster Guidelines – You'll be surprised if you revisited the whole
Google Webmaster Guidelines document
how much of it has changed. In theory Google hasn't really changed its
stances on major factors however, it’s a completely new search engine
specifically calling out new and old factors. Make sure your website
meets all the guidelines. Be confident enough to feel you can ask a
Google rep to come visit your website to determine where it should rank
on the engines.
9. Analyze Inbound Link Anchor Text & Bounce Rate
– Use your backlink analysis tool to help you identify your keyword
anchor text distribution. Record your highest non-branded anchor text
percentages, then compare in Google Analytics. Check the bounce rate of
those terms with the highest percentage. If you have a high percent of
links saying a certain keyword and high bounce rate for visitors via
that keyword, this is an obvious red flag. You’re pretty much telling
Google,
“look, this is what I want to rank for, even though I’m not
about that, and since my visitors say I’m not really all about that
term, I guess I’m trying to trick you!
An easy way I like to
look at it is like this; if you have 1,000 backlinks saying a certain
term, you better have a really low bounce rate for the next 1,000 visits
that come via that term. Of course this isn't a true measurement of
link value and keyword correlation. This is just something to help you
keep in mind when optimizing your website’s inbound linking and bounce
rate correlation. I’ll discuss in more detail how to tie this in with
referral traffic & bounce rate in my post-penguin tips post.
10. Revamp Outdated Content
- If you have any content that is obviously outdated, (either because
it includes dates or tips/news that are no longer applicable,) consider
revamping the content. Replace that page with new content and move old
content to a difference page (with reference to it), or add a disclaimer
above the content giving some current news related to any changes since
it was written. Or, maybe add a last updated snippet with link to
latest version.
All that matters is that the users that come to
that page don’t think your business is outdated or that what they find
is old and misleading. Also, when revamping the content keep on the
lookout for LSI terms relevant today that weren't relevant when you
originally created the content.
I’m on a roll… I might as well tell you the other 2 tips, even though I only promised 10.
Bonus Tip #1
– Make your content so good that it gets shared on social networks –
I’m not going to elaborate on this. It’s pretty straight forward and
we've heard this a hundred times before.
Bonus Tip #2 – Speed up your website – Another tip that I can’t take the credit for.
Google told us this…
"You
may have heard that here at Google, we’re obsessed with speed in our
products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we’re including a
new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed."
.. plain and simple. They even created a tool to help us speed up the site. That’s how serious they are about page speed.
I’m
still on the fence about this because I've had a couple sites where
that’s all I fixed and viola, improved rankings and several other
websites that speeding up made no difference at all. But what Google
says, goes!
Lastly, I wanted to add; make sure
there’s a mobile friendly version of your website for smart phones and
tablets because that’s what I read all over the place. But I can’t
attribute any of my major recoveries to that.
Conclusion
As
you may have noticed many of these strategies aren't rocket science or
even "advanced" SEO techniques. Many of them are so basic we usually
forget about them and skip right over them. However the fact remains
Google has been telling us what they want from a website for over a
decade now. Even though techniques and strategies have evolved, the
basics still remain.
These strategies derive
from Google's goal to reward higher quality domains and are intended to
satisfy our visitors. After all isn't that what SEO is all about?
Stay
tuned for some proven off-page strategies for a Post-Penguin era. In
combination with the above on-page strategies, your site is bound to be
future-proofed and ready for any update Google rolls out later on in our
SEO lives. I do believe it’s more important to fix your backlink issues
before the above on-page issues, because if your backlink profile is
crap, many of the above fixes won’t make a difference. So maybe I can
say I’m saving the best for last. I’m not sure Google and those focused
on quality would agree that focusing on off-page is more important,
because as always, content is King and it’s all about quality, quality,
quality. Either way, like all SEO, it’s based on both on-page and
off-page indicators.
Google launched
the Penguin Update in April 2012 to better catch sites deemed to be
spamming its search results, in particular those doing so by buying
links or obtaining them through link networks designed primarily to
boost Google rankings. When a new Penguin Update is released, sites that
have taken action to remove bad links (such as through the Google disavow links tool
or to remove spam may regain rankings. New sites not previously caught
might get trapped by Penguin. “False positives,” sites that were caught
by mistake, may escape.
Every time Google algorithm update happen it big like Panda Update
4.0 then it's too painful for spammers and some good webmasters they
don't know about spam lol.
Each site Web Rank will defer by vendor like (Google and more) each
vendor having different factors, measurements and website data. So, the
ranking should vary depends upon the rank providers.
Canonical URL defined as the preferred URL for the page content to be indexed in the Major Search Engines. Canonical URL is
used by the Major Search Engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. Many
websites have two or more links of the same content with different
parameter. In this time Search Engines are confused about Which One is
needed to be Index?
Interesting and Descriptive to read
The Below list will help to improve the Keyword Analysis better.
For
those that wanted to be first to the trough, getting their Google+
account set up and adding authorship where appropriate, was a good
first step. Fleshing out that G+ profile with all their other online
profiles was another step forward. I even know a few people that
suddenly decided to start writing for some online publications, to
augment that.
