Know your Internet Neighborhoods

Have you done all of the right SEO practices and find your rankings aren't showing positive results? Then it may be time to start looking at your linking neighborhoods. To put it in simple terms your online neighborhoods define who you are and who you associate with. Good links from good sites gain you positive results and bad links from bad sites gain you a negative result.

Inbound links is one of the fundamental necessities in good SEO. If you have read our previous posts on how to get high rankings, and you have sites linking to you but your rankings don't show positive results then it may be time to look at who is linking to you. If you find sites that have negative associations then you want to contact them and ask them to remove your link from their site.

What do bad sites look like? Bad neighborhoods can be sites that spam, steal content, use keyword stuffing, use doorway pages, use hidden text, and violators of copyrights. Other members of known bad neighborhoods are gambling sites, porn sites, and sites that engage in fraudulent activities.

If you want to know whether or not a site is blacklisted in Google you can do a search on the domain name by inputting the following into a search field: site: www.thecompanynamehere.com. If no results come up for an established site then chances are they are a bad neighborhood site.

A great tool to check your site links is the "Text Link Checker Tool". Use this tool to see if the sites that are linking to you are reputable.

So remember a bad neighborhood website is a website that engages in dirty tricks to gain rankings.

How to Choose Keywords for your Website

Typically the best way to choose the right keywords for your website is to choose words that people would type to find what it is that you do or that you offer. You want to stay away from one word targets since these most likely won’t be enough to drive the proper traffic or will be widely sought after and harder to achieve.

Having a brainstorming session with some of your fellow employees is a good way to get everyone to state what your prospective customers might type to find you in a search engine. In your brainstorming session you want to find those primary keywords that best describe what it is that you do.

To help you with your keyword research use the following free tools:

• WordTracker
  
• Google Keyword Tool
  
• KeywordIndex
  

Will Buying Links Help Your Website?

The short answer and correct answer to the question is yes as long as the site linking to you has a good reputation. Many webmasters buy links to improve their page rank and popularity which will move them up in the SERPS (search engine result pages). Links are a large part of getting your website to the top results pages of the SERPS.

Now that we answered the question here is why you DO NOT want to purchase links, because it's not allowed! Links are meant to be natural, not paid for. A link to your site is a vote for your site, so the more votes you get the better you do. Makes sense, right? So that is why it's important for links to be natural, if you're paying for your vote is that ethical? Of course the answer is no.

Remember if you buy votes for your website and you get caught by Google then you will be removed from the search index.

• SEO Tools - 4 Great tools to use on this page
• Firebug - Good for web development and viewing source code for SEO
• Google Toolbar
  

• SEO Site Tools
• Chrome SEO

Have Your Search Engine Rankings Dropped? Here's Why

I often get calls from clients who are upset that their rankings have dropped. In most cases they feel that the company that was optimizing their site might not have been making white hat changes. While in some cases this can be true, but that is not the only reason rankings can drop.  There are numerous other reasons that your web site rankings can drop. Below we talk about some of those reasons.

Your Competition Has Caught Up
Since SEO is an ever changing environment and is in constant flux the reason your results may have changed can be as simple as your competitors have out optimized you. So if that’s the case it’s just a matter of going back and using good SEO basics to regain those rankings.

Your Website May Have Been Penalized
Some of the search engines penalize sites with negative 10, 40 or 50 placements. So if you were number 1 and dropped to 11, or 41 or 51 then this may have happened to you. In most instances the experts agree that these penalties are due to a drastic change in the way inbound links change from what they were. A red flag would go up if you did a major ad campaign where many pages linked to you that didn’t have a “nofollow” in the link code. That is a good example of how your links would change drastically.

Your Website May Have Been Sandboxed
It has been known for some time now that new websites are sandboxed until they are anywhere from 6 to 18 months old. Since they are new websites they have not had the opportunity to build a trusted ranking with the search engines. The timeframe that a website spends in the sandbox depends on link patterns that a website establishes over time. If a website is known to have spammy links they can also find themselves re-sandboxed.

The Search Engines Have Banned You
If you find yourself in this scenario then you have some work ahead of you. You can normally tell if this has occurred because all of your web pages have been removed from the search engine index. Reasons that you may get banned are cloaking, using doorway pages, duplicating sites across numerous domains, and linking to known bad neighborhoods. Once you have fixed these problems you can petition the search engines for reinclusion.