Let me give this analogy a try; It takes 100 pennies to make a dollar. If you are happy and content with having just 90 cents, then that’s okay, but if you demand the full dollar, you can’t ignore a few pennies just because they are not perfectly shiny, they must be included.

The same goes for SEO. There are many bits and pieces that allow a site to be well optimized. Many are fundamental and easily implemented, such as proper tags, while others are more trivial and easily ignored such as page load time, but it’s these trivial things that really add up to make the difference. Read more…

Remember the Nigerian scam messages way back when? Perhaps not so much way back when but quite awhile ago and still on occasion coming into my junk mail folder.

Scams are annoying, fear mongering, and down right rude. In 10 email scams to watch out for, Debra Shinder explains what you should watch out for to avoid being ‘duped’. Read more…

Search Engine Guide kindly republished my article called “How a Google Penalty Can Make Your Site Stronger” which prompted some great questions from readers which I have reformatted and posted here for readers of the StepForth Web Marketing Blog:

Question 1) My site has been penalized by google coz of paid post and links, which left my site with a PR 0, do you have any suggestions for that?”

Ross Dunn: Yes, the best way to go is to have all of the paid posts and links removed; if that has not happened already. Then once you are certain you are no longer infringing on Google’s guidelines, go into your Google Webmaster Tools account and submit a request for reconsideration of your website; if you can’t find the area to do that, then just do a quick search in the help area and you will find it.

Unfortunately there is no guarantee this will get you back into Google’s graces and there is also no telling how long Google will take to even get to your request, however, it is an excellent first step. The next step is to build your site into a powerhouse of excellent information by creating a blog or getting more active in the one you have. This involves posting original, high quality content that provides potential readers with something of value – be it simply an enjoyable read or useful tips. The act of building your site’s reputation through new quality content will help your odds of getting back into Google’s graces considerably.

Question 2) “I am eager to know if we go for URL removal request and make changes to site and then again submit link to google.Does it faster way to get out from penalization?” Read more…

There are several billion images indexed in Google Images. Are yours there? If you’ve been wondering what it takes to get your images ranking, then this article is for you. Here are some tips to help you increase the exposure of your images, and with a little luck, have them appearing at the top of the regular web search results.

1. Image File Name
The first step towards having your images appear in image search is with the image file name. When naming images consider using a target word or phrase whenever it makes sense to do so. If you run a hotel, consider naming a photo of your building as “victoria-hotel.jpg”.

Use hyphens instead of underscores in file names. While these days underscores are supposedly being treated as word separators by Google, consider sticking with hyphens to play it safe. Read more…

Okay, in all honestly, if you are actually in bed with the swine flu, you are probably better off sleeping, but if you are nurturing the tail end of a flu, or even just the common cold, you may be able and willing to get a few things done.

The other day I was feeling a bit under the weather, and for some reason got to thinking – what SEO work could be done from bed? Sometimes illness can wipe us out so all we can do is sleep the day away, but other times it is just bad enough that you wind up being stuck in bed, but lying awake bored.  I came up with a few tasks a sick site owner could work on while not requiring too much brain power.

This list is for those who want to be at their desk, but just can’t make it off their pillow. Laptop required. Read more…

Last week I wrote a story called “How a Google Penalty Can Make Your Site Stronger” and since then I have received a lot of inquiries about how to identify if a site has been penalized. Instead of answering every email individually, which I could never find the time to do, I figured I had better create a quick list of the most obvious indicators of a Google penalty which I could refer people to and build on when I have more time.

Read more…

Over the past 12 years consulting on web marketing  I have answered countless questions but one question I receive often stands out from all; how to remove a Google penalty. The following is an example of a question I received in the past from a person named Patrick:

PLEASE HELP! For the last 8 years we were #1 for a ton of search terms but then my site got penalized by Google because we had overused some keywords. We fixed the issue months ago but my top rankings are all still over the place. Sometimes we get back into the top 10 and we all breathe a sigh of relief, then just a few hours later we are on page 5. What is going on and how can I correct this? We are beyond frustrated!

First, Some Research

In order to answer Patrick’s question I needed to find out a couple of things about his website to make my answer more accurate:

• His site has excellent content right now and when I looked at past versions of the site I see the content was still great but definitely had keyword stuffing problems.

  Key finding: his site is really well done so I can see why it had top rankings before.

• I took a look at competitors found in the top 10 under several keyword searches that were obviously main targets for his website. After reviewing the backlinks (definition) for each competitor’s sites I could see they were all very well entrenched but their content was not up to par with Patrick’s site. I reviewed Patrick’s backlinks and was surprised to find that he had very few.  Key finding:his competitors have a lot of backlinks than Patrick’s site does.

  An SEO Tool Note: I use Yahoo Site Explorer for cursory examination of backlinks for my clients and their competitors. For more in-depth research I use OptiLink by Winrose Software (that is an affiliate link) which provides excellent statistics that are very useful for analyzing the quality of backlinks among other things. Here are more recommended web marketing tools.

• I checked the server headers for their home page and other key pages to make sure nothing was outwardly wrong with their server configuration; everything was fine.
• I took some time to surf through Patrick’s website and discovered that not all of the keyword stuffing had been removed.

  Key Finding: Google may still feel his site deserves a penalty because it is not 100% clean.

Read more…

Earlier today Nielsen Online (pdf) released the latest search share rankings. Figures are pretty much what one would expect, Google far in the lead followed by Yahoo and MSN, but this past month Google has taken another small hit.

April and May of 2009 each saw Google lose a bit of ground. Back in March their search share was 64.2%, and in April it was down to 64%. May has seen another drop, bringing them down to 63.2%, a full percentage point in 2 months. In these same two months, Yahoo has increased a total of 1.4% to 17.2. Read more…

I was just reading more about the IIS SEO Toolkit when I came across the following interesting tutorial on how to block competitors from running the IIS SEO Toolkit on your servers. If you have an asp-based website then this is a mandatory update in my opinion unless you want your competitors to have easy access to your site’s information. That said, a lot of the information that the IIS SEO Toolkit provides is likely available through other tools but at least if you block the Toolkit you will make it that much harder on the competition.

Here is the tutorial: Read more…

Here are the top posts on “Tips” from the old StepForth SEO Blog.

The Ten Minute Optimization REDUX – A SEO Tips White Paper

‘A 10 minute process to optimize a web page for top search engine rankings.’

How to Troubleshoot Dropped Search Engine Rankings – A StepForth SEO Tutorial

‘Discover why your search engine rankings have dropped and what to do about it.’ Read more…