Posts by Nichola Stott

Nichola Stott is owner and co-founder of theMediaFlow; online revenue optimisation and audience services (including SEO, SEM and SMM). Prior to founding theMediaFlow, Nichola spent four years at Yahoo! as head of UK commercial search partners. More articles and bio from Nichola Stott

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Why Is My Site Not Ranking?

If you are a small business owner on a small budget the chances are you are learning about everything you can to set-up and promote your business. You are the CEO, the CMO, the bookeeper and the post room and chances are you make a cracking cuppa. Not every startup is VC funded, not every startup has a budget for everything and not every business can afford to have an agency to support every aspect of their marketing efforts. If this is you then perhaps you are hoping to get your online presence ranking in the search engines in order to attract customers through organic search. Whilst in some business sectors this can be very difficult and very competitive, but in some cases, for example local businesses in less populated areas you might have a decent chance at success providing you have some rudiments in place and an understanding of what search engines are evaluating when attempting to rank your pages.

As full-time search professionals those of us agency-side will come across a number of common mistakes or oversights time and time again, when auditing any website, or when talking to friends and contacts about their small business website. Even if you don’t have budget for an SEO campaign there are a number of things to check and to be aware of if your website is nowhere to be seen in the rankings.

First a little disclaimer: search algorithms are rather complex as they evaluate over two-hundred factors, some of which matter more than others. If one of the below “mistakes” effects you, fixing it doesn’t necessarily mean your site will rank overnight, but rather that these are very common mistakes that can often be found with new websites.

1. Disallow: *

You may or may not know that there is a file that allows you to instruct search engine spiders (or bots) as to how to crawl your site. It is called a robots.txt file and here’s an example.

You (or the person that built your website) can put instructions in the file to specific user-agents, such as Googlebot or Bingbot, though in the above case the use of [*] means all. Using the command >Disallow: you can restrict a user-agent from indexing content from the pages/folders that you specify on your website

2. URL Confusion

The State of Search website has a URL or address which I can type into a browser in order to access it directly. The format of the address may differ from site to site, but when you bu a domain for your web business you are purchasing the domain, specific to a TLD or ccTLD.

A TLD is a top-level domain, such as .com and a ccTLD is a country-code Top Level Domain, such as .fr (for France). The domain part of it is the name that should be akin to your business name. However as is common practise since the web became popular, many websites choose to precede the domain with what is actually a sub-domain www. You don’t have to have the sub-domain to make your website work and here is where this can cause problems. Publishing your website to both www.yourwebsite.com and http://yourwebsite.com if untreated can mean you have essentially duplicated your website. Search engines do not like duplicated content on URLs as they may struggle to work out which version is the intended or preferred. If your site has been around for a while and has gathered some links that point to it, if there are stronger links pointing to one version rather than the other this may often tip the balance in favour of which version is preferred.

Rather than publishing your website to both versions of the address it is generally best-practise to pick a preferred URL .e.g. www.yourwebsite.com and use a 301 redirect instruction so that the http://yourwebsite.com version simply redirects to the preferred version.

The reason you would want to do this is so that from the get-go the search engines do not have to use other signals to work out why you have a duplicated website and which version is preferred. Perhaps more importantly any equity that you accrue in links is funnelled towards the preferred version of the URL. Even if somebody links to you using the non-preferred version the equity afforded to that URL is passed on via the 301 redirect instruction. A bit like when you move house and get your post redirected.

Check to see what is happening with your website by typing in both versions of the URL. For example with State of Search if I type http://stateofsearch.com into my browser it will redirect e to www.stateofsearch.com without my doing anything. You can easily check if the correct redirection is in place using a free tool like this Redirect Checker.

Another thing to be very careful about which I have seen on many occasions is when different content has been published to each version of a URL, for example you may have put a holding page at http://yourwebsite.com and then the finished website at www.yourwebsite.com. I’ve even seen examples of entirely different websites on both versions. This can really inhibit your progress and potential in organic search.

3. Missing Tracking Code

I asked some of my peers at other SEO agencies which common mistakes they see with new websites and Hannah Smith of Distilled pointed out a great one that is more to do with a lack of traffic than rankings and that is when your tracking (e.g. Google Analytics) code has been mistakenly removed. Perhaps you have started out with some traffic showing in your Google Analytics account and then suddenly it all disappears. This is something that can send people looking into all sorts of places and reasons such as Google penalties or a website hack. Sometimes the simplest explanation is the answer and the first place to start is to check that the code has not simply been removed somehow; though normally by human error.

4. Crawling (Or Not)

For a site to rank broadly and well it has to be crawlable. Search engines use crawlers as mentioned in the first point 1 above, in order to discover pages on your site, crawl and index the content on them. If your site is hard to access or contains a lot of image and video content there’s a lot more work to be done to make such content accessible to such bots. In fact in a timely post on Search Engine Watch today, author Danny Goodwin cites Google head of webspam Matt Cutts as saying that this is the number one problem he sees with websites not ranking.

5. Time and Patience

Another of my fellow writers and peers Barry Adams of Pierce Communications says that the biggest mistake is one of perception. All too often Adams gets the question why isn’t my site ranking? It has been live for over a week! Simply having a functioning website does not mean that it is going to rank. Certainly a large part of getting your pages crawled, indexed and ranking well is dependent on how many links point to it. Much like reviews for a bed & breakfast, or references on a Linkedin profile, good links don’t happen overnight unless you have a huge marketing budget or you are the source of a scandal! Do beware of any service that offers you X links in X weeks. If the offer seems too good to be true then it almost certainly is, and poor quality links can actually do your site far more harm than good.

If you suspect that a lack of links to your youthful site is inhibiting your progress then we have a wealth of content on this site and by our bloggers on linkbuilding the right way.

8 Free Technical SEO Tools

It’s Tools Week here on State of Search and as such we’re celebrating all those great, informative and handy tools that help make the technical and analytical aspects of our roles that little bit smoother and quicker. Whilst we have a number of posts planned on the bigger premium tool suites; plus a tonne on the link tools I thought it might be handy to collate a list of disparate free technical SEO tools that help us solve problems and answer questions. I recently posted here about handy Chrome Extensions for SEO, so in this post I thought I’d focus more on web (plus a little software.) (more…)

Friday Talk: Inspirational TED Talks for Search Marketers

This post is originally from a year ago, but with the event week in mind we thought it would be a good idea to ‘re-publish’ the post.

There’s been a couple of good posts recently about learning within the field of search engine optimisation, that include resources that can assist those looking to begin or develop their knowledge. It got me thinking about some of my favourite resources for learning and inspiration and I find that time and again, I’m often looking outside of search engine optimisation for a wider perspective. I like to do this because I find that to come up with a search marketing strategy, it helps to keep on top of many different aspects of marketing, technology and creative thinking. Then of course the mechanics of your strategy are informed by your methods of learning and testing within SEO.

In particular I love the TED Talks videos,which are an amazing collection of talks from visionary experts within a number of fields; from Scientists to Astronauts to Movie Directors. Ted is a non-profit organisation which is devoted to what they define as “ideas worth sharing”, the ideas coming from leaders across the fields of Technology, Entertainment and Design (hence TED). I wanted to share some of my favourite talks that I have found personally educational, insightful and most useful in my role as a search marketer. (more…)

Good Rel.ations – A Beginners Guide to Rel Attributes

In recent times we’ve covered a lot of stories about HTML tags that include, canonical, author, publisher and many more for reasons that they are (relatively) new; topical, useful and beneficial for webmasters seeking to get more (and more relevant) traffic to more and more appropriately indexed pages.

We bandy about terms like “attributes”, “tags” assuming we’re talking to an initiated audience which is often the case. However not all our readers are search professionals, web developers or HTML proficient. Many are webmasters and small business owners who wear many hats. We thought it might be useful to collectively examine the more useful of these tags in their employ as rel attributes; particularly the ones that might directly boost our efficacy or solve a problem from an organic search perspective. (more…)

Anywhere I Chrome: Handy Browser Extensions for SEO

We all love a good tool now don’t we? Anything to make life easier and our work rate more efficient. When it comes to tools for SEO and related online disciplines it can be extra useful to have these tools to hand as browser extensions.

So if you’re still fannying around in Firefox or Opera (dems jokes – cc Hannah Smith) then here’s a list of useful Chrome extensions that we like to use at theMediaFlow. (more…)

The New Google+ iPad App

The new Google+ app for the iPad went live earlier this week. Until now, users had to be content with the limited functionality of the iPhone version, (which has also been updated in time with the iPad release).

First-off the app is designed for the tablet device, therefore the look and feel is by that token more “tabular”. The update stream appears in a grid format, with each update given a visual block of real estate on the screen. (more…)

SMX Israel 2012 – Google Panda, Freshness and More

I was lucky enough to get to speak at SMX Israel, which took place on Sunday. I’ve long been keen to get out here as for a couple of years now I’ve been following and speaking (via twitter and Facebook) to a number of SEO and online marketing professionalst here in Israel, so was thrilled to finally get the chance to come and meet some friends face to face; and get to know some new people. I’d always got a sense of a highly engaged, extremely adept SEO community in Israel however I was bowled over by everything. Hospitality, conference venue, levels of professionalism and enthusiasm from every single attendee; and I have to say that at every session I attended the level of content from my fellow speakers was of the highest quality and variety.
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Shall We Do Something Together?

Last week I had a call from the MD of Manual Link Building (MLB), Gareth Hoyle. As one of the lead sponsors of tomorrow nights’ UK Search Awards, MLB receive in return signage and exposure, as is normal in a sponsorship agreement. Hoyle told me that they had decided to donate a page of exposure in the awards programme to a charity and when searching for a suitable cause had discovered that the WWF are currently running an awareness campaign. (more…)

ThinkVisibility, Linkworthy Stories and a Link Opportunity to Share

I was lucky enough to be selected to speak at the recent Think Visibility conference, and did so on behalf of SEO PR Training, a second company that I run in partnership with Claire Thompson. By way of background, at SEO PR Training we put our mutual PR experience to use offering training for SEO professionals seeking to learn more about the media knowledge and skills utilised by PR professionals, that can be turned to our (SEO) advantage to secure high-quality links in online editorial.

If you weren’t at ThinkVisibility and are interested in “How to Find the Angle“, I wrote up my presentation on the SEO PR Training website. In summary we looked at what constitutes “newsworthy” including (amongst other things) stories that have human interest. After my session a webmaster/publisher whom some of you may be familiar with, namely Jason Dale of Loquax competition directory – came to speak to me, as he was in agreement with a particular point I made, and wanted to make me aware of a good link opportunity on that site, which I can share with the community. First, a little context… (more…)

Review: Ontolo – The Linkbuilding Book

As our connections to each other are the stuff of human relationships, so are links between sites the very stuff of the web.

I was therefore overjoyed to read Ontolo, and to find that here is a documented guide; from concept to objective to methodology to realisation; for pretty much every quality method of building and attracting the links that matter. (I felt I’d found a kindred spirit and something of a validation of our more PR focused approach at theMediaFlow too.)

Authored by Garrett French and Ben Wills Ontolo – The Linkbuilding Book, is possibly the most thorough documentation of linkbuilding to success. It is important to point out that the foundation of the Ontolo mindset reads to me as one of “links as business-driving” endeavours, rather than purely “links for rank sake”. On the other hand, if you’re more into this kind of crap, then this book isn’t for you. (more…)

SEO Keyword Research – Should Competition Ever be A Consideration?

In the words of La Whitney Houston “I’m asking you ‘cos you know about these things.”

In the general course of business, I will ask clients, trainees and others how they currently approach keyword research and am told time and again that level of competition is a key consideration; and that choosing less competitive keywords means you can rank highly, easily.

I take issue with this.

I can not see why competition (and to be clear I’m talking about the level of competition not specific competitor research) should ever be a consideration in term selection. Surely competition is an environmental factor outside of our control? It is nice to have insight to the level of competition only insofar as it can inform our rate of progress against objectives; however I’m yet to come up against a keyword research project where this should inform consideration to term selection. (more…)

Brand SEO, Information Retrieval and Ecommerce

I am constantly surprised by how often different term sets and query types are either ignored, or their role in a user-journey, misunderstood. All too often, run-of-the-mill keyword-research advice leads with an emphasis on relevance, volume and competition; ignoring the vital supporting role of e.g. “brand” terms – or the interplay between product/transactional terms and brand/navigational terms.

Brand SEO is often overlooked, as let’s face it – it’s pretty easy to dominate a good few pages of any search engine with your company results (whether on your owned and operated properties, or whether {your content} on social network and sharing sites), which means it’s not so sexy. However when it comes to Ecommerce, it is brand visitors that drive the revenue, often at a far greater contribution to overall revenue than what we may understand to be “transactional” terms. In order to get at the “why” we need to get out of our “doing” mindset and think about brand SEO from a user perspective and to do that, we need to revisit Information Retrieval and query-type classification. (more…)

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