by Marketing Practicality

Website Penalty? How to Diagnose and Fix a Google Penalty

Marketing Practicality | February 22, 2010 in SEO | Comments (0)

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Website Penalty? Steps to Diagnose and Fix a Google Penalty

One of the most devastating things that can happen to a small business – especially a business that generates leads and business through the internet – is a Google penalty.
A Google Penalty is often difficult to diagnose and fix, especially if you have recently made multiple changes prior to the suspected website penalty, such as a complete redesign or if you are not completely aware of what your SEO company is doing.  I’ll provide you with some practical advice on how to diagnose and fix a Google Penalty.

What Was Done Before Your Website Rankings Dropped?

I suggest you apply the scientific method of eliminating variables here as well as ask yourself some honest questions. Let’s presume your website previously ranked well in Google for select keyword searches, and now it doesn’t – ask yourself this:

  • Did your website really deserve to rank for those terms?
  • Have you, your web design firm or your SEO firm recently made changes to your website?
  • Where does your website rank for a Google search of mywebsite.com? How about site:mywebsite.com?
  • What do you see in your Google Webmaster Tools account?
  • Has your organic search traffic dropped on all search engines or just Google?
  • Do you buy or sell links (or both)?
  • Do you run an affiliate program?

Review and understand exactly what has been done to your website prior to the suspected Google penalty.

Google Penalty or Search Engine Algorithm Change?

Sometimes your website may lose it’s rankings because of an algorithm change. OK – sometimes Google makes a change to it’s algorithm and that can impact your website, the rules do change and that’s a good reason to diversify your small business’ marketing exposure, as well as hiring an SEO firm that stays on top of this activity. Sometimes this happens for other reasons, for example new websites that rely on rankings because of keywords in the url.

In my experience, sudden dramatic drops in small business website rankings are not algorithm changes, but it’s possible.

Fixing a Google Penalty

Here are some of the things I recommend you consider to diagnose and fix a Google penalty:

  1. Check your website for Malware and Viruses (every directory, every file, every line of code – start with .htaccess and your web logs.
  2. Look at your links – use Xenu or a similar product, a bad link profile can crush a website.
  3. On page content – could you be keyword spamming? Using excessive anchor text? Loading your footer with keywords and links?
  4. Consider a reconsideration request with Google as a last resort.

Resources for Fixing a Google Penalty

Having seen this with several clients, I understand the frustration and real revenue consequences that come from a penalized website. I recommend the follow websites as resources as well as for more tips on diagnosing and fixing a Google penalty:

If you suspect you have experienced a website penalty, I recommend you either plan on spending a lot of time analyzing exactly what changes potentially triggered the change or hire a professional, qualified SEO company. In order to properly diagnose and fix a Google penalty it is critical to understand what caused it.  More important is fixing the penalty, and restoring your business’ website traffic.

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5 Email Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

Marketing Practicality | February 4, 2010 in Email Marketing | Comments (3)

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Email Marketing Tips

Here are some 5 email marketing tips to better interpret, test and analyze your email marketing campaigns.

Email Marketing Tip #1: Interpreting the Open Rate

After reviewing your email marketing metrics, you notice one person opened your email 30 times. You think, “Wow! What a hot prospect!”. Not so fast. If you sent HTML email and your recipient uses Outlook with the reading pane, your results can be skewed. If someone uses a reading pane and scrolls over your email using the up or down arrow keys, the email is opened in the reading pane. That counts as an open, even though the intent was nothing more than quickly scrolling past your email to get to a different email. So interpret this metric carefully.

Email Marketing Tip #2: Test, test, test!

If your email marketing list is large enough, you should segment and test your list every time you start an email marketing campaign. Common and useful things to test in your email marketing efforts include:

  • Subject line – this is critical
  • Email Offer or Call to Action
  • List Segmentation – including: geography, age of leads, previous buyers vs. prospects, etc.
  • Landing Page
  • Creative

Email Marketing Tip #3: Use Website Analytics

If an email generates a click to your website, then what? Use your Web Analytics program to understand what happens next. Depending on your call to action, your Analytics program can tie in the performance of your email marketing campaign to the actual result.

Email Marketing Tip #4: Send HTML and Text Versions

Most email marketing service providers allow you to send an HTML version as well as a text only version of your email. Nowadays, most people use HTML as their default – but many people intentionally or not, only accept text based emails. Make sure you use both.

Email Marketing Tip #5: Follow Up with Qualified Leads

Prospects that opened up your email message multiple times or clicked through to your website, identified themselves as interested. Your next step should be to follow up directly with that prospect.

Email Marketing Service Providers

There are many email marketing service providers out there. Two of the most commonly used are iContact and Constant Contact. My personal preference is iContact but I use both depending on the client. If you have a small business and are looking for a quality email marketing service provider, you be satisfied with either of those two.

Email Marketing Tips Wrap Up

These are some basic email marketing tips. Email marketing can be as sophisticated as you want. But most importantly, your email marketing efforts should continually improve and yield a better marketing ROI. Contact Marketing Practicality for expert email marketing help with your small business.

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How to Interpret Email Marketing Metrics

Marketing Practicality | in Email Marketing | Comments (2)

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Email Marketing Metrics

If you are a small business and looking for an affordable way to reach out to your prospects, email marketing is a great channel. Most email marketing service providers have built in analysis and reporting so you can view your email marketing metrics in an almost real-time environment. But do you fully understand what the reports are telling you? Here are some email marketing tips to help you better understand email marketing metrics.

Overview of Email Marketing Metrics

Most email marketing services provide the following common metrics:

  • Bounces – A bounced is mail didn’t get delivered to the intended recipient. This could be for a host of reasons – the email address was spelled incorrectly, the address no longer exists, the email was blocked by a firewall, etc.
  • Released (sent) – Released emails were sent and delivered to the recipient.
  • Unsubscribes – The email was delivered and the recipient unsubscribed from your email service – basically they have removed themselves from your email list.
  • Opens – The email was opened (more on this later)
  • Clicks – If there are links in your HTML email, any clicks are tracked.
  • Forwards – The recipient used your email marketing service provider’s forwarding feature to send your email on to another person.
  • Complaints or Spam – Complaints are registered when an email recipient reports your email as spam to their ISP (Internet Service Provider). It is usually done by clicking a Report Spam button in their email client.

The Most Important Email Marketing Metrics

The three most important email marketing metrics. When analyzing a campaign I initially focus on three key email marketing metrics:

Bounce Rate: the bounce rate is an indicator of the quality of your list. If you are emailing an in-house prospect list and you experience a high bounce rate, it’s time to perform some database hygiene and get your email addresses updated

Open Rate: The higher the better. If your email isn’t opened, your message is not conveyed. A good open rate is influenced by crafting a great subject line and how familiar the recipient is with your email address and company. It also indicates the relative level quality of your list; better prospects will yield a higher open rate. Interpreting the open rate can be tricky though, see my email marketing tips post.

Click Rate: These recipients are even more engaged than those who just opened your email and deserve special handling.

Email Marketing Metrics Wrap Up

Once you have a good grasp on email marketing metrics, you’ll be much better prepared to interpret the results of your email marketing campaign. Next step is to understand the basic nuances of email marketing which can be found under my 5 email marketing tips. Contact Marketing Practicality for expert email marketing help with your small business.

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Google Caffeine | FeedBurner | Time to get in Google’s Index

Marketing Practicality | February 1, 2010 in SEO | Comments (0)

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Google Caffeine, FeedBurner and Ultra Fast Google Indexing

After you create a new web page, do you wonder how how much time it will take to get in Google’s Index?  It’s something I constantly check for my own website as well as for my clients’ websites.  But over the past several months, I’ve noticed ultra fast Google indexing when you combine blog posts, Google Caffeine and FeedBurner.

And I mean ultra fast – my posts are indexed by Google in three minutes.  The group at Hobo-Web also wrote about this phenomenon.

(Update) In this case – Google indexed the web page in two minutes:

Time to get in Google's Index

Time to get in Google's Index

Formula for (Almost) Real Time Indexing

Here’s how I’m set up:

  1. My blog is WordPress
  2. The RSS feed is connected to FeedBurner (which pings Google Blog Search)
  3. My FeedBurner is also using the Socialize feature to update the post on my Twitter account

Here’s what I have observed:

  1. Blog post is submitted
  2. Search for the targeted keyword(s) appears in SERPs (search engine results pages) almost instantly as in 3 minutes
  3. Rankings bounce around for a few days before stabilizing

Google Caffeine, FeedBurner or QDF (Query Deserves Freshness)

Admittedly, this post raises more questions than it answers, but hopefully you will share your own observations and experiences.

The time to get in Google’s Index is likely tied in to the Google Caffeine infrastructure change, FeedBurner integration and the QDF or Query Deserves Freshness part of Google’s algorithm.

QDF – which is covered in more detail by SEOmoz here – deals with a part of Google’s algorithm which identifies certain topics which are deemed to require more frequent updating.  So webpages covering topics which fall into this category get indexed more rapidly.

However, I believe Google Caffeine, FeedBurner and technology advancements have more to do with this than the QDF part of the algorithm.

Google Does Not Index all Web Pages at the Same Rate

No kidding right? But seriously, in the last two weeks, I’ve experienced three very different indexing situations.

  1. Blog Post Indexing
    • When connected to FeedBurner, new posts on my WordPress blog are indexed within a few minutes.
    • When the blog posts are not connected to FeedBurner, it takes significantly longer.
  2. Non-Blog Web Page Indexing
    • A client’s home page was revised – content, title and meta information only, not a redesign
    • 12 days later – the changes are not reflected in the SERPs
    • Standard (not a blog) HTML webpage – not connected to FeedBurner or RSS
    • Bing picked up the change after about a week
    • This is a Page Rank 4 website that gets a respectable amount of website traffic
  3. New Website
    • Created an e-commerce website for another client two weeks ago
    • Website was added to Google Webmaster Tools
    • Sitemap was submitted
    • Links were added from authoritative, established websites
    • Website is not indexed in Google, Yahoo or Bing after 2 weeks
    • This is what is referred to as “The Sandbox” effect

Shorten the Time to Get in Google’s Index

If you want to shorten the time to get get in Google’s index, hook up your blog to FeedBurner.  Whether it’s the new Google Caffeine infrastructure, FeedBurner or a refinement to the QDF portion of Google’s algorithm is a technology question.  If you want your blog posts to get immediate visibility – consider adding FeedBurner.

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Successful Web Marketing | Increase Website Visibility | Web Marketing Ideas

Marketing Practicality | January 31, 2010 in Internet Marketing | Comments (6)

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Successful Web Marketing

This is the third article of a three part series on Successful Web Marketing – this article provides web marketing ideas on how to increase website visibility. Because, at the end of the day, no matter how good your content is, what does it matter if no one can find your website (and your content)?

How to Increase Website Visibility

In order to successfully increase your website’s visibility you will need to learn certain tools. Like most things – you will be able to pick up a basic knowledge of these skills with a moderate time investment. If you want to develop expert-level skills, count on 1,000’s of hours for each of these web marketing tactics – or hire a qualified professional. The following 5 tactics can be employed to increase visibility to your website – generating more web traffic – and exposure to that valuable content you have already created.

Increase Website Visibility Idea #1 – Search Engine Optimization – SEO

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the practice of developing and managing your website so it ranks well for targeted search terms in the major search engines. An effective SEO marketing strategy will significantly increase traffic to your website. Search engine optimization consists of both on-page SEO and off-page SEO. I strongly recommend you perform search engine optimization within the search engines guidelines if you intend to build a website for the long haul. When done effectively, search engine optimization is the best tactic in your toolbox to increase website visibility – and a critical component of successful web marketing. Don’t overlook this web marketing idea. And use a proven, qualified SEO marketing consultant if you’re not sure how to do it internally.

Increase Website Visibility Idea #2 – Pay per Click Marketing – PPC

But like most things, you don’t want to put all of your eggs in one basket, so if you completely rely on SEO for website visibility, you may be very disappointed if a search engine that sends you a large amount of organic traffic changes an algorithm or otherwise stops sending you the website traffic you were accustomed to. Pay per Click Marketing (also called paid search or PPC) involves targeting certain keywords and paying for search engine listings. This is a great tactic to increase visibility to your website, but of course costs money. So carefully evaluate your marketing metrics and monitor your PPC campaign performance. It only makes sense to carry out a PPC marketing campaign if it produces a positive ROI.

Increase Website Visibility Idea #3 – Social Media

Social media continues to gain momentum as a tool for increasing website visibility as well as developing online relationships with your customers or prospects interested in your products and services. Social media also ties in with search engine optimization as it provides a medium where your website can garner inbound links, thus increasing your website visibility.

Increase Website Visibility Idea #4 – Referring Websites

When I say referring websites, I mean websites that link to your website and direct traffic to your website by means of an inbound link. This also ties in with SEO, but if you build up a network of quality, referring websites that are synergistic with your website, you can increase visibility to your website and quite likely, improve your conversion rates. Generating a network of referring websites takes work; it’s best to reach out to other webmasters and establish a level of trust before simply asking someone for a link.

Increase Website Visibility Idea #5 – Networking

Old fashioned networking and personal relationships can go a long way for small businesses trying to increase website visibility. Think about who could link to your website – starting with your personal network. Vendors, customers, suppliers, business contacts, friends, consultants – there are likely a host of people you already know that have a business website. If you already have an established level of trust, and it makes sense, why not ask that person for a link in to your website?

Successful Web Marketing – A Blend of Old and New Marketing

In today’s competitive landscape, successful web marketing really requires a blend of old and new marketing tactics. Staying on top of rapidly changing technology and how it impacts your business market efforts is critical to successful web marketing.
Ask yourself:

  1. Are you getting the most out of your search engine optimization?
  2. Have you fully tested pay per click marketing?
  3. Are you effectively using social media marketing?
  4. Do you know the top ten websites referring traffic to your website?
  5. Do you routinely discuss web marketing with your network?

If you take these 5 web marketing ideas and deploy them effectively. you will see positive results. In order to increase website visibility, you need to work at it, or hire someone who will. Successful web marketing depends on knowing what to do, how to do it and then putting in the hard work to ensure success. So get going!

View the first article in the “Successful Web Marketing Ideas” series:

Web Marketing Ideas

View the second article in the “Successful Web Marketing Ideas” series:

Creating Valuable Content

By Marketing Practicality

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