Oh yes, they do.

We’ve learned the hard way that if your site gets hit by a virus, the search engines will penalize you. On a few occasions recently, we’ve seen our clients websites hosted by major providers get hit and go down. We notice it when our SERP tracking tools alert us to drastic drops in search engine ranking positions.

If you’re a search marketer or webmaster concerned with organic search rankings, you need to take security seriously. This blog post explains the impact we’ve seen on a client’s SERP rankings and what we did to harden their website.

For privacy reasons, we won’t mention the name of the client or give their URL, but we can share the SERP positions. This graph is provided by AuthorityLabs, one of the SERP tracking tools we use.

SERP Rankings Drop After A Website Outage

As you can see, the blank space indicates the outage of the site. The chart also shows how after the site was restored, the SERP positions in all three of the major engines remained below their previous rankings.

Google’s SERPs still are not back to the top 30 postions.

The restored site was identical, and there was no significant difference in our link building immediately before or after the outage.

How To Protect Yourself From A Drop In SERP Rankings After A Website Outage

As they say, an ounce of prevention…

Since influencing the search engines is so laborious, the best protection from sagging SERPs is prophylactic. Keep your website up and running, and you’ll be safe.

Since this client was running WordPress, we will provide the steps we took to harden their site. Let it be known, though, that if a hacker wants to get into your site, there’s nothing you can do to fully prevent it. As our security advisor says, “There’s way more of the bad guys out there than us security guys. And in some cases, they’re much smarter.”

These steps are intended to “harden” WordPress, to make it less susceptible, but not impenetrable.

Security Checklist for WordPress

If you’re installing WordPress for the first time, use the Secure WordPress plugin, which helps with installation by removing extra information, otherwise, perform these tasks:

There are also several plugins that can help with closing these security loopholes. It’s best to install these one at a time, to see how they behave and to see if there’s any impact on your site.

If you’re installing a new instance of WordPress, start with WP Security Scan. If you’re working on an existing site, start with Secure Wordpress, which will close many of the vulnerabilities listed above.

WordPress Security Plugins

Note: We are not security experts and suggest you hire one to provide professional advice about your particular setup.

How Do I Get My Ranking Back If My Site Goes Down?

Many hosting providers keep thier own backups, but you need to check to see what their policies are for restoring your site. Some hosting providers don’t backup your site, or may only keep a week or so of backups, which won’t always help.

It’s important that you keep your own backups as well, just in case. Here’s the tools we use:

• WordPress EZ Backup – Backs up the entire site
• WordPress Database Backup – Backs up the database

Check your Google Webmaster Tools. We’ve seen the webmaster tools reporting weeks after a site was restored that it still had malware or that the keywords of the site was incorrect.

You can then submit a reconsideration request to Google to re-index your site. Google does read all requests, but provides no timeframe for responding.

After your site is restored, speak with your SEO specialist about their strategy for restoring your rankings.

Other Resources

• Eyal Estrin’s Hardening Wordpress Guide
• Secure Your Wordpress By Learning From My Mistakes

I got a call today from a web developer we partner with, who asked if I had a best practices guide for designing a website with SEO in mind. It got me to thinking that while most of our SEO work is on technical or content issues, many of these best practices will impact a designer’s work.

The most important thing for a designer to understand is that SEO is not push marketing, it’s pull marketing, where you’re responding to a stated need by your consumer. This means that effective SEO design should give users what they’ve already told you they’re looking for.

In other words, a user is having a conversation inside their head about what they need when they type words into a search engine. Your job as a web designer is to step into that conversation and say, “I’ve got what you’re looking for.” This most often means creatively using your target keyword phrases in mind as you design your UI. Why? Users are thinking in their terms, not your terms, and not the client’s industry terms.

We always coach our clients: this is not about you. It’s about your customers & making them feel like you can solve their problems.

In addition, we of course always advise clients to involve SEO at the inception of the web design project. Knowing what terms people are searching on and having a keyword sitemap will help designers make informed decisions. Plus, it could reduce the need to rework designs.

Checklist For SEO Webdesign:

• Make sure the text, headers AND navigation are machine readable, either with web-safe fonts or technologies like Cufon or Type Kit. This is most important for headers and tag lines, less so for flashy imbedded presentations. Go ahead, select the text on this example.
  • Don’t use images or flash for navigation, only html text.
• Use your target keywords in the navigation elements, when possible. Look at the Floating Docks pulldown menu in this example.
• Use your target keywords in the header text, when possible. Example.
• Include a machine-readable footer. For local businesses, be sure to include the address. Example.
• Put a strong call to action and the phone number in a big font in the top right of the masthead. Example.
• Have at least a page of content on the home page, even if it has to go below the fold. Example. Consider show/hide features of DHTML5 if you want to minimize the negative impacts of too much copy.
• Find a way to utilize internal links in the copy. Example.
• Include an HTML site map for larger sites. This will help search engines and people.
• Design a custom 404 page.
• Never, ever build a site entirely in flash. Only use flash to embed movies into HTML wrappers. Use a technology like Frontal Code to make flash machine readable.

Coding Your Webdesign For SEO

• Make your code W3C compliant and fast loading. Google is trying to make the web a “better place” and has been known to penalize sites for bad code and long load times.
  • Use .js includes rather than putting javascript on pages. The search engines will therefore only read one line when loading this http request. Even though there might be 100 lines of code for the script, this would be handled as a separate request.
  • Use compressed, fast loading images.
• If you’re on a CMS, make sure the title, nav, headers, and other page elements are independent. Many older CMS systems tried to make administration easier by making these page elements controlled by a single field.
• All images should have optimized alt tags.
• Avoid frames.
• Ensure the site displays with javascript disabled.
• Check for broken links and images.
• Code address and contact information with Microformats
• Consider that the pages at the top level of a site are “more important” to search engines than sub section pages. In other words, apply SEO strategy to your directory structure. Keep URLs short and include keywords in the URLs. Generally, the closer to the root, the more chance a page has of ranking. As usual, I agree with Stoney deGeyter’s description of how to use directory structure to an SEO advantage.
• If possible, use table-less coding techniques and put the most important content for the search engines at the top of the code. In this example, you’ll see that at the top of the web page is content for branding, not content for SEO, but have a look at the code, and you’ll see the first words we’re presenting to the search engines is actually “Maryland Lasik.” Look at the screenshots below for an illustration.

Note how the SEO content appears below the brand / sales copy.

Yet in the code, the SEO Optimized Content comes above the sales copy.

If you have any additional thoughts on SEO for webdesign, feel free to post a comment below.

Finally, you should also check Google’s Website Design Guidelines.

Gerry is a great writer by the way, if you’re looking for someone who can market you on or off line. He also makes compelling corporate videos.

Thanks Gerry!

Here’s the video and Powerpoint of the seminar. If you want to learn how we can apply these best practices to your business, give us a call.

Powerpoint

If you’re looking to have a new website built, here’s a checklist of all the things you should consider, to make sure it’s well optimized for search engines:

Watch this short video (4:20) to learn how you can boost search rankings with internal links. A text transcription is below.

Internal Links Video Transcription

Hi everybody, this Dan Kaplan, co-founder of periscopeup

This short tutorial is about how do you use internal links to improve the rankings of search engines positions.

First I am going to describe what an internal link is, and then give you a process by which you can test to see if changes you are making are improving your search engine rank positions.

Definition of Internal Links

Let’s take a quick look at one of our client websites, www.dddsigns.com. Let me say this tutorial presumes you have already optimized your pages. In this case, this interior page, the gallery page, is already optimized for the long-tail keyword term “outdoor business signs.” You can see that i have the keyword phrase in my title tag, in my header tag, and in first hundred words of the content. So this pages is already optimized for this term, “outdoor business signs.”

Now what is a good optimize internal link? Let’s go to our home page now and take a look. You’ll see two instances where we have created a link to the internal gallery page which have been optimized and “outdoor business signs” is in the text of the link that directs users to the page that is optimized for “outdoor business signs.”

Now, there are a couple of things here to note. First, the home page is very important page. So, we’re telling the search engines that a link from an important page to the internal page means it too must have some importance. Secondly, by optimizing by the link in this way, we’re saying that this destination page really is about this term. These are the things that help the search engines know what are the site about and will help raise us up in the search engine ranking positions.

Now, how do we know what links we have already internally? A great little tool that you can use as the Google webmaster tool. It can found at www.google.com/webmasters. If you login into dashboard and go the internal links section, there is a little tool here that tells you which pages have the most internal links directed to them. You can also do a search for individual pages. You notice that our internal gallery page (optimized for “outdoor business signs”) has quiet a lot of internal links already pointing to it. If I click in further, I will see all the individual pages that link to the gallery page. This is a way how we can analyze our side and figure out what internal links we have and which pages we should be adding more internal links to.

Internal Link Process

So, for the second part of this tutorial, I said I will show you a little process that we use to test the changes you’re making to internal links, to see the impact on your website’s search rankings.

• The first step is to list all the pages and the target keywords for your website.
• Second, using the Google webmaster tool, take a look at how many good internal link these pages have and which one should be optimized.
• Third, we recommend increasing the the number of optimized internal links to just one of these pages.
• Fourth, wait until the search engines re-index your site.
• Fifth, take a look to see if that had a positive impact — if you went up or down in search engine results for that target keyword.

If you did increase your ranking, you can repeat the process with another keyword term for another page, or if you went down, then you should revert back, undoing your changes and then try something else.

Conclusion

It’s quite simple, but just takes time. The proof is in the pudding. You can see here that our search engine position for DDD Signs, on the term “outdoor business signs,” and as you can see, we are consistently staying on page one of Google and Bing for that term.

I hope this was helpful for everybody, if you would like a free consultation on your website, please feel free to give us a call at 866-446-1972.

Even if you struggle with your Blackberry, there are concrete, high-level things that only you as the captain of your ship can do to ensure your website contributes to your top line.  In this 60 minute lecture, given by two industry experts with a combined 26 years of experience, you will learn ten most important things that business leaders must do to ensure their website is capturing as much market share as possible.

After this free seminar you will have a clear understanding of what you can do to turn your website into a 24/7 sales person that never sleeps, never calls in sick, and continues month after month to generate leads and sales for your business.

Here’s an example, one of our top 10 mistakes you  may be making…

For example: # 1. If your IT people are in control of your website, something’s wrong. As an integral part of your web team, your tech department of course needs to run the servers and write the code, but your website is a marketing tool and team decisions should be driven and led by the marketing department.

And a Great Networking Opportunity

This free seminar is being offered in conjunction with Accelerent and and PSA Financial, so it will be a great networking opportunity, as you’ll meet Accelerent business executives and our extensive list of clients and connections.

Seminar Details & Signup

When: April 28, 2010, 10-11 AM
Where: PSA Financial, 1131 McCormick Road, Hunt Valley, MD 21031
For: Business leaders, including CEOs and other C level executives, business owners, and organization leaders
Presented by: periscopeUP in partnership with Accelerent
Cost: Free
Refreshments will be served.

Reservations are required and seating is limited so  click here to sign up  for this free seminar.

About periscopeUP

periscopeUP helps you get more business from your website using search engine optimization, pay per click marketing, banner and web advertising, email marketing, social media, and other online marketing tools. periscopeUP was founded by Dan Kaplan and Eric Kronthal, who together have 26 years of experience in online marketing. We’re located in Mount Vernon, and serve national, regional and local clients across all industries. If you think you’re leaving money on the table because your website isn’t generating leads, visit us at www.periscopeUP.com or call (866) 446-1972 for a free consultation.

The event is New Media in the New Year and Eric will be one of four panelists discussing SEO, Web Design, Web Development, and Social Media.

The event’s headline reads: “Searching for that perfect tool to make your business’s engine roar, but not sure if you should redesign your website, get linked into social media, or find another way to keep your company’s face in the game?”

We see this all the time, most often when we’re on the phone with a client who is not here in Batimore, where our SEO company is located. We’ve been talking with clients in Chicago or Lauderdale, for example and ask them to do a search to show off the results of our SEO work, only to hear them say, “that’s not what I see…”

We often find ourselves having to explain that search engines base their results of course on relevancy, but also on hundreds of other small factors like browser type, searcher’s location or search history, website language or page rank. The list goes on. Here are the three factors we’ve noticed to be the most important.

First the search engines update their rankings throughout the day. Learn more about how Google indexes the web.

Second, if you’re logged in to Google, Bing, or Yahoo, your personal search history and profile information is being used to serve up more targeted results. I’ve seen this referred to as “search personalization.” Read these links for more information:

• Search Engine Land article on Search Personalization
• Techcrunch article on Search Personalization

Third, if you are searching from one location, and someone else from another location, you may be hitting different datacenters. Rankings can vary from one datacenter to the next.

• Here’s a tool that will show you results for the same search performed in different datacenters.

Why Does A periscopeUP Website Generate More Leads?

On sales calls, Eric-our-sales-guy often gets asked why the websites we build are able to generate so many leads. It’s not a simple question to answer to prospects who don’t understand interactive lead generation or technical website bable, plus there’s A LOT that goes into a website to get it to perform. Without giving away our secret sauce, here’s what we make sure to cover on every website build.

Website Planning Stage is Thorough and Effective

• Competitive analysis
• Research your prospect’s search behavior
• Keyword strategy for every page
• Test different messages to see which is more effective

Website Content Is More Than Brochureware

• Effective sales copy – a website should talk like your sales team
• Strong calls to action. Give me a reason to call
• Features & benefits selling, including your Unique Selling Proposition (why should I buy from you?)
• Optimized to get you high in search engines
• Compels people to take action. How will you help the customer sleep at night? (It’s about them, stupid!)

Designs That Drive Leads, Not Just Build Brands

• Prominent phone number in header
• Unique designs that draw attention to the unique selling proposition
• Our proprietary design process makes it easy to capture your vision
• Easy to use and navigate architecture – KISS
• Optimized to get people to take action

Technology Gets Rewarded by Search Engines

• XML Sitemaps notify search engines every time you update content
• HTML coding optimized for Search Engines
• W3C and 501(3)c compliant code
• Optimized for speed – fast loading sites

Consulting Helps You Get The Most From Your Website

• Monthly review of statistics & user behavior
• Help you gain understanding of your market and potential for more leads
• Increase monthly traffic with inbound links & fresh content
• Increase monthly leads with testing and website updates

Free Consultation

If you want to learn more about how we can drive leads and sales from your website, call us for a free consultation: (866) 446-1972 or fill out the form to the right.