Ask Kalena

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Dear Kalena…

I have a site which has lost about 1000 back links, they were weak back links (repetitive links from same domain).

My question is this: is the site now permanently damaged or is it possible I can get it ranking again?

Thanks
Louie

Dear Louie

No the site is not permanently damaged - you’ll most-likely find that since the links were poor quality, and site-wide, a bulk of them probably weren’t even being counted in the first place.

Not all links are equal and the better quality (ie. more authoritative, trust worthy, relevant etc. ) the fewer links you’ll need to achieve the same results.

Jim Boykin explains this nicely in his post about Why that site with 50 backlinks beats your site with 1000 backlinks where he quotes:

It’s not always “He with the most links” who wins the game……often, “He with the right links” can win the game as well. Really, very often, he with the right 10 links can beat the guy with 1000 of the wrong links – I see it all the time.

So all you need to do is go out and find some decent links and you’ll be fine. If I were you, I’d consider this a good thing to be rid of the old crumby links and a golden opportunity to start building a better inbound link profile.

Hope this helps

Peter Newsome
SiteMost Search Engine Optimisation

Popularity: 2%

Dear Kalena…

I was hoping that you could help me with the following debate.

What is suggested SEO-friendly punctuation for the following examples:

keyword/keyword or keyword / keyword (ie. using a space before and after the slash or using no space)

and

blah blah-blah blah … or blah blah — blah blah (ie. space or no space between — and the words)

Also, if you would recommend an article on the subject of punctuation for SEO, that would be great!

Thanks and best regards!

Laura

Dear Laura

Different types of punctuation and where/how it is used will have varying impacts on your SEO. Some punctuation is completely ignored, some should be avoided although doesn’t strictly have an impact on SEO and some can make minor differences when the search engines are indexing your content.

In the examples you’ve provided, it doesn’t make much difference at all. I personally would put spaces between the dash and slash, but that is purely to make the text more legible and doesn’t really impact on the indexing of the content.

When naming files, I tend to use hyphens instead of underscores and spaces. For instance I’d name the “Contact Us” page on a site: contact-us.htm instead of contact_us.htm or contact us.htm (as the later example would end-up looking like contact%20us.htm after it’s been parsed by the webserver/browser. The same applies to adding any other unnecessary punctuation (such as inverted commas, quotation marks, ampersands, exclamation marks, commas etc. etc.) as this can also create some funky looking page names.

If you were optimising a page for the keywords men’s hats vs mens hats - this slight variation (with or without the apostrophe) would have an impact on how Google indexes the content and while you’ll still rank for both terms, you’ll obviously rank better for the term that matches what you’ve used in your content.

As you’ll probably use your chosen keyword more than once on the page, you could choose to use punctuation most of the time, but “accidentally” leave it out on a couple of occasions to cover both bases.

Generally speaking, your best bet is to adhere to the standard grammatical rules for punctuation and when in doubt, err on the side of the reader and not the search engine as usability and readability far outweigh the very minor benefit that could potentially be gained otherwise.

If you’re looking for some good articles that pertain to punctuation and SEO, here’s a few to check-out:

How Google Treats Punctuation
How Punctuation in Keywords Affects Google Results
Does punctuation affect SEO?
Watch Your Punctuation Online

Hope this helps

Peter Newsome
SiteMost Search Engine Optimisation

Popularity: 2%

Hi Kalena,

How would I find that how many users are visiting my site? Is that possible to have it as a report? i.e. daily, weekly etc.Question

Baskar

Dear Baskar

The two word answer to your question is “web analytics”. Web analytics software will not only help you to track the number of visitors coming to your website, but would tell you where they came from, the amount of time they spent on your website, pages they visited, and a whole lot of other data pertaining to your website.

The data from your web analytics software is extremely useful in helping you fine tune your website and is a must have for anyone who owns a website or a blog. There is a plethora of web analytic software, both free and paid, which you can use to get all the data you are looking for. The only challenge you are likely to face is converting this raw data into information which can be acted upon.

Personally I prefer Google Analytics and I have various reasons to do so. It is free to use and will supply you with all the data that you need, at least at beginner and intermediate level. On top of this, it is simple to use and intuitive. Your can generate reports based on various dimensions, customize it, and export them in various formats. You could not ask for more from free-to-use software.

The installation process is simple. All you need to do is sign up for Google analytics (you can use an existing Google account), grab a tracking code and insert it in webpages you want to track - job done. Google will start tracking your website’s activities in the next 24-48 hours. You can refer to Google Analytics Installation Guide for step by step instructions.

Saurav.

Pay for Performance Search Marketing

Popularity: 3%

Hi Kalena

I have been practising on my own site.  When I add an alt img tag I still cannot see the text when I scroll over the image.  I don’t understand this, could you please help? My URL is [URL removed for privacy reasons]. There is no alt img tag at present (I took it out because it didn’t seem to work).

Thanks in advance and regards,

Barry

—————————————————————————————————

Hi Barry

If you’re using Firefox, you won’t see alt tags when you mouseover. But if you right click on the image with your mouse and view *properties*, you should see your alt text in the alt field.

Or you could just view your site in Internet Explorer where the mouseovers should work fine.

Regardless of which browser you use, search engines will be able to index your alt tags. Plus text to speech software will be able to read them for visually-impaired visitors, so you should include them wherever possible for site usability purposes.

Popularity: 3%

Dear Kalena…

I’m on the verge of starting an apartment mega site mixed with social networking kind of like Rent.com meets Myspace, where people can list property for rent, etc.

I need tons of traffic and was going to start this off strong by targeting the keyword “apartments”. I have heard from many people to go more targeted but I need the massive traffic as I will be running Adsense as well. What would be the perfect way to tackle this?

I currently have someone writing 1,000+ articles with the keyword and derivative of it so I’m set in that arena.

Thanks again and any help would be greatly appreciated.

Cathy

Hi Cathy,

The first challenge any SEO faces isn’t how to improve the rankings of a website, but more-so how to manage the clients expectations.

While I acknowledge the need for massive amounts of traffic for your website to work effectively, it’s also important to remember that taking-on very generic keywords and wanting to compete with highly authoritative websites will take a lot of time and money. There is no cheap or easy way to accomplish this and if you don’t have a substantial (and really, that’s my polite way of saying HUGE) marketing budget covering a mix of both online and offline advertising along with the patience of a Tibetan Monk, you’d better stop reading here.

At the time of composing this post, there are roughly 181,000,000 sites indexed by Google.com for the word apartments. Rent.com has over 9,000,000 inbound links. The number one site ranked for the term ‘apartments’ has over 11,000,000 inbound links and the sites in the other top 5 each have well over 100,000 inbound links (all according to Yahoo’s Site Explorer).

So the first challenge will be finding a way to attract over 100,000 good quality links.

The next challenge will be the age of your website - each of the top sites in this niche have been around for over 10 years. Google looks at the age of a site as a sign of trust and authority, so if you setup a brand new website on a brand new domain name, it could take years before Google even considers your site in the same league as the sites you’re targeting.

Google’s Traffic Estimator tool suggests that advertisers are paying up to $3 per click for the word ‘apartments’ and the recommended daily budget (as suggested by Google) to achieve the maximum number of clicks through their PPC system would be approximately $39,820. This would bring you anywhere between 21,819 - 27,364 click every day.

So if that’s the amount of traffic you’re hoping for - it’s simply a matter of putting aside $1,200,000 a month on Adwords.

Now the Yahoo! and Google data above is bound to change and should only be used as a guide, but based on this information, it clearly indicates that a few thousand keyword-rich articles and a well optimised site isn’t going to cut it.

My advice would be to focus on more specific keywords (perhaps targeting different locations), try and create a range of viral/linkbait articles that will help generate slightly higher-than-normal link quantity while building relationships with other prominent (and industry-relevant) sites to get the link quality in there. To utilise social media effectively, you should also start to build an online profile within some of major networks and start creating genuine connections with people through comments, guest blogging, submitting other great articles (not written by you) etc.

Be prepared to pay for some online advertising through systems like Adwords and banner advertising or sponsorship deals with other high-volume sites. And although I probably shouldn’t be endorsing offline advertising on an SEO blog, you should also use mainstream media to gain greater exposure for your brand.

If you consistently roll-out great content, focus on managable keywords, form the right partnerships with the right websites, be prepared to put in the time-and-effort with social media and embrace the old adage “you have to spend money to make money”… in a few years time, you might be in a better position to try and tackle the major players.

If all this seems like too much hard work… maybe making money online isn’t for you.

Hope this helps!

Peter Newsome
SiteMost SEO Brisbane

Popularity: 5%