5 Website Changes That Will Hurt Your SEO

One of the biggest factors in the traffic you get from search engines is the inbound link profile to your site. When you make a significant change to your site, one question that the search engines need to consider is whether those links are still valid.

Would the person who linked to your site still link to it if they looked at it again now? If the answer is no, the search engine doesn't want to count that link.

Of course, the search engine can't determine the answer to that question, but they can choose to initially reduce the effective value of those inbound links for a period of time, until they see whether people start removing links to your site after you make a large change.

This filtering process helps protect them from spammers who look to buy domains with lots of link authority, and then change them into entirely different web sites (e.g., buying a domain that used to be for an educational institution and turning it into an auto insurance site). The people who linked to the educational institution certainly didn't mean to endorse an auto insurance site.

Let's look at a few cases where the search engine may consider a change large enough to reconsider how they treat your site.

1. Domain

Many website publishers make the decision to change their domain. For example, maybe they started out with a ".net" domain and they were able to obtain the ".com" variant of the same domain. Or perhaps they are simply rebranding their company.

Whatever the reason, a domain change in potentially seen as a huge change by the search engines, particularly if you do a site redesign, change the URL structure, change the content significantly, and change the WhoIs all at once.

Even if all you do is a simple domain change, the search engines have reason enough to contemplate the possibility that people who linked to the old domain would no longer choose to link to you. With a simple domain change and proper implementation of 301 redirects, your risk of a significant setback is relatively low. But the risk is still there.

2. URL Structure

It isn't uncommon for sites to go through complete redesigns, or to implement a new content management system (CMS) without making significant changes to the content at the same time. However, it takes time for the search engine to understand the new site structure to determine what is on the new version of the site.

All the intricate relationships between the pages of the site have been restructured, and this may take weeks or even months for the search engine to understand. In the meantime, they may feel a need to devalue your site somewhat. Implementing 301 redirects from the old pages to the new pages will help with this problem, but it doesn't eliminate it entirely.

3. Content

Significant changes in content can also give a search engine a reason to ponder how it treats your web site. Even if the basic topic matter is unchanged, it can take some time for the search engine to make that determination.

4. Whois

When you make a change to the Whois record for a domain, even when no change is made to the domain itself, this can be an indicator of a change of the owner of the site.

To the search engines, much of the reason why one web site may link to another may be very much related to their trust in the owner. If the owner changes, is that trust still there? In many cases, the answer may be no.

Simply changing the e-mail address of the administrative contact isn't likely to be seen as such a signal, but changing the name or address of the registrant is likely to be interpreted as a change in owner.

Making such changes often goes without a hitch, particularly if you don't make other significant changes at the same time. Combining a major change to a web site and the registrant at the same time, however, starts to be quite a bit riskier.

Ultimately, the best way to change the registrant is to do it in isolation. Just wait a while before you make other significant changes to the site.

5. Theme

Changes in theme can take many forms. For example, if you have a site that is about auto insurance, and you then add a new large section on home insurance, it will certainly take a while for the home insurance section to receive the trust and authority conveyed by the inbound links. The value of the links to the auto insurance section of the site may also be devalued.

The type of change that would be seen as a theme change could even be a lot more subtle. For example, if you had a site that was purely a directory of links to auto insurance resources, with little text content on them, and you suddenly start putting lots content on those pages, this may also be seen as a significant change.

It gets back to core principle: Would the links that were given to a directory site still be given now that you've made a deep content site, even though it's on exactly the same topic?

Summary

Learn to consider the possibility of changes to your inbound link profile when you make changes to your site.

Will the change you're considering possibly impact those links? Even if the answer is no, you should also ponder whether the search engine will see the change as large enough that the search engine will question the ongoing value of those historical links.

Remember that the search engines use algorithms to make their determinations, and algorithms aren't as smart as humans are at figuring out what is a material change to a potential linker.

Source:http://searchenginewatch.com/3641466

Why You Should Combine Your PPC & SEO Strategies

Studies show that organic search receives as much as 70 percent of total clicks from search results. But having both a paid and an organic listing has proven to increase the amount of total traffic by as much as 66 percent and influence a consumer's purchase consideration by as much as 8 percent.

This provides a significant lesson for both users and advertisers.

A recent Rosetta study found that only 17 percent of advertisers take advantage of the synergies between paid and organic search results.

The retail industry has the greatest percentage (25 percent) of advertisers that are effectively coordinating paid and organic search results, followed by financial services at 21 percent, travel at 16 percent, technology at 13 percent, and health care at 3 percent.

But it's surprising that more advertisers, overall, aren't doing a sufficient job of balancing their search strategies.

Advertisers can develop a search strategy that effectively coordinates paid and organic listings. The value of paid and organic listings to any advertiser is derived from testing, analytics, and a holistic strategy. This strategy can be applied in these categories:

Attribution

Understanding the interdependencies and relationships between search listings is critical to properly valuing the listings and setting the strategy. Consider the possibility that your paid listing is driving a higher amount of first time visitors, and your organic listing is the last click prior to a sale. You may never know this unless you closely monitor your attribution patterns.

For example, one of our financial services clients sees 3 percent of their traffic hitting multiple sources of traffic, and .25 percent hitting three sources of traffic. These consumers give important information to the brand marketers about media consumption and habits that can be optimized and harvested.

The better your ability to see the common paths that consumers take to achieve the desired action, the better informed your keyword and optimization decisions will be.

Messaging

The copy that is displayed in the search results page can be keyword-rich or sales- or brand-focused. The appropriate message should be tested and defined by achieving the largest increase in incremental traffic and sales.

Copy can be used to identify the consumers that are right for your company's offering. Leveraging various messages in the paid and organic listings that speak to each of these audience segments will prove effective.

For example, Road Runner Sports ranks well for [running shoes].

Their organic listing focuses on breadth of selection.

Their paid listing contains rating information, as well as a focus on their guarantee offer.

These ads are differentiated, and speak to different consumer segments who have different values when shopping online for shoes. The best combination of copy, features, or benefits can be discovered through A/B testing paid search ads.

Position Strategy

You should always strive to achieve the number one position with your organic listing.

Where your paid listing ranks, however, can vary depending on your targeted goals. Understanding attribution, and the highest incremental sales and traffic volume, allows you to determine your ideal paid listing position.

You may not always have the necessary budget to fully fund all targeted keywords via paid search. When this is the case, a strong organic ranking can help align and inform the paid keyword selection.

For example, CreditCards.com has the number one organic listing for the very competitive term [credit cards]. This provides them with the ability to leverage that listing by not over-paying for the number one listing in the paid results.

Instead, they rank fourth in the paid search results, or number one on the right rail. This is strategically good planning as they have two very prominent listings on the page without having to overpay for the paid result.

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Keyword Selection

The primary consideration when aligning paid and organic efforts should be keywords and their associated competition and costs. It may not always be financially possible to buy paid search ads given a limited budget, or depending on your ROI goals. Also, the amount of competition for any given keyword makes the effort to rank organically that much more difficult and resource intensive.

For example, the keyword [money market account] has 78.8 million listings, compared to 45.3 million listings for [12 month money market account] -- a 42 percent decrease in the number of competitors.

Search volume for tail terms is certainly aligned to the number of pages indexed; however, an advertiser could get ranked well for five to 10 tail terms before hitting a home run on the head term.

The same can be said for the different competition between the keywords [3 piece suit] and [gray 3 piece suit]. Consumers in this situation are more definitive in what they are looking for, and therefore advertisers can be more prescriptive in their offering, landing page, and content.

Summary

Only a few brands truly take advantage of combined strategies across paid and organic search. Advertisers should think of how consumers interact with their search efforts, including ad copy and keywords.

Consider writing messages that speak to various consumer mindsets, and increase your ability to win their business given your value proposition.

Search is rapidly growing and changing. Maximizing all the factors that contribute to success is critical to keeping up and winning the game.

Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/3641449

SEO Metrics

If you're going to get anything out of a search engine optimization (SEO) campaign, whether you're working on it yourself or with an external provider, the first thing you need to do it get to grips with the main metrics, or measures, of campaign performance. This is a bit easier said than done though, as seasoned SEOs will argue late into the night about which metrics are important, which aren't, and even what they are and how they work.

SEO is a fuzzy process, with cause and effect only indirectly linked. Measuring it isn't a straightforward process.

However, we can skip a lot of these problems by focusing on the old adage, "What is measured is managed." So let's look at a couple of metrics that are directly actionable, no matter what your level of SEO expertise.

Unique Search Landing Pages

This is the number of unique URLs, or pages, that visitors have been sent to through organic search, and it's one of the most useful indicators of your site's search health. It's an easy metric to find through your Google Analytics account, or other web analytics software. Just select the organic search traffic segment and view the report on unique landing pages. Remove any spurious URLs and there's your list.

• Why it's useful: It gives you a clear idea of how well your site is indexed by search engines. To succeed with an SEO campaign, you want as many pages of quality content as possible, and you need as many of them to be indexed as possible. If a page is receiving search traffic, even a small amount, you can be sure that it is indexed, even if it isn't yet ranked well for generic search terms.
  
  
• How to use this information: Apart from giving you insight into how well your site is indexed, there are specific actions you can take from this data. Search engines use a variety of factors in deciding how much and which pages of your site to index, but the make or break of it is that an external link from a quality source to a specific page of your site almost guarantees indexation. So, your action is to use your list of indexed pages to work out a list of important pages on your site that are not indexed, and build links directly to those pages. This will help your site's overall search ranking as well.

Of course, you can get a lot more insight from this information. For example, are some pages getting much more or much less traffic than you expect? Are whole sections of your site not being indexed? (This may indicate a crawl problem.) Do you have many more landing pages than you thought you even had pages on the site? (This may indicate a canonicalization problem.)

Unique Keyword Visits

The number of unique keyword visits your site gets per month (or whatever time period) is another vital health indicator. Again, it's easy to get through Google Analytics (just go to the keywords report and it gives you the figure right there).

• Why it's useful: It gives you a truer picture of the proportion of possible search traffic that you're getting than just tracking overall search traffic. The problem with overall traffic is that it can be very seasonal, with big variations from month to month. Unless you have a large amount of historical data upon which to look back, this can obscure what's really going on with your campaign. It also hides the fine detail of where your traffic is coming from -- you may have loads of search visits every month, but if they're just coming from a few generic keywords or brand search terms, you're probably missing out on a lot more traffic that you could be getting.
  
  
• How to use this information: The goal here is always to be increasing the number of visits from unique keywords that your site gets, so you need to track it over time and keep working at it. Incoming links to the site are always important, especially for indexation and ranking for generic search terms, but the key to receiving traffic from more unique terms is to add more quality content to your site on a regular basis. There are numerous strategies for doing this, but running a regularly updated blog is an obvious answer. There's no need to worry about putting specific keywords into the text -- just writing naturally about your subject works best. And by working with the indexation strategy above, you help to ensure that all the content you write actually has the potential to receive traffic.

So there you have it. Although there are many different aspects to SEO, just working with these two simple metrics and associated actions is almost guaranteed to improve your site's search performance.

This is especially true for small businesses. For a small business, top rankings for generic, competitive search terms can be out of reach in the short term, so going after long tail traffic (more unique search terms) is a great strategy for the short term.

Source : http://searchenginewatch.com/3641400

Who Am I ???

Hello my friends,

This is Shazan Sayani.. living in karachi, Pakistan and working for freelance and doing my job as well.. I was in Karachi Stock Exchange from 2005 till jan 2009 then i entered in a company as a trainee of SEO on 6 july 2009 and worked there for 1 year as Asst. SEO on main project and Team lead on other project.. i had gained a lot of experience from there and had more work from freelance from nov 2009 as a link builder from odesk then shifted to freelance.com and now I am working for my personal friends and relation.. I had gone through many experience in this field.. I am now searching to learn SMO and to be a good SEM.. :) If you need any type of Help please contact to shazansayani@gmail.com for any type of questions or consultancy... this is my blog helping people for SEO and SMO..

Thanks

Shazan Sayani
SEO Consultant
shazansayani@gmail.com

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization is the process to increase your website ranking and make your website to visible on search engines like Google, Yahoo, Msn, Bing, Ask and others.. This is way from which you can rank up your site and make revenue from it :)