SEO Problems and Solutions

Probably the most worrisome of issues you could encounter is being banned from a search engine, Google specifically. If you depend on your search ranking to keep you in customers and sales, being banned from a search engine is a frightening prospect. Even a single day without search engine visibility can cost your company big, not only monetarily but also in terms of customer loyalty. There’s good news. Despite the fact that you hear a lot about being banned from search engines, it’s really not all that likely to happen. You have to carry out some pretty offensive tactics (like page hijacking, keyword stuffing, or other decidedly black-hat SEO techniques). Of course, there are exceptions to every rule, and even search engines have a bad day now and again. (SEO Problems and Solutions )

So what do you do if you’re in a top ranking slot one day and the next your site is nowhere to be found in search rankings? Before you assume you’ve been banned from a search engine, make sure. You can search for your site on Google using the search string site:www.yoursitename.com. If your site is included in Google’s index, the pages that are included in the search rankings should appear in the search results. If they do, you haven’t been banned, but you may have been penalized for something. Try to figure out what and make it better. If you don’t see any pages listed for your site, it’s still possible that you haven’t been banned. But the best way to find out is to e-mail the search engine. Be professional when you send the e-mail — you don’t want to make matters worse by being rude, especially if you have done something to be banned.

Analyzing Success

If you want to maintain successful SEO efforts, you need to analyze what works and what doesn’t, and try to extrapolate why, based on the information that you have. That information can vary, depending on how you gather it.

There are many methods for measuring the success of your SEO efforts. Some people are just happy to see their site traffic and sales rising. But if your SEO
strategy is to work toward achieving a more complicated goal, you might need more ways to measure the success or failure of your efforts. As an example, if you’ve implemented SEO strategies in an effort to build visitors to your site as a way of creating or improving brand recognition, you might not be as interested in the sales achieved by your SEO efforts as you are in the creation of returning visitors. It doesn’t matter if your SEO goals are monetarily based. You can create goals, and conversion values, for non-monetary activities like newsletter sign-ups, filling out a form, or even requesting additional information. Whatever your goals are, learning which SEO efforts work and which don’t is vitally important to ensuring that you’re always putting forth your best effort to reach those conversions.

Analyzing SEO Successes

You know that search engine ranking for your web site can change from week to week. Those changes can be caused by competition, modifications to search algorithms, and changes to your web site. To maintain your top ranking, you must constantly monitor and make changes to your web site. It’s through this monitoring that you’ll also be able to see how successful your SEO efforts are. And measuring the success of those efforts is essential to keeping you on the right track

Find yourself

If all you really need to know is where your web site appears in search rankings, you can use the search engines and directories that you’re targeting to do a keyword search. That keyword search should show you where your site is ranking. It won’t show you much more than that, but it does help you to monitor your position so you know if your efforts are working or not. Just don’t base your decision on a single search. Search for your keywords daily over a period of time to make sure your rank on any given day isn’t just an anomaly. If you’re using this method of analyzing your success, you’ll need a historical view of where your site appeared in search rankings before you began your SEO efforts. With this measurement, you can compare your current rankings to see if your listing is climbing or falling. Without historical data, you should, at the very least, take stock of where your site appears in rankings on the first day of your SEO campaign. This won’t tell you the average ranking for your site, but it will give you a good idea of where you should start.

Analyzing web stats

Most web-site hosting companies now provide some form of web statistics program. But this may be limited to basic measurements like the number of hits, number of unique visitors, search terms used to find your site, IP address accessing your site, and locations of people accessing your site. Even this basic information will help you to learn where your visitors are coming from, but you might want to add to those metrics by expanding your web-stats package. If you’re looking for a web-stats package that’s more comprehensive, there are a few available online for free. Most notably, Google Analytics will provide most of the measurements you’ll need, including keyword tracking for AdWords and for other PPC applications.

Find the package that’s right for your needs, and you’ll have all of the measurements you need to analyze When you’re analyzing your web statistics, there are a few principles you should keep in mind. These principles will help you understand your metrics and how they correlate with your SEO efforts.

Baseline statistics

Baseline statistics are the measurements that you collect before you begin to implement changes to your site, like the changes you’ll make as you’re optimizing your web site. Record statistics such as the average number of visitors to your site each day. You can later compare this number to statistics that you collect after your SEO strategies have been implemented, to see the results of your efforts. If your numbers aren’t improving as you would expect them to, given the changes you’ve made, then you may not have done something right, or there may be some factor that needs to be adjusted. Your baseline measurements will help you to see (over time) where you stand.(SEO Problems and Solutions )