Improve your Google ranking with Peter Mahoney, 20+ years SEO & Wordpress experience
I need to moan. I’ve spent most of this week undoing the issues other “SEO professionals” made for some new clients.
One company was charging £400 a month, for six months, and supposedly never noticed that the robots.txt file was blocking all search engines from visiting.
Another set up a CNAME redirect for a site–and naturally Google was marking everything as duplicate content!
I wish this industry had fewer cowboys. A slick website and lots of promises does not a good company make.
New site up and out! It’s a really simple site that exists only to drive SEO juice to the firm’s main site. http://healthydogfoodadvice.co.uk
As you’d expect for someone obsessed with SEO I regularly check my own ranking on Google and the other major search engines.
But when 
My first thought was, “But I haven’t changed anything!” and of course, that’s the problem.
I’ve only blogged a few times in the past four months. I used to keep a regular schedule of three times a week, and Google loved me for it. It got their SEO juices flowing. But now, I’m falling – and it’s totally because I’m not generating enough content.
Content really is king for SEO. Yes there are all sorts of things you can do behind the scenes (and as a WordPress SEO expert – those are my specialty) but ultimately SEO is about reinforcing your core content; key messages, what you’re all about – that sort of thing.
After the sort of work I do the next most important thing to keep Google, Bing – all the search engines happy -is to have regular, topical, original content on your site. And there’s almost no better way to achieve that than blogging. It doesn’t need to be called a blog of course – you can call that section Update, or News – whatever creates an area in your site where you’ll be posting regularly.
It’s ironic in one way (and not in the Alanis sense, but something that actually fits the definition of irony) in that I write to at least two clients a day extolling the virtues of blogging. I’ve been so busy preaching the blogging gospel that I haven’t had the time to do it myself.
Well, all that changes today. Thrice a week, you’ll see me writing. And you’ll see me back at number one as a result of those efforts.
And I won’t feel like such a hypocrite when delivering my SEO sermons.
Backlinks are useful, however I strongly recommend you do not buy any. If you get them “naturally” then that’s great. But Google has always said they will try to penalise any site that buys them. So while you might find a vendor who has some great system for implementing links that they haven’t found yet, if Google does realise that you’re trying to trick them (and they will eventually) you could find your site disappears from their listings entirely.
Just don’t do it. Fullstop.
I’ve been working with this firm for most of 2013, they’re awesome, and really committed to their own success.
And that’s the sort of firm you want to be working for.
When search engines first came out (pre-Google), the idea that they could read a whole website was out of reach. It would take too long, require they store too much data, and generally there needed to be a quick, simple approach to scanning a website. The simplest of the simplest techniques was “meta keywords”.
This was a small piece of code that lived behind the scenes of a site, that listed all the keywords a site owner wanted their site to rank with. The list was delineated by a comma, so looked something like this:
<meta name=”keywords” content=”SEO, search engine optimisation, WordPress” />
This method was open to huge amounts of abuse on the part of a website owner. There was nothing stopping someone using keywords which were known to rank well, but didn’t even appear in their website. We started seeing tens of thousands of search results which were really a bait and switch, and it was eroding from the quality of the internet.
Google came along, and was one of the first search engines to really have a strong ethos behind it, in that they wanted to find a way to keep the internet useful, and digitally clean & tidy.
The solution was to index every site’s entire contents, scanning all the text that a real human could actually read, and working out based on sentence structure, density of nouns etc what a website was really about.
The next step was to start overlooking the meta keyword tag entirely.
And that was about a decade ago. Other major search engines followed suit, and as a result that list of keywords has been defunct and totally ignored for the best part of a decade.
Unfortunately for a host of reasons (many SEO “experts” don’t actually keep ahead of best practice, or are too happy to just do whatever their clients ask without explaining the process, or just that keyword lists entered the collectively consciousness at a formative time in the internet’s history) people still think they’re going to be useful.
One of the most popular SEO plugins for WordPress actually says next to the “Use keywords?” field, “I can’t think why you’d want to know. The search engines don’t”.
Sadly a lot of people get caught up on these, and their focus disappears from what is important to something that absolutely is not.
It’s not helped by the number of places that lists of words and phrases ARE still used, like Google Adsense for example. We also track our website’s analytics based on what search queries people found us with, etc.
I prefer to call these things “search terms”, or occasionally “key terms”. I try to steer clear of the (possible) synonym “keywords”.
So what I do in this regard is to look at your site as Google et al try to, (pretty well) as a human being. I read your site to see what it’s really about. I then run tests just like they do to see what words and phrases you use most often, and check that those do a good job of describing what your site is actually about. Most of the time, as long as someone has written their website from their own knowledge and experience of their industry or topic, these match just fine.
Occasionally I find someone thinks they have a site about, say, “window fitting”, but really it comes across as being about “buy my product”. You can imagine how that might happen, but it’s not want the search companies want to see so it’s not what we want to give them.
If I come across a discrepancy like that, I let my clients know that they need to rethink their content asap.
As long as they do match, I make sure I reinforce those terms everywhere we know Google et al want to see them. In image tags, in the description tag, in the page titles.
So, the short answer to a long history is let me take care of that–if I need to alert you to an issue I’ll let you know, and please don’t be surprised if you look at your site’s code when I’ve done and there is no outdated “keywords” code.
