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

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.

When optimizing a local business website, there’s a few additional things we do to ensure the site will do well. Our checklist for local SEO is below.

We define local search as either a search with the town name (“seo baltimore”) or any search that returns a pin map with local results.

Our checklist for local search engine optimization

Please note, we do these items in addition to our regular SEO checklist.

On page local optimization

• City & state in title tag
• Address in footer
• hCard microformat on contact us page

Off page local optimization

Create a neighborhood (geographic or thematic) with links and citations about your website.

• Links & Citations
  • Chamber of Commerce
  • Local Business Directories (search your city+directory)
  • Dominate Yelp
  • Other Websites in/about your city
  • Links from local businesses, clients, organizations, schools, speakers, etc.
  • Reviews. Start with happy customers, partners, and vendors.
• Review current listings for accuracy: phone, address, links, etc.
• Include your best search terms in the company name and description fields of your Google Maps account.

One note, with Google’s release of Caffeine, we’ve been reading more and more about the importance of citations (references to your business even if a link is not) included.

More information on Local Search Optimization

• http://smallbiztrends.com/2010/01/seo-trends-to-watch-for-in-2010.html
• http://searchenginewatch.com/3627073

Our friend Joe has a personal website (www.joemillman.com) and blog (http://blog.joemillman.com).  Here’s our free advice to him and anyone with a personal website who wants to get high on Google — our tips for personal promotion with SEO. 

1. Get a Google Webmaster Account

http://www.google.com/webmasters/

Add the following as “sites”:

• www.joemillman.com
• http://joemillman.com
• http://blog.joemillman.com

a. Verify your website(s) according to the instructions. Under settings, make www.joemillman.com the preferred domain for all your personal websites. This will make sure Google doesn’t treat http://joemillman.com and www.joemillman.com as different sites. You’re telling Google they’re the same site.

b. Check on who’s linking to you. In the world of personal promotion, a link is like a vote. A link from a industry-relevant, a trustworthy or a popular partner will be worth more than some guy blogging in his underwear.

c. The Google webmaster tool will also tell you if Google’s having trouble indexing your site.

d. With this same login info, Create a local business listing on Google Maps:

http://www.google.com/local/add

The terms you put in the site title and description should be your best search terms, as the search engines will pick up the terms in these fields when displaying local search results. In other words, use your search keywords IN your title and description.

How do you know the “best” keywords for personal promotion?

Good question, I’m glad you asked…

2. Understand the keyword terms that you want to go after.

When promoting personal and small websites, remember that when you’re starting out, people search on the services they’re after, not your brand or name.

This is the number one personal promotion tip, EVER…

Place yourself in front of people by understanding the terms that they use to describe your services, NOT the terms you think describe your services.

a. Where are you already doing well? Login to the webmaster tool above and go to “Top Search Queries” > More. The “Impressions” column will tell you what terms you rank in the top 30. “Queries” will tell you which terms people are clicking on.

b. What terms do you want to go after? Find your target keywords with this tool:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Because you shouldn’t be competing with the big boys in your industry, you should identify “long tail” keywords with search volumes less than 3,000 per month.

This is the best SEO strategy for personal websites. Go after low volume (but not too low) terms first with new content (explained next) and links (also explained below). Then, once you’ve ranked on some of the three and four keyword terms, go after ones with higher search volume.

3. Write your blog posts and pages to target those terms.

a. Use one target term in the post or page header and content.

b. Make a spreadsheet, which you can use as a tracking tool to remember which terms you target.

4. Add Google Analytics to both your site and blog. Analyze your stats monthly. Get to know your users and traffic.

http://www.google.com/analytics/

Be sure to set up goals, to track the number of conversions.

5. Set up Yahoo Explorer for your personal website and blog

• http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

a. Verify the sites.

b. Check the inbound links from elsewhere on the web to your sites.

6. Submit your personal website and blog to Bing.

http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx

7. Get a Bing Webmaster Account and verify both your personal site and blog.

http://www.bing.com/webmaster

8. Submit your site and blog to the DMOZ.

Go to www.dmoz.org and find the right category and top right, click on “Suggest URL.”

Many websites and search engines get their info from this grandaddy of all directories.

9. Find other relevant directories to place your listing.

Start here: http://www.directorycritic.com

Pay only for links that have a Page Rank of 3 or better, and have high traffic volume (compared to others you find in your industry).

• Check Page Rank here
• Check traffic volume here

10. Get some link love.

Find other bloggers, trade publications, and related websites and ask them to link to you. Request that the link text be your target keywords (call me if you don’t understand this). Go after only sites with higher relative traffic and Page Rank using the tools above.

a. When requesting a link, offer to link to them in your blog or on your site. Keep a tracking sheet. Here’s a huge secret to optimizing links. If you can get the text of the link to be the term you’re going after. Great! If you can get that link to go deep into your site, directly to the page that is optimized for that term. Even better.

Here’s an example of a great link: Finding the right blog keyword. (The text is my target keyword and it links deep into the site to a page that targets that keyword).

b. Join forums or social sites in your niche and post thoughtful comments. Add links back to your sites.

That’s it for personal promotion with SEO. Go Joe and get high on Google!

If you want some help implementing some of these suggestions, contact us and ask about our personal promotion SEO services.

One important change is Google will be giving more results based on up-to-the-minute breaking events, to compete with Twitter and Facebook’s real time search initiatives.

We appreciate Google holding off on making this change, to put webmasters at ease that no rankings will change until after the holiday shopping season.

More resources:

• Matt Cutts’ announcement
• Mashable’s tests of the release (including notes about keyword relevancy)
• Test Caffeine on the Google Sandbox
• Fun conspiracy reading

How do we chose a keyword for our blog posts?

If you want people to read your blogs, you need a strategy for every blog post to get found in search engines. In other words, you should SEO your individual blog posts. This starts, like any SEO project, with good keyword research.

Our approach is to fish where the big fish are. We’ll chose a blog post topic AFTER THE KEYWORD RESEARCH! This post for example, started as an idea about Blog SEO, but after researching what people are searching on, we decided there was too much competition on the term “Blog SEO”  (40,500 searches last month) and narrowed the scope to “blog keyword” (2,400 searches last month) as part of our long tail strategy. And hey, you found us!

Tip: A search on the plural of a word or phrase is not the same as a search on the singular. In the above example, there were only 1,000 searches last month for “blog keywords” so we went with “blog keyword” which had 2,400.

So how do I chose the right blog keyword?

At periscopeUP, we use the same three factors we would for finding the right keyword for a web page:

• Search volume
• Competition
• Return on Investment (ROI)

We don’t have a formula to weigh the three factors, but try to find a balance. For example, the higher search volume or competition, the tougher it will be to rank on page one, but if from our analytics we know a certain keyword will provide a better ROI, we may want to go after it anyway, even if it will take us several months to rank well. For this post, our goal was page one quickly, not high search traffic.

Determining Blog Keyword Search Volume

We like the old standby, the Google External Keyword Tool. It will give you both global search and local search volume.

Be careful here, because the use of the word “local” is misleading. According to Google, it means search volume “specific to your targeted country” as opposed to global search volume which “includes traffic in all countries and languages.” We’ve suggested to Google that they make local search volume available as a radius from your city or town. To us, this would be more valuable “local” information.

Determining Competition

There are a few ways we determine competition for a keyword. The first is the number of results for a specific search. Search Google, and on the top right, you’ll see the number of results returned for that term, or the number of pages that are “competing” for this term.

Here’s what it looks like:

Blog Keyword Selection

The other way we judge competition is by spying. Use a site like compete.com (paid) or spyfu.com (free) to see what you’re competition is up to.

Tip: log into your Adwords account when you research search volume, and you’ll get the Cost Per Click of what people are paying to bid on terms. This will also give you an indication of competition in the marketplace.

Determining ROI

You can only determine if a keyword phrase will provide a good return on investment if conversion tracking set up on your analytics tool. It’s best to have several months of data, but the idea is to determine which keywords lead to the most cost effective leads, your cost per conversion. This is an involved topic, subject to another post, but if you setup Google Analytics, for example, to track conversion goals, you should be able to run reports and determine which terms produce and which do not, and at what cost.

Conclusion

The fastest way to get a blog post high on search is to select your topic and write your post AFTER you select your keyword term(s).

Your next step after selecting your blog keyword would be to write the post and optimize it for that keyword. Don’t forget to track your SERPs and build optimized links directly to your posts to push your blog post up the search engine results.

Date: October 20, 2009
Time: 7:30 am to 12 noon
Place: Sheraton Baltimore North, 903 Dulaney Valley Road Towson, MD 21204
Phone: 410.321.7400
Price: $65

Click here to register.

Event Description: Panel discussion from an expert panel of top Baltimore Executives in Search Engine Optimization, Offline Marketing, Online Social Media, Web Development, Internet Marketing and how to tie this all together. Attendees will  have the opportunity to discuss and interact with presenters in a Q & A session.

Here’s a flyer with more information (pdf).