| From the Editor: |
 Dear
Reader
It has been an incredible month for anyone in business whether it be online or offline.
However, the news is not all doom and gloom. The online business sector is well placed to weather current economic conditions and may even come out shining. Web based services, retail and entertainment may be seen as cheaper and more energy-efficient alternatives. It has possibly never been a better time to be a search marketing consultant! If you have been thinking about switching careers, this might be the perfect time to make the jump.
One of our Search Engine College graduates took the plunge and launched her own company recently and wrote to tell us about her new adventure:
"I think SEC is the best choice I could have made! I am learning so much and implementing it as soon as I learn about it. I am already having some great success with starting my own Web Design and Marketing (SEO) company
New Tree Web Design. I have achieved some first place rankings in Google after only ONE MONTH!
Needless to say, I am pretty excited. Now I just need the phone to ring and land some clients. I wish the best of luck to all the students and a great big thank you to all the staff!
Amanda Woodrum
CSEO Pathway Graduate
Speaking of Search Engine College, congratulations to all our college
graduates this month. Thirty four students have earned certification
status in the past few weeks. Congratulations everyone, I'm very proud of you :-)
So what's up for this month's newsletter? We've got some great Q and A's for you, including advice on search engine submission protocols, multiple meta description tags, and what to do if your ranking has dropped. Also, I hope you enjoy my feature article Planning for Web Site Disaster.
Enjoy this issue and remember to visit the Ask Kalena blog to check out my daily answers to frequently asked search engine questions. Got a question of your own? Gobsmacked by Google? Yikes about Yahoo? Press the big green button on the bottom right to send me your question and you might see it featured here next month.
Until then - wishing you clicks and conversions...
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| Feature Article: |
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Planning for Web Site Disaster
By Kalena Jordan
When you have a business web site that multiple people work on, one of the most difficult tasks is to manage and allocate responsibilities. For example, you might have a corporate site where the content is written by various in-house staff members, the pages are managed by your freelance web designer and your outsourced SEO is responsible for ensuring the content and code is search engine friendly.
But what happens when communication breaks down between all the stakeholders or a miscommunication occurs? It's more common than you might think and it can result in disaster for your web site. Here's a true story of how it happened to one of my clients:
The site in question was being re-designed by the client's 3rd party web designers and the client asked me (as their SEO) to send them a list of instructions to follow during the re-design and launch that would ensure they didn't lose search engine visibility. Naturally I sent the client a list of the usual things to watch out for, including:
- Ensuring that any URLs being replaced or moved had 301 redirects placed on them to their new locations.
- Transferring the optimized title and meta tags to new page versions.
- Implementing a custom 404 page; and
- Building a replacement XML sitemap for Google and Yahoo.
So a week later the client tells me that the new site is now live and would I have a quick check to see if everything is ok? I opened the site and typed in each of the URLs for the pages I had carefully optimized months before. The first one came up with a big ugly 404 Not Found error. Not a custom 404 error page, but an ugly white server-generated one with no design, no branding, no apology and (more importantly) no links back to the main site. So I tried the next one. Same story - 404 error.
As I went down the list, I became more and more concerned. Less than half of the pages I optimized had been transferred to the new site. When I checked their site logs in ClickTracks, I noticed that around half of the page views generated since the site re-launch were 404 errors. Not only that, but a quick check of Google Webmaster Tools showed a small fraction of the original number of site pages as being indexed. Obviously Googlebot had been shown the 404 errors too and had promptly removed the old pages from the Google index. Disaster!
I contacted the client and told her to get a custom 404 page implemented as soon as possible and to double check that 301 redirects from their old page URLs to the corresponding pages on the new site had been put in place by the design team, as per my instructions. Turns out the designers never received explicit instructions about this from the client and didn't know that:
- a custom 404 page was important
- 301 redirects were necessary to ensure the continuation of search engine indexing.
I found this news quite shocking - what web designer/programmer doesn't understand the need to redirect old URLs to new ones?
Plus, we found out later that the few pages that the designers HAD successfully transferred to the new template did not have the carefully optimized Title and META Tags transferred, meaning that all the hard-won rankings we had earned for the client had now vanished. The designer's excuse? They weren't SEO experts so didn't know tag transfer was necessary. I found this excuse pretty flimsy considering they managed to transfer the rest of the page HTML code intact.
This started a chain of urgent emails back and forth between the client, the designers and myself, with the designers blaming the client and me for not providing clear enough instructions, me blaming the designers for not taking the initiative to protect the client's site traffic during the move and the client caught in the middle trying to appease everyone. The emails escalated until finally the designers admitted defeat and acknowledged that they should have paid more attention to the client's instructions.
It took a couple of weeks for the designers to upload a custom 404 error page and I still had to manually login to the client's CMS to replace the optimized Title and META tags. As this goes to press, the client site has started to recover in the rankings, the 301 redirects are back in place, the number of pages indexed by Google is increasing, but the site stats are still showing a large number of 404 pages delivered to searchers. I expect it to take upwards of 3 months for the site to fully recover from the disaster.
The whole saga just goes to prove that you can't assume your site is in capable hands. If you are about to make extensive changes to your site design or move it to a new domain, you absolutely have to have a rollout plan in place with crystal clear instructions and tasks allocated to a team so everyone knows who is responsible for what. Otherwise you will be paying the penalties for months to come.
About the Author:
Article by Kalena Jordan, one of
the first search engine optimization experts in Australia,
who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S.
As well as running a daily Search Engine
Advice Column, Kalena manages Search
Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led
short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization
and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.
Search Industry Job of the Month
Got positions vacant or short term projects you'd like advertised? Sign up for a free account with the Search Engine College Jobs Board and find great candidates.
Social Marketing Specialist
Job Title: Social Marketing Specialist
Job Reference #: Unknown
Position Type: full time
Name of employer: Buongiorno
Location: Los Gatos, California
Date Posted: 9 October 2008
Position description:
BUONGIORNO is a trendsetting, independent mobile media and technology company driving the burgeoning cellphone entertainment and personalization industry. It partners with telecom, media and Internet companies in over 35 countries to distribute, package and create music, games, videos, wallpaper, ringtones, chat, user-generated services, TV voting, quizzes, and to sell advertising. BUONGIORNO helps companies market through proprietary labels, and sells directly through its popular Blinko brand. It distributes across the U.S, Europe, South America and Mexico, the Middle East, Africa and through BUONGIORNO Hong Kong - joint venture with Mitsui, in Russia, India, the Far East and China. Its reach is already exceeding 60 million customers. The dimension of its business, its large portfolio of content and services, its geographical presence and a team of more than 1000 professionals make BUONGIORNO one of the world's largest enabler of digital mobile entertainment.
Key Responsibilities:
The Social Marketing Specialist will be responsible for implementing and driving our Social Networking strategy in the local market based on the Global Product and Marketing Strategy and in close co-operation with the Global Marketing team. The ideal candidate will have the following responsibilities:
Planning, organising and carrying out Marketing campaigns to achieve user acquisition objectives in the respective country in close co-operation with Global Marketing Management department:
- Developing sound Marketing plan/activities to meet user target.
- Set up and drive online and mobile Marketing strategy to enhance viral distribution (blogs, other SN sites, SMS campaigns, banner placements, etc.).
- Establish relationships with online bloggers and potential co-operation partners.
Day to day community management and CRM activities for active users in close co-operation with Global Customer Relationship Manager:
- Email and SMS newsletter campaigns.
- Online community management.
- Establish user lifecycle management and incentive campaigns.
- Get in depth SN market know-how in the respective country, constant review of competitors' activities (product comparison/benchmarking).
Skills and Knowledge:
- University degree in business administration with a focus on Marketing/New Media.
- 2 years of working experience in Marketing for a consumer brand in a multi-national environment, preferably in Internet business or Telecom.
- Excellent knowledge of Online Marketing activities and tools. Mobile Marketing is an asset.
- Self-driven, results-oriented with a positive outlook, and a clear focus on high quality.
- Well developed interpersonal and communication skills and the ability to work independently in an international team.
- High market and user orientation and ability to anticipate user needs and market trends.
- Open minded. Strong analytical skills.
- Passionate for Social Networking and ambitious with a capacity to overcome barriers and make impactful change.
- Fluency in English, any other language is an asset.
To Apply:
To Apply, please provide a cover letter describing your specific experience with (1) social networking in business setting, and (2) writing and executing marketing plans involving social media. They will not consider candidates who do not meet this requirement. Send your letter and resume to careers.us[at]Buongiorno.com
Salary range: $45K-$60K
Closing date: Unknown
More info about company from: http://www.buongiorno.com
Contact: Send resumes to careers.us[at]Buongiorno.com
"Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterward."
Vernon Law
$50 Off Search Engine College Courses
Keen to learn SEO? Want to sharpen up your PPC skills? Been thinking about taking one of our Search Engine College courses but needed an extra incentive? Well here's your chance. Any newsletter subscriber that enrolls in the next 2 weeks gets $50 off the course/s of their choice.
That's right, a $50 discount on each and every individual course we offer. But you must enroll via this link and follow the instructions on that page for applying the discount coupon at the checkout.
Happy studying!
This
Month's Sponsor: Freshbooks
Freshbooks is an online estimating, invoicing, project management and time tracking service that gives your business a professional image, no matter how small. You can use it to invoice all your clients online and it can even be set up to automatically bill and debit the credit cards of recurring clients every month. It also has built in staff timesheets and project management tools for online collaboration.
Freshbooks offers plug-ins for a wide range of third-party tools such as BaseCamp, PayPal and 2Checkout and provides the option of email or ground-mail invoicing. We simply love it!
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Have a great day!
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FAQ 1: Can you submit individual pages of a web site to the search engines?
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Dear Kalena... 
Can you submit individual pages separately of a website to
the search engines - if so - how? My URL is: http://freewebs.com/jazzlist
Thanks
Cy
Hi Cy
Technically it is possible but you need to understand the way search
engines index web sites in order to fully understand why this is often
considered the wrong way to approach site submission.
With regards to your own web site http://freewebs.com/jazzlist there would obviously be an argument for individual page submission due
to you not having a dedicated domain of your own and as your web site
is not located in the root directory of the hosting site, there is
little to suggest that submitting http://freewebs.com/index.html would have any bearing on your own web site's performance.
The argument for submitting to search engines seems to have been around longer than the search engines themselves!
Some say that you need to submit only your homepage, usually
index.html or similar and that the search engine will then index all
links from this page and over time your site should be completely
indexed.
There are variations on this theory the most common is submitting a
properly formatted and structured sitemap alone to the search engine of
your choice. the search engines then index all links from this sitemap
alone. Formats vary but most popular are sitemaps written in xml, this
version in particular is favoured by Google.
For further information: Google friendly site map protocols
Others say that you don't need to submit any pages or sites to any
search engines at all, instead you are better to create keyword rich
and optimised content that, if written well enough should attract
Google and the others along through social bookmarking sites and
articles linking to your sites, a lot of people out there prefer this
method as it is often considered a more honest approach to site
submission.
I know of several websites that have never been submitted to any search
engines but if these sites change content or write a new article then
Google indexes this within 24 hours, proof indeed that if your content
is rich and your site is attractive to the search engines then your
site will become more successful based on its own content and merits
alone.
The thought that you could submit a single page is a perfectly valid
one but before you do this ask yourself this simple question... why do I
need to do this?
The answer lies in the hosting and structure of your own website and
your choice to follow a free/shared hosting option, this decision may
have been made for any of several reasons. The truth is that as long as
your site is hosted on a free, shared hosting solution your site will
most likely struggle to achieve its full potential as you will no doubt
come across issues when trying to optimize this kind of hosting
solution.
The advantages and full control offered by a dedicated host/domain
solution far outweigh any cost restrictions and in my opinion should
always be the way to go.
I appreciate some people and businesses out there want to create a
website for little or no outlay but as these are often clearly charging
for what they provide perhaps they should consider what their visitors
will think and how they will be perceived and judged in relation to
their business acumen when the free hosting option is taken instead of
creating a professional presence on the web.
best regards
Andy Watson
Wildcat SEO
FAQ 2: Multiple Meta Description Tags
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Dear Kalena...
I just noticed that my company's homepage has five meta description
tags within the head tag. Will this have any negative ramifications?
Thank you, Heather
Dear Heather,
I am curious as to how your site got that many meta description tags. In fact, you also seem to have
multiple keyword meta tags. You may get penalized by Google for
duplicate content, but regardless, it's bad design practice to have
improperly formatted meta tags, I would remove the extra tags ASAP. I
wrote a post about meta tags once on my own blog, but here are a few tips.
- Keep the description tag down to about 120 characters.
- Include a compelling call-to-action since this tag usually shows up on
the SERPS (search engine results page).
- Be sure your important
keywords are used at the beginning of the description.
- Don't
keyword-stuff, and use the same keywords more than a couple of times,
even as different variations.
Hope this helps!
best, Nick
FAQ 3: What can I do to reinstate my Google rankings for my key phrases?
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Hi Kalena... 
You've helped me out before so I hope you can help me untangle this
one. Although my site is doing OK, I'm concerned about one of my pages
which has fallen like a stone in Google for crucial keyword phrases
like "Croatia map" and "map of Croatia".
It's one of my oldest pages (4 years) but the drop has occurred over
the following year. I wonder if it is competing with a newer page which
is also not doing as well as it should? I don't know what to do.
Combine the pages? Dump one? Redo the page completely (thus putting up
a brand new page to crawl up the SERPs)?
I feel that my page is much better than my competitors, but how to
convince Google? I'd really appreciate your feedback. If you need more
coffee to figure it out, let me know!
Jeanne
Dear Jeanne
First up, thanks for your generous caffeine donation. That will keep me in Starbucks lattes for a while!
I've had a look a the two pages you've provided, as well as the Google rankings for those phrases and here's what I found:
- The two best ranking pages for those phrases are from the domains lonelyplanet.com and visit-croatia.co.uk
- Your first page has a Google PageRank of 4, as does the Lonely Planet page, whereas the UK page has a PR 5
- Both Google snippets for those competing sites come directly from the Title tags of those pages
- Both Title tags from those pages contain one or both keyphrases and very little else
- Your Title tag contains the keyphrase "map of croatia". but also an additional six words
- Your page doesn't contain an optimized META Description tag
- Your HTML code is suffering from unnecessary code bloat
So what does this mean? You've got some work to do. Try slimming
down your Title tag to your most important keyword phrase and get rid
of any extraneous words. Look at the Title for the UK site - they've
managed to include both keyword phrases you are targeting without
sacrificing space.
If it doesn't make sense from a usability perspective to have two
pages about Croatia maps, combine them. A little more on-target text
from the second page would likely help your first page to rank better
anyway. Run your code through a HTML validator to prevent indexing
problems and see if you can extract some of that excess code and
reference it in external files to reduce code bloat. Compare your code
to your competitor's and you can see what I mean. Googlebot likes clean
code that is faster and easier to index. Also less code increases the
keyword density on your page for target keywords.
Add a META Description tag that is optimized for your target keyword
phrases. Use variations and contractions of your target keywords in the
page, rather than repeating them ad nauseum.
Above all, remember that Google doesn't care whether YOU think your
page is better than your competitors, it's their algorithm that
determines who ranks above whom.
Kalena
Google Now Helps You Clean Up 404 Links
Google has just announced the easiest way to obtain inbound links to your site in a short space of time.
Webmaster Tool's new Crawl Error Sources feature allows you to
identify the sources of 404 Not Found errors that are found on your
site. Listed next to "Crawl Errors" in the Webmaster Tools control
panel, you'll now find a "Linked From" column that lists the number of
pages that link to a specific "Not found" URL on your site. Clicking
on an item in the "Linked From" column opens a separate dialog box
which lists each page that links to this URL (both internal and
external) along with the date it was discovered. You can even download
all your crawl error sources to an Excel file.
If your webserver doesn't comprehend 404s or fetch error pages very well, Google has also introduced a widgetfor Apache or IIS that consists of 14 lines of JavaScript that you can
paste into your custom 404 page template to helps your visitors find
what they're looking. It provides suggestions based on the incorrect
URL.
You can use the "Linked From" source information to fix the broken
links in your site, place redirects to a more appropriate URL on your
site and/or contact the webmasters linking to missing pages or using
malformed links and ask them to fix the links.
Webmasters have been asking for something like this for a long time,
so it's a relief to see it live at last. The official post about the
feature is on Google's Webmaster Central Blog and Matt Cutts goes into more detail on his blog.
Got a question? Ask Me:
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