Ask Kalena

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Dear Kalena…

What are your favorite WordPress plugins, especially those used for SEO?

Anne

Hi Anne

I use a lot of plugins for WordPress, but the four I can’t live without would have to be:

• All in One SEO Pack
• Google XML Sitemaps Generator for WordPress
• Popularity Contest
• Sociable / Antisocial

To learn more about these, view my video answer below:

Popularity: 41%

Hi Kalena

I’ve been reading your articles and find your answers to many people very helpful. So, here is my issue.

I am helping a friend with his website that I built. I felt like we did a pretty decent job with SEO and we had some fairly high ranking in some key terms like “lasik in chicago” 6th and “lasik in Oakbrook” 2nd.

All of a sudden I was changing the index page to put up a larger flash video. I also added some additional text that looks similiar to some of the higher ranking sites that are competitors of my friend Dr. Sloane. Since then I have noticed he has been moved down to page three for the same ranking. When I went into Google Webmaster Tools, I noticed that it shows that Googlebot hasn’t accessed the homepage since 2007. Also, I see all my pages rank very low on PageRank.

I’m just a little bit confused and was hoping that you could give me a little advice on getting his site on the right track. He has been around on the net since mid 90’s, so the domain has some age.

Shannon

Hi Shannon

First of all, thank you for the caffeine donation, that helps a lot when I’m answering these questions in the wee hours. As for your issue, I’ve taken a look and wow, where do I start? How about here:

1) The first major content on your client’s home page HTML is a huge Flash file. Quite apart from the fact that it’s visually distracting and goes against every web site usability rule possible, you’ve stuck it right after the header tags, meaning it’s the first thing search engines are going to try and index. The file isn’t optimized so it doesn’t tell Googlebot and others anything about your page, it simply pushes the meatier content further down the code.

2) You seem to have some weird link to the iFrance site embedded in an iframe. What’s that about? It looks dodgy and search engines don’t like iframes so it’s probably triggered a red flag or two.

3) Your current home page looks and smells like a doorway page. There’s no obvious formatting, no navigation menu, the design is not consistent with the rest of the site and it doesn’t load properly in Firefox. I was half expecting to see user-agent sniffer code in the HTML, but perhaps it’s just really poor design.

4) We’re up to number 4 already, and this is probably your main problem: there seems to be some type of delayed meta refresh that kicks in after 5 seconds and redirects people to a different URL on the same domain. This is retro spam at it’s finest and is like waving a huge red flag at Google saying “HEY, I’M DOING SOMETHING DODGY OVER HERE! PENALIZE ME QUICK”

Spammers like to use meta refreshes in order to bait and switch i.e. show Googlebot a family safe DVD page like Driving Miss Daisy and then redirect human searchers to a porn site of the… ahem… same name. Ditch the redirect pronto. Decide which home page you want to show both users and search engines and stick with it.

Surprisingly, your Title and META tags check out ok, although there’s a bit of excessive keyword repetition in your META Keywords tag. Googlebot last cached your home page on 13 April so check your Webmaster Tools account again.

That’s it for now, I hate to say it but my coffee’s run out.

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Popularity: 32%

Well I was checking the SERPs to see what all the current fuss was about regarding Google datacenters at the moment (is it an algorithm tweak or just a shuffle?), when I came across something amusing.

Check the current SERP for “SEO Training”, paying careful attention to the #3 result. Yep, you can now undertake SEO Training of the Smelly Kind. From the site:

“In the Precertification Academy, DEP and PSATS provide Sewage Enforcement Officer (SEO) candidates with the basic knowledge needed to work for a local agency and prepare them for the duties and responsibilities of an SEO. We are committed to providing quality training to assist SEOs with making decisions that ultimately protect the Commonwealth’s public health and environment.”

It all sounds pretty similar to the responsibilities of most SEOs, although protecting public health and the environment is going beyond the call of duty. Perhaps we now have a more appropriate anagram for SEO: the Sewage Enforcement Officer!

Gave me a chuckle anyway.

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Popularity: 35%

Hi Kalena

As I’m rethinking about my page, I’ve become curious about something. Do people actually search for phrases such as “web design Gloucester” or do they for the most part just search for a page with those three words on it? (which if I understand things is what you get when you search without quotes).

Of course if I have the three words as a phrase either search hits it, but I’m having trouble making it as readable as I’d like using the concise phrases and I’m wondering if the sacrifice in readability is worth it?

Lastly, I wanted to be sure that if I have a key phrase such as “web design Gloucester” that the string “web design in Gloucester” matches. I seem to remember that “in” was a stop word ignored by Search Engines.

Steve

Hi Steve

I think you’ll find that most people will start a search using generic terms and then add qualifiers to help narrow down the results. So they might start with “web design companies” (no quotes) and then seeing billions of matches, they might try “web design companies Gloucester” or “web design Gloucester” (no quotes). I don’t really know too many searchers who use quotes unless they are advanced users or SEOs. So it really pays to try to get ranked for the non-quotes version of your target keyphrases.

You can achieve this by using the phrase in your text but including stop words so the copy is more readable. You should never have to sacrifice readability! Stop words are words like “the”, “and”, “in” etc that are mostly ignored by the search algorithm. So if your page has the sentence “we are one of the most popular web design companies in Gloucester” then search engines should rank your page high for the query “web design companies Gloucester” as they will ignore the word “in”.

The reverse also applies, where if a search query includes a stop word, engines will show pages that have either the shorter sentence included without the stop word/s or the longer one.

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Popularity: 32%

Hey Kalena

Quick question for ya if you got a minute. If I’m targeting a keyword or phrase, lets say dogs. I write a 500 word article about dogs. I post it on my site. I want to target my main url i.e. www.dogs.com. How many times can I create anchor text in that one article that links to the main page?

Chris

Hi Chris

It’s really not about counting the number of keywords or links - it’s about what sounds natural to a reader and what makes the most sense in the copy. If you can read page copy aloud and it doesn’t sound stilted or repetitious, you’ve probably got the right balance of keywords. As a general rule of thumb, I recommend aiming for keyword repetition of around 2 to 3 times per page for each keyword/phrase you are targeting. More than that usually ruins the copy and/or triggers red flags in search engine filters.

When using anchor text, a good way to avoid excessive keyword repetition is to try using keyword variations and word stemming e.g. accounts, accountant, accounting etc. Also consider using your keywords in headings, sub-headings and bullet points. These have the added advantage of breaking up the copy and making it easier to read. Oh and if you decide to use “dogs” in your anchor text, for Pete’s sake make sure the page you are linking to talks about dogs! Sounds obvious but it’s amazing how often this is overlooked.

ADDED: Nick from Search Engine Optimization Journal has blogged about this post. He took from my comments above that when I said 2 or 3 instances per page, I was referring to anchor text links. But I was actually referring to keywords per page, not links per page. Nick’s right, too many links pointing to a single page using the same anchor text is dodgy and unnecessary and may trip spam filters. Just wanted to clarify this point to avoid confusion. Thanks Nick!

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Popularity: 53%