Ask Kalena

Hey Kalena,

I’m trying to optimize a site for the first time. Its a fashion jewelry site. I have come up against a couple of stumbling blocks that I need a little clarification on. One is the target market – its a New Zealand website, but we want to target New Zealander’s, Australians and the rest of the world this brings up issues of spelling – do we focus on Jewellery (New Zealand/British spelling), Jewelry (US spelling, but where a lot of the current customers come from) or Jewellry (a common misspelling).

Secondly, I’m having a hard time trying to choose my keyword phrases. Silver jewelry and costume jewelry (which seems to be the most common way people search for fashion jewelry, even though fashion jewelry sounds so much more modern!! – found out through the Google Keyword tool) seem to be the best as they are well searched for. I want to be more specific however i.e *women’s silver jewelry*, or *silver jewellery nz* or *buy silver jewelry* etc. but the search volume according to the Google Keyword tool is well below 20 per day.

Can you please suggest what I should do in this situation?

Thank you!
Mitchell

Hi Mitchell

To answer your questions:

1) The regional spelling issue is a tricky one. There are a few ways you can approach this – do you have the .com as well as the regional Top Level Domains (TLD) .co.nz and .com.au? If so, you can use the American spelling on the .com domain and the British spelling on the regional domains. However, this may create duplicate content issues unless you block robots from the near-duplicate pages.

Alternatively, you can simply use the appropriate language version for your largest target market as the default throughout your site. For example, although we are based in New Zealand, our main target market for Search Engine College is the US, so we use American English throughout our web site. Most regional markets will understand that American English is common on the Internet, so you should not isolate them by doing this.

Another, trickier, option is to use British English on your main site to attract organic local search traffic and then create a Pay Per Click advertising campaign (e.g. Google AdWords) with tailored landing pages and ad text using American English to suit your other markets. Then, run your PPC campaign targeting only those countries where American English is used more commonly, making sure you block search engine robots from indexing your American English landing pages. You could do the reverse if you decide American English should be your default language.

As for misspellings? Those are fantastic for picking up extra traffic your competitors are missing. Best way to get that traffic is by targeting the misspelled keywords within your Pay Per Click campaign or by including the misspellings in your Page Titles and META Tags (the META Keywords tag is a particularly good place for them if you don’t want human visitors to see them).

2) You are spot on wanting to target the longer tail keyword phrases such as *women’s silver jewelry* and *buy silver jewelry* because it is these specific phrases that are more likely to bring you qualified visitors who are more ready to purchase. But the beauty of targeting these longer phrases is that they also contain the more popular shorter search terms such as *silver jewelry* and *women’s jewelry*. So, by default, you are also optimizing your web site for these shorter phrases by integrating the longer ones into your tags and page copy.

Choosing long tail phrases that contain more generic popular search ones is a great way to save valuable keyword real estate in your page titles and meta tags. For example, instead of having to include both *buy silver jewellery*, AND *silver jewellery* in your meta description tag, you only need to include the longer one as it covers both. A META Description tag of “Buy women’s silver jewelry from French Fashions” sounds a lot less redundant than “Buy silver jewelry and women’s silver jewelry and silver jewelry from French Fashions”, don’t you agree?

When researching keywords for multiple international markets, remember to use a keyword research tool that offers regional search data so you can pinpoint what persons are searching for in each country. Apart from regional spelling, regional jargon such as (accommodation vs lodging) can impact keyword search trends considerably.

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Hi Kalena,

We have put our hotel website into Joomla CMS and I notice with our CMS based sites that the home page ranks well but most other pages say ‘Currently not ranked by Google.’ I know they have been indexed by Google, and have internal links pointing to them, yet they are not achieving any ranking despite having relevant succinct copy on them. Any ideas as to why there might be a problem? i don’t see any spam links pointing to them…

Many thanks

Sarah

Hi Sarah,

The most popular Content Management Systems (such as Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress) are reasonably search engine friendly with their default settings – although all can be tweaked to improve their SEO capabilities.  There are a variety of plugins/modules available for each of these open source CMSs and it is usually worth talking to your SEO or Web Developer to see what can be done to make your site more search engine friendly.

As you say, many (if not all) of the pages on your site [URL Provided] are indexed by Google. When you say you get the message “Currently not ranked by Google”, presumably you are using rank checking software to see how your site ranks for a variety of keyword phrases.  This simply indicates that the pages you are checking are not ranking in the top “X” search results – for the keyword phrases you have identified.  It doesn’t necessarily mean that they are not rankling for other keywords.   I suggest that you review your analytics data to see which pages are being found on search engines(and for which keyword phrases).

It is typical for a website’s home page to rank better than it’s sub pages – this is largely because the home page usually has significantly more links to it from external sites.  In order to improve the rankings of your sub-pages (assuming that the page structure and content has already been optimised for the target keywords)., you should work at building backlinks to these pages – ideally using your target keyword phrases as anchor text.

The Link profile for your site is fairly basic – with relatively few links from external sites – and most all of these appear to be going to the Home Page.  Undertaking a link building campaign is likely to improve your overall rankings – and also balance your rankings better between your home and sub-pages.

Andy Henderson
WebConsulting (SEO Brisbane)

Dear Kalena

I have a question regarding google alerts. I have used them before to follow a topic or to stay informed about other articles regarding my website/blog niche. But can you find out your web ranking with this tool? I have had a look but I can’t get my head round it.

Thanks
Luis

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Hello Luis

You can’t really track your search rankings using Google Alerts. Such alerts are really only useful for tracking a specific topic or mentions of a brand / company that then get listed in the Google search results. They’re really handy for keeping track of a company’s online reputation.

For example, I have a client for whom I prepare a Social Mentions report every week. These social mentions consist mainly of web sites, blogs and social networking posts (e.g. tweets, Facebook status updates etc.) that mention their brand name. I use a combination of Google Alerts and Raven Tools for this purpose.

Speaking of Raven Tools, they DO offer a way to track your search engine rankings, as well as powerful historical ranking charts that can track your position in the top search engines for a particular keyword/phrase over a time frame set by you.

They have a 30 free trial and then a $19 per month option for tracking up to 3 websites – might be worth a try?

I should note here that I am a BIG fangirl of Raven Tools and a Pro member. I am also an affiliate, so the link above is my affiliate link if you want to use that (I get a small percentage of any sales that result) or you can use the normal link which has no affiliate ties.

The other (more time-consuming) way to check your rankings is manually, conducting a live search at a set time period on each of the main search engines and keeping a record via spreadsheet. Just remember to log out of any Google account before you check Google rankings, or else they might be skewed by Google Personalized Search.

Another very useful tool I’ve been using a lot lately is Google Insights for Search. With this Google tool, (still in Beta), you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties. This type of data can tell you a lot more about your web site performance / niche potential than your search positions can.

Hi Kalena

I have several questions if you have the time to answer them.

1. What impact does a video clip have on search engine indexing (if any)?

2. Some websites I look at don’t seem to be using good navigation structures or use anywhere near the minimum recommended amount of text on their home page at all — yet they came up on page one when a google search is done – why? For example: Visiooptic.com has very little body text yet they come up high on a google search for *eyeglasses in Brookline, MA*.

3. I would think that web designers would automatically incorporate meta tags and key words and know about the importance of on-page criteria – yet it seems they don’t. Isn’t this bad business practice?

For example: one of my websites was done by a very experienced web designer, yet I wasn’t informed about many of these things; and I am seeing that my site isn’t very well optimized. I’m so surprised by this!

Thank you
Toni

Hi Toni

I’ll answer each of your questions in turn:

1) Depending on the way your clip is uploaded, LOTS. As you probably know, Google purchased YouTube a few years ago. So that should give you an idea of how important video is to the web and to search in particular. You can optimize your YouTube videos for search engine rankings now – there are lots of tutorials about this and we are looking to add a whole lesson on this to our SEO201 course in the near future. In the meantime, have a look at this post on how to optimize your video content.

2) Optimized body text is just one factor of the 100+ ranking influence factors in the Google PageRank algorithm. It’s an important one, but not the only one. So the reason you see other pages ranking well despite little or no text is that they score highly in other areas such as inbound links (quality of other sites linking to them), title and meta tags, inbound traffic, internal cross-linking etc. The sample site you mention is ranking ok because (amongst other things) it has a toolbar PageRank score of 4 and quite a few inbound links. If it had more optimized text on the page, it would probably rank even higher.

3) Surprising isn’t it? Despite SEO playing such a vital role in how a web site performs online, it’s scary how many web design companies either don’t know anything about SEO or don’t think it’s their job to optimize a web site. It’s not that they are unprofessional, it’s just that SEO is quite a specific science and many designers don’t have the knowledge to optimize a site well, or believe it is someone else’s job because it can be time-consuming. Some web designers offer SEO as an add-on service to web design, which I guess is fair enough as it could be outside the scope of the agreed design project. But I can’t tell you the number of web sites I’ve had to optimize for clients who have paid tens of thousands of dollars for a web site that is basically a glossy online brochure that would never be found in Google in a million years.

Kalena

Hi Kalena,

I love your blog… you have a lot of useful internet marketing content. I was wondering if you could do a blog post about the situation I’m currently having.

My site, [URL Provided], was recently penalized in Google. I got one of those -50 penalties where I go down to page 5 or 6 for all of my search terms (including site name). It has been like this for nearly 2 months… since September 24, 2010. I used to be ranking #1 for the term ‘auto insurance quotes’ and also on page one for ‘auto insurance’.

Now, they say that incoming links cannot hurt your site, but that is the only explanation I can think of for my situation. There are a lot of blog comments pointing to my URL. Most of these comments, as well as many of the links pointing to my site, are links that I personally never created. I have never purchased links nor have done any automated link building… The domain is 11 years old and I have devoted the past few years of my life to it.

James.

Hi James,

A sudden drop in search rankings is one of the worst nightmares for most website owners, and can be a very scary thing – particularly if your site relies heavily on organic rankings for traffic and sales.

I’ve had a look at your rankings, and can confirm that it looks very much like a ranking penalty has been applied by Google (although your rankings seem fine under Bing). Your site appears in position 47 on google.com for a query of your business name, with many other sites that simply mention your name outranking you.

Unfortunately it’s not possible within the scope of this Q and A to undertake a detailed analysis of your specific circumstances. However, I’ve outlined below some of the general steps that should be taken, and suggest that you contact a professional SEO for further advice.

It is unlikely that dodgy backlinks, or even duplicate content would result in a ranking penalty – the problem is much more likely to be caused by something on your site.

Identifying a Ranking Penalty

If you are monitoring your sites rankings, you should notice a ranking penalty very quickly, as you will see a sudden and dramatic drop in your rankings for all keywords and pages,  If you arte not checking rankings reguilarly, you may not realise there is a problem until you notice significant drop offs in traffic (via analytics) – or, worst case scenario, in your sales or enquiries.

Identifying the Problem

If you are using Google webmaster tools (and you should be), Google will often (but not always) notify you when a penalty is applied – and will also usually indicate what the problem is.  You should also very closely review Googles Webmaster Guidelines and check if there is anything on your site that may contravene Googles “rules”.

A ranking penalty may not necessarily be applied as a result of a recent change on your site.  The problem may have existed for some time, but have been triggered by a new crawl, a change in the ranking algorithm, or could also be caused by a combination of relatively minor problems with your site, which , taken in total, reach a trigger threshold.

Fixing the Problem

Once you identified the problem/s it is important to fix the issue completely as soon as possible.  It’s also a good idea to also fix any other “iffy” or questionable practices, as your site is likely to be submitted to closer scrutiny than normal before the penalty can be lifted.

Submitting a Reinclusion Request

Once you are satisfied that the problem with your site has been completely resolved, you need to submit a reinclusion request. Google calls these a “request for reconsideration”, and provide some good tips for how to go about doing this (along with a video from the Google Search Quality team) on their Requesting reconsideration of your site help page.

In your reinclusion request you need to be very clear about what action you have taken to resolve the issue and ensure that it will noit happen again.

Once a reinclusion request has been submitted, the Google search quality team will undertake a manual review of your site, and (as long as the site does now conform to their guidelines), will, probably reinstate your rankings.  Be aware though that this review process can take days or weeks.

If you’d like to find out more about the Ranking Penalty and Reinclusion Request, I blogged about it a couple of years ago, and the process is still pretty much the same  – “My Google Rankings have dropped and I think I’ve been penalised – What can I do?”

Andy Henderson
WebConsulting SEO (Australia)