Search Engine Optimisation BlackDog

This question “Should a good SEO company rank for [SEO] ?” has popped up a number of times when I meet people to discuss SEO. Also for some SEO firms it’s a point of boasting or a sales pitch, saying that they can rank for some great terms like :

• SEO
• Search Engine Optimisation
• Search Engine Optimization
• SEO consultant
• etc.

Note: I’m not slamming anyone company in these examples, well maybe one, but this is not the point of the post. I want to give some tips on picking a SEO company so that you know the right questions to ask and know when someone is pulling the wool (a little) over your eyes.

Reality Time

A sad fact in this matter is that people searching for [SEO] are more likely to be other SEO companies, rather than potential clients looking for some SEO help. So the fact that they rank for SEO probably doesn’t even help their bottom line. Here is a little comparison between the number of searches for [SEO] and the number of searches for [cake recipe] using a popular enough keyword [house prices] as a scale. This graph relates to the worldwide view rather than just Ireland.

It just can’t be that there are similar enough numbers of people looking to bake cakes, as there are people looking for information on SEO. My tip would be if a company says they rank for a keyword, give it a check on google trends or on google keyword tool for adwords to find out exactly how popular it is.

Looking at the amount of enquiries I got last year, and the % of them which came from the keyword [SEO] I would have to say it was close to zero. I would hazard a guess that the a lot of my manual comment SPAM for SEO tools and link building etc, is from dubious firms putting these keywords into their browser and going through the first few pages of Google results to find some links. So the fact that a company ranks for [SEO] doesn’t really help them, rather it probably wastes a bit of their resources, unless they are using it for bragging rights.

Final Thoughtson hiring a SEO company

If you are going to hire a SEO company, ask more about what they do and how they do things. What is their approach to site structure ? And how to they go about procuring back links ? Don’t be fooled when a company says that they are are #1 or #2 for a particular {keyword}, and therefore they must be good and they will be able to get you to rank at a high position too. Rather, ask for real life cases they have worked on, and what the resulting traffic increase has been because of their SEO efforts. Request Google Analytics data (or some other statistical report) of before and after the SEO campaign, and if necessary verify with their client that the SEO company has actually done this.

An aside : And oh, here are our SERPs for SEO so we do rank somewhere, but just not that high, but then again we are not looking for new clients, so that’s okay.

Jobberbase [www.jobberbase.com] is a rather powerful jobs board software which we’ve been testing on jobsinireland.org for the last year or so. Overall it has become a rather mature and stable software, offering the ability for companies to post open jobs.
Aside : In fact, if your company doesn’t already have a career portal on your website, this software would be a great way to avoid recruiters. In the business of hiring, recruiters & agents have gotten a bad reputation for either being too expensive or for simply wasting employers time. With jobberbase you could have your HR staff post jobs openings directly on your website, and candidate could apply directly to you. With recuiter fees being in the thousands of Euros for a successful new hire, having your own jobs board could be a real money saver.

Some issues with jobberbase

Although the software is strong, there are a few weaknesses, especially for the SEO side of things. The first problem is that the footer template (located at /_templates/default/footer.tpl) is a global footer. This means that the same footer is used right across the whole website. Generally your homepage is your strongest page on your website and you should use this. We recommend adding a custom footer for the homepage and adding some extra text or  perhaps deeper links to your site from here. Also if you are linking to other websites the effective difference between a site-wide link and a homepage link is minimal.
Another, and perhaps less known issue with jobberbase (in versions up to 1.8 at least) is the fact that the error page template returns a HTTP status of 200 (page found), rather than a 404 (page not found) error code. With jobberbase, once a job is removed, the page is no longer listed and if you call the URL of this job you will be redirected to a generic “unavailable page”, but this page is served as a real page (that should be indexed) rather than as an error page. My quick solutions to address these two issues are highlighted below (file references here are made for version 1.8 of jobberbase)

Jobberbase custom homepage footer

• copy the file /_templates/default/footer.tpl to /_templates/default/footer-home.tpl
• edit the file /_templates/default/footer-home.tpl to add in more navigational links or text.
• edit the file /_templates/default/index.tpl and change the last line from

{include file="footer.tpl"}
to
{include file="footer-home.tpl"}

Jobberbase proper error page handling

• copy the file /_templates/default/header.tpl to /_templates/default/header-404.tpl
• edit the file /_templates/default/header-404.tpl and add at the top of the file

{php}
header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");
{/php}

• edit the file /_templates/default/error.tpl change the first line from

{include file="header.tpl"}

to
{include file="header-404.tpl"}

Advertise your open jobs

And finally if you are an Irish company, and want to find good quality staff for free, then we recommend you submit your jobs to jobs in ireland where you have total control of the applications and best of all it’s completely free ! www.jobsinireland.org

There are plenty of examples of good SEO, but what about those examples where companies have clearly gone too far in the wrong direction? While doing some competitor research over the weekend I came across some obviously bad SEO, which even has the potential to get the client a google penalty. This site clearly has had someone do some onpage SEO because nested in the footer, you can see the following code :
<div class="footer-seo"> many links </div>


The site in question is HarleyMedical.ie has a really nice design and decent navigation, site structure.

above the fold view

But let’s have a look at the full page view:

full page view (click to view)

There seems to be some large port of text at the bottom of the main page. The big worry is that they have have over 280 links on their home page. And on the sub-pages it averages closer to 160 links per page.

These links are clearly targeting keywords and it doesn’t appear that they are using them as a navigational aid. We all know links are important. Of course you should link to your some of your more important internal content from the home page, but basically having a keyword stuff sitemap at the bottom of the page really won’t help you rankings. In fact it could possibly have negative effects.

Here is a zoom in on those famous links:
 

200+ links in the footer

Currently it doesn’t seem like they have a penalty from google, they are ranking well for [cosmetic surgery] on google.ie and some other terms. Also they have around 150 pages in the index. We would see this SEO tactic as “high risk SEO” which would have the potential to have a domain banned from google.

A further SEO look

As for off page SEO , HarleyMedical doesn’t have many links, but they have gone the route of submitting some “basic press releases“. These types of links can be helpful for new websites, but what you really need is some good, relevant, trustable links.

There is also a potential issue with having similar content on their .co.uk domain, and it does appear that at least one other domain has taken a copy of their content as well.

And one final tip, fix the canonical URL issue

For SEO reasons you may not want to add your blog roll to every page on your website, but sadly it’s not so easy to do on WordPress. Having  the blog roll links on every page, can really zap your link juice, and overall such site wide links generally don’t help the sites you are linking to.

 Here is a quick quide on how to list your blogroll links on your homepage. It involves editing one of your templates (Admin Menu > Appearance > Editor) and editing some wordpress code around where the Blogroll links are called. On the default Wordpress Theme (and probably your theme also) it can be found in the sidebar.php file. 

<?php wp_list_bookmarks('title_after=&title_before='); ?>

Before you start to try and edit the template you need to make sure that you have uploaded the file so it can be edited. 

Replace the code above with the following code:
<?php if (is_home()) { wp_list_bookmarks('title_after=&title_before='); } ?>

The is_home() function is an inbuilt wordpress function that checks if the page you are on is the home page, and if so it will display the subsequent code. 

Note if you are using “widgets” (Admin Menu > Appearance > Widgets) to populate  your sidebar, then this method might not work.

Some more advanced examples of listing blogroll links

<?php if (is_home()) { wp_list_bookmarks(); } else { wp_list_bookmarks('category=4'); } ?>

This example will show all bookmarks on the home page, and on all other pages it will show just links that are in the 4th category. You can find out the link category number by going to (Admin Menu > Links > Link Categories), then click on the category you want to be displayed. You will now see a URL in your browser that ends in &cat_ID=XX, where XX is the category number. In our example we will display category 4 on all other pages.

The traffic data in this example has been removed on purpose, but general information used with permission from client.

One of the easiest ways to see if you are penalised by Google is to see how your traffic is doing. Here in this example that show things quite nicely. Here we are looking between February and April 2009.

example of a Google penalty

The client in question received a number of new links via some media attention, which was in turn picked up by some blogs. Initially the traffic grew to about 300% it’s base level, and then suddenly dropped off to about 5% of the traffic in the previous month. The remaining traffic was coming from other search engines, 3rd party site who linked to the client and direct type in traffic.   Looking at the previous traffic , from the start of the year:

Jan 1st to Mar 10

We see that the traffic to the site was increasing steadily, it had some peaks and dips, in this case due to weekend traffic fluctuations, and then around February 26th there were two big jumps over 2 days. And then suddenly zero. So what happened ? Our guess is that because of the quick increase of the number of links to the site, that Google decided to over night cut off the traffic to it. This was also confirmed by seeing that the clients SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Positions) were also removed. The site: operator on Google was saying that the domain not in the index. For all of the other queries, where traffic was previously coming from, the client was no longer listed.

Our actions against the penalty

The client contacted us and gave us access to their Google analytics account, where we discovered that there was some strange things going on. When realising that they were no longer showing up within the first 5 pages for queries they normally ranked for and having no results from the site operator. We requested a reconsideration request on Google webmaster tools (click talk to Google on the right hand side, and then request reconsideration. Here we outlined what we thought had happened, and within about 2 weeks the traffic started to come back. We also took it as an opportunity to get some authoritative links from some business partners of the client, in order to add more trust to the domain. To enable faster spidering we also added a XML sitemap. This also helped to see if there were any problems indexing the content again. Note: When you send a reconsideration request you won’t hear back from Google, the only way you can find out if it was granted is if you start to see your site appearing in the index again.

Google on Reconsidering Request

Here is a quick video tutorial from Google on the topic of “Requesting reconsideration”

Further reading

Here are two good posts about the google penalties from SEOmoz.ORG and SearchEngineLand.com and are well worth a read.

For my clients I tend to check on a monthly basis, who we link to, and what links those websites in turn link to. It’s not enough to make sure that the websites are live, rather one would need to check visually what is being display on these websites and where the links go to.   Also it is important to monitor if sites are being dropped (i.e. failed to be renewed, and subsequently registered by someone else) or if they have recently changed hands. Being anyway associated with dubious domains has the potential to damage your SERPs (the so called “bad neighbourhood” effect). Often when these sites are bought or picked from the dropped list, the old version of the website will remain (or re-appear, scraped from somewhere like google cache or archive.org) and then over a period of time these dubious links will creep in. This all sounds like a bit of work, but in the end it can avoid damage to your online reputuation. It’s not enough just to have a google alert, which emails you whenever someone mentions your website/brand, online reputation management should start at home, on your website. Have a look at your older out going links to make sure that they still work and they still link to the website you intended to.

Just today there was a high profile case of the British Home Office linking to a Japanese porn site  on BBC News.