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How Does Your Website Measure Up? Compare Traffic to Competitors with this Handy Tool

  • Oct 10, 2012
  • SEO
  • 0

Have you ever wondered how your website stacks up against your competitors? Google Analytics provides traffic data for your website, but provides no comparative data for other websites. In fact, without access to Google Analytics for a website it is impossible to get precise traffic metrics or data. While you cannot obtain exact data for websites other than your own, there is a way to get comparative traffic rankings for your website versus competitors or other websites. Alexa and Compete offer traffic rank statistics based on data gathered from their users browsers. We created a easy to use Website Traffic Rank tool that runs Alexa and Compete traffic data for your website and multiple competitors and displays the information on the webpage.   Website Traffic Rank Comparison Our Website Rank Tool shows the following data:  Alexa Data Alexa Rank & Top % – where your site ranks with respect to other websites, this is the Top Percentile. Links In (as reported by Alexa) – shows the number of links into your website as reported by Alexa. This is not an exact number, Goolge webmaster tools provides the best link data, but this is good a good comparison between your website and your competitors. Inbound links are still one of the key factors for SEO so take a look at your reported links vs your competitors and other websites that have good traffic.  Load Speed and Top % for Load Speed – load speed is important for SEO. A load speed of 2 seconds or less is recommended by Google.  If your load speed is over 3 seconds it needs improvement.  Compete Data Compete Rank & Top % – this where you rank in the Top Percentile of worldwide for Compete traffic. Unique Visits (as reported by Compete) – estimated unique visits. Great comparison tool.  Google Page Rank Website Page Rank Below is an example comparing Amazon, Facebook and MySpace.  What is Alexa Rank? Alexa website traffic ranks reflect website popularity,  similar to TV’s Neilson ratings as this is not an precise measurement of traffic but an estimate of relative popularity. Alexa is measuring popularity, not unique visits. For example a visitor to that visits your website 5 times in one day counts as 5 Alexa visits, but is one unique visit.   Alexa rank is a statistical estimate based on data gathered from the Alexa subscriber base of over 32 million users. Alexa traffic rank is top down, e.g. #1 is the most popular or most frequently visited website. Websites with Alexa ranks of under 100,00 are in the top 100,000 websites world wide. Websites with Alexa ranks of over 1 million have low traffic and websites ranked in the millions have extremely low traffic.  What is Compete Rank and Traffic Metrics? While Alexa measures overall popularity, Compete measures unique visits to a website, thus a user visiting the website 5 times in one day is counted as one unique visit in Compete. Compete is a website ranking company that compares and estimates unique visits to a website based on their subscriber community of over 4 million users.   Compete estimates website traffic statistically much like the Nielson ratings estimate viewer for TV shows. Compete traffic estimates are not 100% accurate as they are a an estimate based they user community, but they are very useful for relative comparisons between websites.

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Your Password is Hack-able, How to Pick a Secure Password

John1984, cathy87, J4cksABc – are these the of passwords you find yourself using? If so you are definately hack-able, in fact your logins can be hacked fast! Despite what you may think, all three of those passwords are distinct, but very easy for a machine to guess. When creating an online profile, website, E-mail address or any other social media username and password, it is crucial that you pay attention to your password strength. Do you own a pizza business that is well known for providing the most delicious pepperoni? Having a password such as D3l1c10us would not be the best choice in mind. While to you it may seem rather clever and unique to the mind’s eye, it is easy for computers to guess.   Importance of safe passwords Besides the obvious reasons of why you would want a secure password, there are other reasons people are not aware of. Say you own a business application and were hacked – that hacker now has full control of your database and can now send all of your clients or employers information that can ruin your reputation. If they were to break into your website, they could temporarily or permanently shut the site down, leaving you scrambling for backups, if you have any. Sometimes hackers use your website to redirect the people to inappropriate or illegal pages which then leaves the original business owner with a headache, and feat of having to explain to his clients what has happened in hope his clients do not leave his business. Nowadays reputation is everything no matter who you are.   Knowing your password strength Your password strength provides you with a measure of effectiveness. What I mean by this, is it allows you to know how easy it would be a for a hacker to guess your password. Most websites, when creating your password, will provide you with a pictured image to show you the strength of your password to ensure that you create one that reaches a “Great” limit rather than “Poor.” Your aim is for a green sign, thumbs up, “good,” anything that makes you feel accomplished by creating the best password on the streets! The more characters, the better.   Understanding your password Now of course we all know that in the early times of internet, ones mind had the ability to replace letters with numbers such as E with a 3. Usernames and passwords were then known as being “clever” or shall I say c13v3r. Recent studies has shown that those passwords are no longer clever or effective. The diagram below shows the new knowledge of password strength. From: http://xkcd.com/936/ – Licensed via Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. Entropy, in this diagram is roughly saying that more characters increase password guessing time exponentially. What this diagram is showing you is that although you address yourself as being “master password maker” by creating passwords that involve a mixture of letters and numbers that even you yourself have difficulty remembering, it is not the best procedure. This is because you are generally going to create a short password so you can still remember all the funky letter to number combinations. You are actually making it easier for the hackers to access your account. Hackers realize that normally people will use a single word that is distinct to them, but they will change the letters into numbers or even turn the word into slang. For example they may change the word “girl” into “gurl.” Programs that use brute force attempts at guessing passwords have algorithms that guess common word and number combinations, as well as letter to number replacements. They do this by data mining your social media accounts and any other materials they can find about you on the web and other sources.   Tips for creating the best password To better ensure you create the safest password be sure to:  Be random! – Now of course you do not have to make it correcthorsebatterystaple like shown above but it does make it harder for the hacker to guess. They would never assume to put those four words together or even in that order. Those words may not even pertain to you, but that is just another reason for it to be the safest password. Make it long – The longer your password, the longer it takes to guess. Now this does not mean make it ABC1234578910. There is nothing random about that. You’d be surprised how many people have that as their actual password. Hackers will attempt most common passwords first. Make it silly, and irrelevant – Now I know you may be completely in love with your pet hamster named Roofus, but you may not want to include him in your password. Hackers that are interested in breaking into your account may know who you are and are fully aware that you are crazy about Roofus. They will try all the letters and numbers involved with the simple name. If you must use Roofus, do something creative and mix in multiple words such as roofusvisacoffeecontroller. Use 3 words or more words – By doing this you are making your password longer, easier for yourself to remember and causing a brute force attempt to require 3 or more times the dictionary words to guess. It omits having to remember whether or not you used a “3” or an “e” due to you being able to use proper grammar. Hackers don’t know if you used numbers, special characters or capital letters, they still have to go through all those options. You may decide to still use the numbers instead of letters, but keep in mind, to hackers, it makes no difference since most password systems now allow for all characters.   Avoid E-mail Spammers Now let’s say the hacker has either successfully hacked into your account, or by some other means is sending emails that we like to categorize as “Spam” from your domain.  As a business owner, this is one of the worst things that can happen to you. You, as the trusted business owner, are now sending e-mails with links to inappropriate websites that the hacker prefers leaving your clients confused, annoyed and frustrated. Here at Esotech we know the nightmare. We have seen it happen to clients. In response, we offer a package that causes emails sent by the attacker to be immediately flagged as spam, while leaving your legitimate emails unflagged. For more information on how we can help you avoid that nightmare from happening to you – contact us. Do not assume you are not important enough to hack. There are thousands of robots and hackers on the World Wide Web today and you could be the next victim if you do not ensure safety within your account. Allow this to make you rethink whether or not you want your password to be D3l1c10s or unicornsdancegrasspop.

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The Road to Website Recovery – Google Adds Disavow Links Penguin Fixing Tool

  • Oct 10, 2012
  • SEO
  • 0

Was your Website effected by Google’s Penguin Update? Did you use a SEO Company that spammed the internet with shady links pointing to your site, only to suddenly drop in rankings and traffic overnight? How many hours of sleep have you lost worrying about getting your rankings back? Did you curse and mutter while trying to decide whether to take  dreadfully slow route of  trashing your website and starting over, or trying, painstakingly, to get those links removed?  Worry no longer, today Google Launched a Penguin Fixing Tool to ease the process of recovering from a Penguin update and getting you back on track. Now that you have learned the detriments of low quality SEO, and the benefits of brand building and content marketing, you have a chance to recover from a Penguin disaster. https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main Just create any major text file in notepad, text, sublime or notepad++ and save it as a .rtf or .txt file.  Inside of it list the domains following format: domain:linkpharm.com that you do not want to trust. This will send a signal to Google to consider these links as unwanted or untrustworthy, possibly lifting any Penguin penalties your website has. This will also help fend off attacks from those using Negative SEO Link Farming against you. (Yes, it is possible to do this, and will be explained in a later blog). Here is an example of the format Examples, and a file for quick handy reference and download (right click and save-as to download): domain:linkpharm.comdomain:blackhatlinks.comdomain:lookingtogetpenguinslapped.comdomain:lookatmeimalinkfarm.comdomain:icantbelieveitsnotalinkfarm.com  This tool is recommended to assist with links that you have not been able to remove yourself. It is still recommended to try and get those links removed, but if you can’t use the tool.  Matt Cutts has a video on Youtube explaining the reasoning behind the Disavrow Tool, as well as how to use it. This is very welcome and fresh news from Google after a year of dreadful update after update putting thousands of dollars of company SEO funding down the drain. At least SEO’s who participated in darker practices now  chance to take some action to correct it.  But perhaps it is still too little, too late for some companies that got hit very hard and were relying on that traffic to survive.

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2012 – The SEO Apocalypse – Shuffling the Deck

  • Oct 10, 2012
  • SEO
  • 0

Apocalypse – Penguin, Panda, and EMD Missiles In the past week we have seen some major changes to Google Search pushed by Google, an algorithm Update, a EMD algorithm update and a Penguin Update, all within the span of a week. The rate of data refreshes is alarming. The rate signifies a few things though, most importantly that Google is comfortable enough as king of search to start tinkering with the results without having to wait too long to see the results (or complaints). No matter how many Bing taste tests Microsoft does, they are being dwarfed.  This heralds both good and bad news for SEO’s out there and their clients. Depending on how the algorithm works with the methods an SEO employs, it could spell disaster or victory. Some may call this a SEO Armageddon and that SEO is dead. Their position is that Google is killing SEO doesn’t want SEO’s to succeed or exist! This is not the case, as can be seen in this article and infographic from SEOBook and Search Engine Land on how these harbingers have been decreeing the death of SEO for years. One of the most significant changes, and a good one in my opinion, is the drop of focus on Exact Match Domains (EMDs). Google sent an EMD Missile at that old SEO tactic, blowing it to smithereens. Finally, we have written proof and reason to tell clients they don’t need to buy kittyclumpinglitter.com and 5 other exact match domains to redirect to their website, or worse…build their website on it.  Shuffling the Deck – Keeping it Fresh Let’s talk about why SEO can’t die, no matter what Google does to search, or how they change the algorithm. The irony is that changing SERP’s is good for the economy, for user experience and for Google’s pocketbook. It evens the playing field and shuffles the deck so that up and coming websites may have a chance at attaining Google’s graces and the subsequent traffic that is bestows.  It gets users closer to getting the answers they want faster. What it’s not good for is the client that just lost all his traffic due to an update. But never fear! Google has PPC ready for you while you recover your SEO. (not something a client wants to hear, but often the only short term solution!) Let’s think about it though. Shuffling the deck, ordinarily, and making tweaks here and there, keeps webmasters and SEO’s on their toes. As soon as SEO know the game and the rules are well understood, it is won, it is over, and then its spam city. The techniques that get your to rank open the floodgates for spammers that start devising methods to game the system and users can’t find what they want, because anyone with enough bucks can hire a company to get to the top. Google cannot and will not ever maintain or perfect their algorithm…simply because it is mathematical, and you should only be able to buy your way to the top with PPC. The only way to keep the formula from being discovered, is to change the formula and non systematically go in different directions to render old methods of gaming the system ineffective. This is where Penguin, Panda, and other curiously named updates come in. They send people on a mission to discover the next formula. This boosts revenue for SEO companies, especially newer companies as businesses shuffle through SEO companies, blaming the previous company and looking to the next for new answers. It shuffles money into the economy, as companies not getting much traffic suddenly start booming and making sales, while others scramble to invest in other marketing methods or PPC /Affiliate Marketing to keep up. This shuffle doesn’t always happen, sometimes clients end up with an SEO company that uses brand based methods and cleanly thought out digital marketing plans that go beyond generic whitehat SEO strategy and risky blackhat witchcraft.  The funny and interesting thing is this is the very basic principle behind gamification, and more specifically massively multi-player online gaming theory: constantly creating new content and new achievements so that the game never stagnates, and there is no “end” or “pinnacle” except for a peak on the current interval of gameplay in time before the rules suddenly change. It is game mechanics applied to search. I am sure many marketers out there have heard how you can “gamify” your website, sales, salespeople, and business in general. It is absolutely true, and it works.  As an SEO company, we try to hold as many cards as we can while the deck gets shuffled, and we play carefully and employ long term strategies. Sometimes we don’t get to the top quickly or first, but we stay there more consistently and reliably. Don’t ever think Google’s poker face is easy to read and they will never show their cards!

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SEO Scams! How to Find a Reputable Web Design, SEO and Digital Marketing Company

If I hear one more company owner tell me they flushed away thousands of dollars on a web company that made big promises and did not deliver results, I am going to need to defragment my mental hard drive! Maybe there is an ashram for business people who need to cultivate compassion for crooks and scammers that give any given industry a bad name when thye could be spending time on an app for Amazon FBA reimbursements. But until we find that place to deal with these bad business practices, we have to exercise caution and remember the old saying, “Buyer Beware.” If you are looking for a website refresh or redesign that increases your traffic, leads and ultimately increases sales through a digital marketing strategy, there are simple ways to verify that a web design and digital marketing company is legit. Here are some things to look for: Look at the company portfolio and actually OPEN the websites they claim to have built. Are they user-friendly? Next, open a separate search page and run an “organic search” to see how the website ranks. EXAMPLE: Esotech built a website for Horizon Power Catamarans. If you Google “power catamaran manufacturers”, “power catamaran yachts”, “luxury power catamaran”, or “cruising power catamarans”, you will find the site is ranked on page one for these organic search results.  In fact, this Esotech client has 10 words ranked in position 1 through 3 on page one and 47 words on page one. Go for the old-school route and ASK for professional references.  Call one or two of their previous clients and ask them whether they have seen results. Beware of Barbie-site designers who only focus on the look of the site and do not take the time to properly build a web site that can rank on search engines.   It’s great to have a “pretty” website, but if there is nothing under the hood working to deliver traffic it is like a car with a great paint job and a 4 cylinder engine that needs an overhaul.  Google robots “crawl” sites to find out what the website is about and what keywords are relevant, and determine the quality of the site. These Google robots then use over 250 different factors to rank that site for various keywords.  Google bots don’t have eyes so they are not looking at how pretty a site is, but how relevant the content is and how it compares to other websites for the same topics. Beware of companies who use ready-made templates to build your site.   Our experience is that ready-made templates are not Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, friendly and are difficult to optimize for a particular customer application. This NEGATIVELY impacts search engine optimization. Beware of companies who promise instant results, such as “we will have you on page one in 60 days,” or “we can fix your Panda-Penguin problems in 30 days,” or worse, “we can get you page one results for $100 just per month.” These are scams!!! It takes time to build a website properly and get it to rank effectively for keywords.  Don’t let stars of “going viral” get in your eyes. Look for steady incremental increase in your rankings and traffic starting in three to four months and with substantial results over approximately 6 months to a year. These are just a few tips to help you steer clear of scams and crooks in the world of web design and digital marketing.

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Sender Policy Framework – Protect your E-mail from Spam with SPF

Don’t let your email fall into spam or the limbo of undelivered/unreceived emails. Add an SPF record to your domain: it’s quick, simple, and the benefits speak for themselves.

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Plan Your Rebranding to Avoid De-Branding

Without careful planning and implementation your rebranding campaign can devolve into a de-branding campaign, diminishing your presence on the internet and social media, creating confusion with your customers.   After years of developing a brand sometimes a strategic decision is made to change the brand or create new brand and start a re-branding campaign.  Whatever the reasons for changing the brand, before you choose your new identity and launch your rebranding campaign there are several things to consider.   Before there were websites, domain names, and social networks rolling out a new brand was a bit more straightforward.  You picked a new name, made sure there were no copyright issues or companies using a similar name, set the creative team in motion to create new logos, letterhead, print materials and other media materials, and then rolled out your new brand through traditional media.  Rebranding required good  planning and execution, but it was much less complicated than today.  Let’s take a look at a brand launch gone bad and then how to do it right.   Netflix Qwikster – example of branding faux paux  A great recent example of a rebranding faux paux is Netflix roll out of Qwikster in 2011 and immediate retreat and euthanasia of the new brand.  It was bad enough that the new brand represented a thinly veiled price increase of 25% or more to users, but to make matters worse, or from the public’s perspective ironically funny, there was already a @qwikster Twitter account in use and the avatar was a pot smoking, obviously high, Elmo.  Needless to  say this was a short lived brand and very embarrassing epic fail for Netflix.    Netflix clearly demonstrated the need to do your homework and research before choosing a new brand name and launching it, lets take a look at some basic steps to avoid a Netflix brand fail Redux.   10 Steps to Prepare for Rebranding  Before you embark on a rebranding campaign to roll out your exciting new brand here are some steps to take to ensure your campaign is successful:  Google and Bing searches:  Some would think that the obvious first step is #2 below, obtain the domain name, but before you do that it is smart to see what turns up for your prospective name in Google and Bing searches.  We suggest you to both Google and Bing as they do turn up different results and we also recommend you go back several pages and do some variations on the search as well.   Domain Name (url) availability: Prior to choosing your new brand name, the most important step to take is to confirm and then purchase the domain name for your new brand.  In addition to purchasing the domain name you intend to use, make sure you check for obvious conflicts with similar domain names.   Facebook Page availability:  One you have your domain name purchased and it is under your control the next thing to check is availability of a Facebook Page with your new brand name.  Facebook Pages have a title and can have a custom url such as Facebook.com/newbrandname  There can be multiple Facebook Pages with the same title, but once the url is taken it is permanent and unavailable.  If the url for your new brand is available that’s great news, but you will not be able to obtain it until you create a new Page and have a minimum of 25 Likes.  If it is available you may want to create that new page, build it to 25 Likes and then lock down that url as soon as possible. Your current Facebook Page: If you have a current Facebook Page with a custom url you cannot change the url.  Once a custom url is set on Facebook it is permanent.  You also cannot “migrate” your Fans or Likes to a new Page.  The only way to get your existing Fans to the new Page is to place frequent posts about the new Page notifying them of the new page with a link.   Twitter handle (account name) availability:  As you saw in the Netflix example above, make sure the Twitter handles you want for your brand are available and if so set up accounts immediately to lock these down.     Pinterest:  Pinterest is still an emerging social network platform, but it is presently the fastest growing, and even if you don’t have a presence on Pinterest today, you should plan for one in the future and obtain your brand name there with a page. Blogs: While you can’t necessarily lock down a blog name other than via a url (domain name), it is good to check for blogs with similar names and see if there are any potential conflicts.  Obvious conflicts would likely have shown up in the Google and Bing searches, this is just an extra measure of precaution.   Rolling out a new website: once all of the above is done and you are confident you have the right name chosen you can start the design of the new website.  When you are ready to launch the new website it is imperative that 301 Redirects are set up from the old website and all of the old pages to the new website and equivalent replacement pages.  Done correctly, 301 Redirects will preserve your search rankings and pass on the rankings to the new site.  While there may be a small drop in your search rankings, it should be temporary.  Announcing the new site:  Now that you have a new brand and new website it’s time to let the world know.  Use your social networks such as Facebook, Google +, Twitter and your blog to let everyone know. You can also use Facebook ads to build your new Facebook Page and do posts on the old Page to inform existing Fans of the new website and new Page.  Email newsletters are also effective for reaching out to your customer base to let them know about the branding change. Consistency:  With your new brand launched it is vital to be consistent with the new look, style, and tone and stay on message for the new brand. Commingling the brands will cause confusion, there is now only the new brand and you must stick with it. 

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How To Post Pictures and Files on WordPress 3

Posts and pages are never as exciting without a photo or two within it. WordPress makes it easy to create pages with photos and links to documents like PDF files and spicing it up your pages will help you generate traffic to your content, leaving you satisfied with the work you put into it. At times it can even be convenient to add a file to your page so your readers may print it out at their preference, such as a PDF file.     Adding Photos in WordPress When wanting to add photos to your content, you want to put your cursor where you want your photo to start. You then want to click what I have outlined in yellow for you in the photo above. That will then bring you a pop up like the one shown to the right. This offers you a few options; you can either drag and drop the photos/files, or you can get them from a URL, the gallery, or the media library. If you have not yet uploaded the photo/file you are interested in posting into your content, you will need to be sure to do so.  Let’s say you need to re-use a photo you have already uploaded into your content or you need to modify your photo in any ways, the “Gallery” holds photos already within the content you are currently working on. The “Media Library” holds photos that you have already uploaded within any content (blog or post) you have published. This makes it convenient for you so you won’t have to re-upload the photo several times.  If you have decided you needed to choose either Gallery or Libary, you would then find the photo you’re wanting to use and click “show” which is alongside the right of the table. You then are given the option to customize your photo to your liking. Adding a good title can help you with SEO purposes and helps you to find your photo later on when needed. Finally you want to choose insert  into post or you can even use it as featured image. Adding Files Although you take the same steps to add files, it posts completely different within the content. Follow all of the same steps you would take when adding a photo, except notice once you have hit insert into post the difference. This adds a link to your page rather than an image. This generates a link that allows your viewer to download whatever document you were adding to your content. The steps are all the same, but the viewing is different.  Keeping your blog interesting will help you generate the proper viewers to your content, leaving you with a refreshing feeling of accomplishment. 

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How to Edit Yoast Plug-In on Word Press 3 Pages and Posts

Driving more traffic to your Word Press page or post is very important when wanting to successfully promote your content that you have spent so much time on. The best way to do this is by installing the WordPress SEO by Yoast plug in. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which helps Google, as well as other search engines, find your content quicker and easier, giving you a higher chance of getting clicks to your page. By having the Yoast plug in installed, you are able to easily customize  what Google finds from your page/post and how to display it to the viewers.      The Yoast plug in should display under your main content writing and should look like this (refer back to this photo throughout this post):   Snippet Preview The snippet preview is displayed to show you what your link will look like when being posted to social media sites such as Facebook. When you are in the process of editing within Yoast you will see the changes display here.    Focus Keyword The focus keyword is exactly as it says; it is the keyword or phrase that your content is mainly about, or focusing on. Say you are writing about fishing in the Everglades, you want to decide what kind of traffic you want to your post, so maybe you want fisherman to be directed to your page, then you could put simply “Fisherman.” Or maybe your post is focusing in on the Everglades and less on the fact that you are fishing there, then you could put “Everglades.” Or to be even more specific you can put “Fishing destination.” Filling out the keyword option helps Google find your article so if someone were to type “Fishing Destinations” Google can refer them to your page more effectively.    SEO Title The SEO title is what is displayed in social media when the link is shared and also on the tab for that webpage or blog post. It is very important to have a title that is less than 70 characters and is relevant to the page topic and content. Spammy titles with repeated keywords or stuffed with keywords do not help and actually hurt both search results and click-throughs. Be sure to always write an informative and accurate title. You may find that the actual title you originally created is good enough to keep as the SEO title, so therefor you can leave this part blank.    Meta Description Your meta description is the most important part of the entire Yoast plug in. Meta Description is used by Facebook WordPress plugin and by Facebook, Google Plus, and other social media sites as the post description – what ever you enter here is what will show up on the post! The Meta Description is also the little summary that shows up on search results describing the page and this is THE most influential information for getting people to click on your link, so it is important to write a GREAT description that is informative and more importantly interesting and engaging. Spammy descriptions never work and will actually reduce the click throughs you get.    Meta Keywords This section is specific for search engines. The best way to come up with your meta keywords is by reading your entire article and jotting down the words that sum up your article. Such as this article we would use the keywords being Tutorial, Yoast, SEO, etc, keeping it at about a 10 word limit. 

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Panda or Penguin Slapped? Here’s the Cure for an Ugly Slap

 The now infamous Panda and Penguin updates were released by Google in April 2012. Actually this was Panda 3.5 and 3.6 and the first Penguin update and while there have been other Panda updates dating back to 2011, these seem to have had the most dramatic impact on websites. Panda and Penguin are intended to target Spammy websites, low quality content, and link farms and in fact they did just that. These updates also affected a significant number of websites that not really were spammers or link farms, but through poor website design and worse SEO practices they looked that way to Google after these updates. One thing you must understand about Google search results, it is an algorithm. It plays no favorites, has no discretion, it is a huge array of computers crunching numbers to a set formula and out pops the search rankings, end of story.  So what do you do if your website has been Panda-Penguin slapped and how do you do SEO in the Post Panda-Penguin era? Below we outline some steps you can take to identify possible problems on your site. If you website has been penalized it is not a simple process to restore your rankings but it can be done.   What to do if Your Website has been Panda-Penguin Slapped  Fixing the issues that caused your site to get penalized by Panda or Penguin can be complicated as there is generally no single problem and thus no single solution. Most sites that have been penalized have a number of problems and red flags that resulted in a rankings drop. Here are some things to do and look for:  Getting Started: Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools: start with this, you can look for the problem if you don’t have the tools to deliver the data. Make sure both are installed and working on your site. Webmaster Tools Warnings, Crawl Errors, etc.: Go through Webmaster tools and look for Crawl errors and any warnings from Google. In some (rare) cases Google will issue warnings about bad links via Webmaster Tools. Google Analytics: check your bounce rate, average time on site, and visitor flow. While these aren’t necessarily a primary cause for a penalty, but they can point to other problems on the website.  SEOMoz: this is a very powerful tool SEO professionals (us included) use to analyze the internal workings of a website. It’s a great tool, and of course it is not free, you will need to subscribe to use it. SEOMoz or an equivalent tool is the only way you will be able to dig into what is going on with your website. Once you subscribe and set up your website analysis it will take a couple of days for it to be completed so let it run and work on the things above while it is running. Finding the Problems Webmaster Tools will give you a basic list of things to fix. Start with cleaning up the basic problems. Bounce Rate, Average Time on Site, and Visitor Flow: If your bounce rate is higher than 40% and your average time on site is low, say less than a minute, then your website has poor engagement with the users. This does affect search rankings to a degree and while it probably was not a significant factor in your rankings drop you should address this at the same time. SEOMoz: the SEOMoz analysis will give you a crawl diagnostics summary listing Errors, Warnings, and Notices. The Errors and Warnings are the places that your Panda and Penguin problems may lurk and there could be hundreds, even thousands of them. This seems overwhelming, but often these Errors are the result of poor design or website structure and can be fixed by an experienced SEO Tech or website developer.  Duplicate Content: The SEOMoz analysis will point this out and if you have duplicate content within your own site (duplicate pages) or from other websites this is certainly a major factor and must be resolved. This may turn into a page by page rewrite.    Fixing the Problems There is no simple list we provide on how to fix the problems. You will have to address each on case by case. By the way, if you are thinking of nuking the site and replacing it with a new one on the same domain name, that may fix some of the problems and it will create others and leave some lingering problems too. So before you nuke the old site, which is an option, make sure you have a plan to fix any problems that may follow the domain. Oh, and if you are thinking of just tossing the domain and starting with a brand new domain name, consider this first; a significant factor in search rankings and domain authority is the age of the domain name. So your old domain name is worth fixing and a new domain name is starting from scratch with zero authority.   As you can see from the list of how to find the problem you quickly go down a rabbit hole deep into SEO and website design wonderland and it takes a very experience SEO tech or website developer to fix these problems.  

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