Search engine optimisation is important for a blog. Because that is, if your blog is small, the primary way to get visitors to your blog. It is evident features in blog systems such as tags and categories help towards search engine optimisation, and others as detailed below. But as many will stress, the most important thing of course is content. Content is king. It is important to have original and unique content and that your blog is updated regularly with original and unique content. If you don’t do this, Google is simply going to give another blog better search rankings that what your blog is potentially capable of being given.

Content is king

Content is king. So what sort of content are you going to write? The thing that works for my small blogs personally is writing about something unique and that hasn’t specifically be written by blogs that are more highly-ranked than my blog is. It all helps towards search engine optimisation and of course, getting valuable visitors, which is (mostly) the reason we have blogs in the first place – if, unless of course, your blog is for your own reference only.

So, talk about something original that may not be talked about by other blogs. If your blog is on sports, why not talk about something in sports that no one else is specifically talking about right now? Perhaps your opinions on something that isn’t being talked about by another blog that is more highly-ranked. Even though there is great competition between websites in terms of search engine optimisation because of how many websites are online and the amount of people using the Internet, if you think of the logical things you can do to help make your blog more noticeable by Google from an SEO perspective, then over time your blog will be ranked more importantly by Google bots.

Backlinks and deep links

Backlinks and deep links are important in order for Google to recognise your site as important. The obvious may well be submitting your site to relevant directories, but you can also do this by adding a link to your blog via your signature, especially on sites which you are active on. If you often post in threads that are related to your blog’s articles or main purpose, that is definitely a practical way of getting backlinks. And where you can, try and get deep links, too. Deep links are links of inner pages within your blog, and they are just as important as backlinks of the main page of your blog. Getting deep links is probably a little more difficult. I am sure if you post meaningful tutorials, articles or how-tos on your blog, perhaps others will link to that article if they find it interesting enough to provide a link back to it, perhaps on their own website or article on their own blog, or on a forum. For example, if blog post is on how to fix a particular issue, someone may find your blog post via a search engine and provide a link to your blog post on a forum topic to assist a particular forum member.

There are other ways of getting deep links, too; such as link directories that accept deep links or link submissions to articles within a blog or website. This can definitely help from a search engine optimisation perspective, so definitely consider this option too.

Of course, remember that Google’s algorithms are very smart and can easily and readily detect cheating and will penalise websites that cheat in the form of search rankings or out-right removal of a website from searches altogether.

There are many easy ways of finding relevant directories to submit your blog to, including this forum of the DigitalPoint forums that allows users to advertise their own directories.

Search engine friendly URLs

Most blog systems including WordPress allow you to have search engine friendly URLs. Instead of an article ID that is part of a blog URL to refer to the article itself, it is best to have search engine friendly URLs that perhaps display the title of the article as part of the URL, for example example.com/blog/2012/20/01/blog-post-title-here.

Use tags with your blog posts

Using blog post tags do help. Add relevant tags (not too many, though) that describe what the blog post or article is about. So if I was making an article on CentOS, I’d obviously use the CentOS tag but other tags more direct to what the article is about, such as Install CentOS, etc

I’m sure this is fairly obvious but also use categories for your blog posts. It does help from a search engine perspective.

Allow users to share your blog posts via various mediums

There are plugins for WordPress that allow you to add icons beneath each blog post allowing your readers the convenience of sharing useful blog posts with others; on Twitter, Facebook, etc. You may think, “Facebook? What?” but Google are now indexing Facebook comments!

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Niche and Keyword Research Tools

Google is arguably the best tools one can use to do the initial keyword research. It will also help you find a much deeper niche for you, probably very lucrative and which is possibly already making lots of profits for the competitors, and it will also show you the most relevant keywords associated with the niche.

So before using the keyword tools such as Google Adwords Keyword Tool or Market Samurai, for example, we shall use Google and yet another very good niche finder tool to find a good niche for you.

The good niche finder tool I am writing about here is the one I use the most – Ezinearticles.com. It is definitely one of the most popular article submission directories on the internet. It is arguably the best in its category one can find and use for his or her marketing research. It has plenty of resources which you can use to build up your niche website too. Thus, I feel it is the best starting point for our new niche website.

For our example niche website, let us see how we can find a good niche market using Ezinearticles.com.

Type Ezinearticles.com in your browser’s address bar and you will see this screen as the home page of that wonderful website. The various popular global markets are right there on its home page – the Articles Categories on its home page!

These categories are the fundamental markets from where we can find sub-markets, and from the sub markets, we shall find our niche markets and various very high quality and focused articles which will help us build our own niche market website quickly. So here it is: the article categories, which we shall use to find our new niche market first:

When you place your cursor on any of those categories, the inner sub markets will be displayed:

So, when you place your mouse cursor over the “Finance” category, for example, a pop-up window will display the various niche topics associated with Finance. In the above example, these various niches are: Auto Loans, Bankruptcy, Personal Bankruptcy, Credit Counseling, Income Taxes, Taxes Tools, and so on.

Let us see another such category, “Home and Family”, which will display various good sub topics like: Adolescent Care, Adoption Foster Care, Baby Boomer, Board games, Crafts and Hobbies, Crafts Supplies, Fatherhood, Elder Care, Grand parenting, Gardening, Pregnancy, Motherhood, Step parenting, and so on. Each of those sub topics are very hot niche topics and are well-known as money makers for a lot of internet marketers.

Then there is yet another great market which will stay profitable for many years to come – “Health and Fitness”, which has plenty of sub niches, and sub-sub niches and a lot more! You can go as deep into a niche market and still find some great topics which you can use as your new niche market.

For example, the niche market inside “Health and Fitness” category can be “Skin Care”, and if you want to go still deeper into the “Skin Care” niche market, you can find a very lucrative hot-selling product category – the wrinkle creams.

So this is how you can come down to a great niche market with plenty of opportunities to make money – because this particular niche market cannot be saturated until the human ageing process exists!

So let us see how good this “wrinkle creams” niche market really is by first using the greatest research/search tool world has ever seen – Google Search, its main URL being: www.Google.com. Remember, Google offers you plenty of options so that you can target a particular geographic region for marketing your product and services. For example, if you wish to target the huge Indian market, you can use www.google.co.in, or if you wish to target the UK market, you may use www.google.co.uk to do your localized research.

So let us try to find a good niche market which is a very hot market right now, and which is going to stay around as hot global market for many years to come – wrinkle creams.

Next, open Google search site in your web browser and type the word “wrinkle cream” once without the surrounding quote marks and once with the surrounding quote marks intact.

You will find a similar result like the following image:

The Google result page shows some very interesting facts about the “wrinkle cream” niche – On the right hand side, the Ads section shows plenty of advertisements. It denotes that this particular niche market can be potentially a money-making niche market, which indeed it is!

The section below the search bar also shows the various brands and stores for this particular keyword – it denotes that this is indeed a big-to-huge money-spinning market as there are various brands and stores prominently shown by Google.

The new Google search page also enables you to see the other good keywords and key-phrases suggested by Google itself. It is a huge benefit for us as we readily get some good keywords for our research.

So write down such keywords suggested by Google. By making some adjustments and fine tunings to our initial keyword “wrinkle cream”, Google will help us with more appropriate keyword and key-phrase suggestions.

By simply typing a space in front of the keyword “wrinkle cream” in the Google search bar, you will be shown other great keywords in the Google’s suggestion box that appears below the search bar.

Write down about 25 to 50 such suggestions which we shall use in our special keyword research tools like Google Adwords keywords research tool and Market Samurai.

You may use any other keyword research tool as you may like as there are plenty of good keyword research tools in the market, of which some are free while others are paid tools. For our study, we shall see how the above two keyword research tools work.

Once you have collected some good keywords suggested by Google related to our target niche market “wrinkle cream”, we shall begin our research using the specific research tools – one each among the free and the paid research tools.

You may alternatively also collect the set of keywords from other sources and only one such great method of collecting keywords for further research is mentioned above.

Next: Using the Google Adwords Keyword Tool

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From what we’ve learned from running blogs for many years, when you have a new blog, it’s important to talk about a certain niche of topics that can immediately get recognition in search results. If you’re posting an article or blog post on a hot subject, you’ll probably find you’ll be so far back in the listing you won’t get any return for the blog post. This is because other blogs that are deemed more relevant and more important by Google have been posting about that subject or product and so they are ranked first before your blog which has a lower search engine ranking.

You don’t need to be an SEO expert to understand the basic fundamentals of getting good search listings in Google – you just have to keep an eye on your search listings for your articles and start to understand which articles are working better for you. This doesn’t necessarily mean one particular subject is listed higher than the other, unless it is not as well talked about in regards to higher-ranked blogs. In general, when your blog is new, it’s best to talk about niche subjects at first if you want good search listings almost immediately or simply things that aren’t discussed by higher-ranking blogs. For example, instead of talking about the latest version of some hot product, you may want to, at first, keep your blog posts to fixes you’ve found for particular bugs in PHP for example or perhaps with a product you own, etc. And remember, make sure you bring fresh new content often, because eventually other blogs that talk about something you’re talking about will eventually replace your position in a search result and so it is important to continue blogging regularly with fresh new content. Eventually, Google will rank your blog higher and so it gives you greater flexibility on what you can talk about and even how highly-ranked you are for blog posts on things that aren’t well discussed by higher-ranking blogs or blog posts which have good a good search listing position.

However, that said, it is important to get back-links from other blogs and websites as well. The easiest way to do this is through submitting your site to directories. If your blog is being linked to from a highly-ranked directory or  blog, Google may start positioning your blog as more important since you’re getting back-links from well-recognised websites. Finding directories are relatively quite easy searching for them online. You’ll also find directories to submit to via the DigitalPoint.com Internet Marketing Forum. Many people advertise their directories over at that forum so it may be a convenient way of finding directories to submit to. Linking to your blog via signatures via forums you go on (where allowed) definitely helps too. This will also help you get actual traffic too, from forum members that click your signature link.

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There are number of instances when people can be seen bothering about their website not getting indexed in search engines. No matter how much they try, despite every effort taken, the websites and its pages simply fail to get indexed. It may be due to the lack of knowledge or due to insufficient tools, webmasters are not able to identify the actual problem at the first go, hence building to frustration and a few incorrect moves.

First of all, once you have created your web site and hosted at a web hosting UK server, it is important that you get it verified in the Google Webmaster Tools wherein you are also required to build an XML sitemap and submit it to Google. Upon verification, you would be informed with the exact reason about is stopping your website to be indexed in Google. There may be numerous reasons to it, but one of the very common one’s is because Google bots and spiders are blocked in robots.txt which is actually responsible for grabbing the sitemap of a particular website.

Further, as a matter of fact, no webmaster would intentionally block the search engines from crawling the website in robots.txt.

So, in the first place you might not even know that your website is blocking search engines through robots.txt. You must take a closer look at this file, if you find anything similar to what is shown below, it confirms that there is a problem with the permissions of robots.txt.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Or

<meta name=’robots’ content=’noindex,nofollow’ />

This concludes your hunt for the problem.

How to make a website Visible to search engines ?

Well the solution too simple than what you can least expect.

You are required to login to your WordPress Website as an admin. Then go to the Privacy Settings option. There you need to select the option that says “I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers”. To avoid such instances, it important that you do not uncheck the option that says “Allow my blog to appear in search engines like Google and Technorati.”

Once you have made the necessary changes to the settings in WordPress, you must resubmit it in Google Webmaster Tools for re-verification. Don’t be surprised to see that your website and its various are now indexed. If not, you would need to check in webmaster tools for the reason and dig deeper to resolve the issue.

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How to Recover from Google Penalty ?

Many webmasters sometimes face a situation where there website and the high-performing keywords aren’t shown in the SERP of Google. In such cases, it is possible that either Google has made changes to its algorithm or has penalized website/s by de-listing them from its result pages.

There are ways of recovery to this problem, but ofcourse one has to make sure if the drop in rankings is due to changes in the algorithm or is it that Google’s filters have caught your website(s) for some un-ethical activities.

Analyzing the reasons for a drastic Dip in the Rankings

There isn’t any precise technique for checking Google penalties. One cannot claim for any degree of certainty. Webmasters may find an unexpected dip in the rankings for some of the well ranked keywords, this might be because of changes in Google’s ranking algo. According to case studies, whenever there has been an update in the algorithm, users have experienced fluctuations in the keyword rankings in SERP’s. Therefore, one cannot claim or strongly say that a particular website has been penalized by the big ‘G’.

Though, there are few pointers which can suggest users if their website is penalized.

Google makes regular improvements and enhancements in its algo and filtering process for detecting violations and unethical activities done by websites which try for better ranking in the Google SERP’s. Therefore, there are possibilities that any of the filters probably has detected a site and is showing a dip in the SERP for any keyword.

Effects of Link De-valuation

If you are one of the webmasters who is considering and hunting for the causes of decrease in ranking, it is important to know that, Google has always been applying link de-valuation to backlinks from non-trusted and non-reputed sources. The basic reason being, spammers have been known to use unethical techniques to rank their websites well in the result pages of search engines. Therefore, inorder to tackle such instances and give justice to the webmasters who adopt ethical ways for optimizing their websites, Google has been making the necessary changes/updates on a regular basis.

If you too have been affected by link devaluation, there are chances that your website is involved in reciprocal linking, paid link advertisements or while building backlinks for your website, you might have submitted the site URL to link farms, low in quality directories, all these factors would adversely affect the rankings. All the mentioned techniques are considered strictly by Google, hence any website caught using any of the unethical ways would feel the heat.

Many webmaster websites that used to be ranked very well in the SERP, now have been de-valued hence is nowhere seen in the SERP’s. After analyzing such websites, it has been observed that most of the backlinks were from directories and do-follow blogs. And since Google no-longer gives much value to low quality directories, such websites have experienced a reductions in their overall rankings. Apart from that, its also been observed that such websites have a large volume of backlinks from irrelevant niche websites.

So, if you realize or doubt about Google penalizing your site, you must first of all not come to any decision or assumptions. It is better to checkout few reputed SEO forums. If at all there has been any change in the algorithm, you’d immediately come to know from the discussion happening there, as yours isn’t the only website on the web facing such a change in the rankings.

Having said that, if you face an unexpected fall in the rankings for your website and there hasn’t been any algorithm updates, then this can be considered as a pointer that your site has been penalized by Google. Violations to the Google Webmaster Guidelines can lead to permanent de-valuation of your website. Rather not just de-valuation but permanent de-indexing too has been observed for some websites.

To recover from such a scenario is a very painful task. If you are able to convince people at Google and dont get involved in any illegal activities, only then they would probably think of withdrawing the ban.

Tests for confirming a Penalty

Test A : If you suspect that Google has penalized your website, you must compare the total number of previously indexed URL’s with the latest figures. To get along-with that, you can use the command “site:yourdomainname.com” in the search bar of Google. Incase there aren’t any URL’s seen, try using the command “link:yourdomain.com” Still if no links are shown, there is a dense possibility that Google has penalized your site.

Test B : One more pointer for Google penalty is a decrease in the rank for your unique company name. Though this cannot be considered to be a perfect indication of de-valuation, as it might yet to be crawled if you have a new website. The new websites with very few backlinks would usually not be seen in Google, hence you cannot assume that your website has been penalized by Google.

Though, Google Page Rank isn’t a crucial parameter anymore, still it is possible that incase of penalization, you would experience a loss of pagerank.

To check if Google has de-indexed your website entirely, you can copy some content from the website and paste the same in the search bar of Google. If the page from where you’ve copied the content doesn’t come at the first place you must use the command “cache:www.websitename.com/page.html” in the Google search bar. Yet, if your domain name or the webpage isn’t listed in the search results, your website has surely been penalized by being de-indexed from Google. This is the most extreme form of ban, which usually happens when you have used Black Hat SEO techniques on your website.

Google Penalty Checklist

If your site has been penalized by Google, you must go through the below checklist. After identifying the probable reason, you must make the required changes and proceed with requesting Google to reconsider your website for inclusion.

• Back-linking to banned websites

You must check every outbound links from your site. Further check if you are linking to websites that have been banned by Google.

• Sharing Links with bad neighbors

Analyze if you are sharing links with any bad neighbors, link farms or doorway pages. With bad neighbors we mean the spam sites and doorway pages. Such websites with a sole intention in mind ‘Sharing links’ and have no useful and quality content. Such domains have the minimum trust in the eyes of Google, hence should be strictly avoided.

• Penalty for an Automated query

At times, Google penalizes websites that use automated query tools that use of Google’s API, particularly when the queries are run from the same IP address hosting your website. This is a clear violation of Google’s terms of service. Though Google does allow few automated queries into its database using its analytic tools, but users must be registered and having a Google API account. Any other types of automated queries would surely lead to problems.

• Penalty for Over-optimization and Google filters

Aggressive link building for selected keywords and keyphrases in the anchor text can attract the curt attention of Google. It is suggested to use different anchor text/keywords when working for your link building campaign. A backlink anchor text analyzer tool can be considered to check the number of backlinks for a particular keyword/phrase. It is a good practice to steadily build backlinks and use long tailed keywords and its variations.

• Cross linking & link schemes

Incase you have multiple websites and you believe all of them have suffered with a penalty, you must instantly start analyzing the interlinking between all those domains. If you unintentionally have done an extensive interlinking of websites, specifically from the same C Class IP address even then it seems to Google that you are involved in some link schemes, hence are violating the TOS. Furthermore, if you receive backlinks from sitewide pages of a website, even then Google would treat that as a Grey Hat technique if not completely Black Hat, which again is a little risk. Also, if you have purchased backlinks from external domains and have added it to the footer, that too would be detected by Google and wouldn’t give priority to such backlinks as compared to the backlinks received from the content.According to the latest updates and the suggestions from SEO Gurus, webmasters should strictly try and refrain from site-wide links. Practically any such site-wide links offer least advantages, what Google does consider is the number of backlinks from unique domains to your website.

Content duplication isn’t considered very strictly, Google would simply de-index the duplicate content or page from its search result pages. Now, this too can affect in a different way, such as loss in traffic to a website, which is equivalent to being penalized.

Many webmasters adopt a technique where they hide the text in the content by using same text colour as that of the background. This is virtually invisible to human eyes but it can be seen by Google bots and crawlers. So, removing such links and keywords is a better option.

Removing excessive keywords from the web page content can help you regain your rankings in Google SERP’s. Natural and informational content is preferable.

You would not find this stated at much places, but it is worth looking out if Google has blacklisted your website due to unsafe browsing. Users can check that using the following link from Google :
www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=yourdomain.co.uk, replace ‘yourdomain.co.uk’ with your website name.

Any other re-direct other than a permanent 301 redirect isn’t suggested by Google. Users can also use the Mod Rewrite technique instead of 301 redirection. Users should set up a .htaccess file onto your web server.

It has been observed and suggested by SEO experts, purchasing backlinks can harm your optimization efforts. As a matter of fact Google had recently penalized link selling websites.

Intense reciprocal linking might attract the attention of Google, and after confirmation, penalise or cause a SERPS filter to be applied when the same or very similar link anchor text is used often and big volume of reciprocal links are added in a relatively short time. Effects can be worse if large amounts of backlinks come from websites with low quality.

It is a known fact that Google hates affiliate websites with almost negligible content and which is set-up with an intention of adding Adsense programs. Users should get assured that the affiliate sites have good quality and original content if you wish them not to get filtered-out of the search results.

Content feeds such as RSS are widely used over the web, according to experts fetching in larger volumes of duplicate content through such feeds might cause an adverse effect on the rankings and if done extensively, it can even alert Google for penalizing your site.

Google have the permission of accessing the WHOIS database for domains. Using that information,they can penalize a website having the same registrant.

Google has been taking efforts to improve communication with webmasters with respect to the banned domains. According to the latest updates they now inform webmasters with the reason of ban and the penalty given. Inorder to do that, they have developed a new Webmaster Console. Further, once the users have made the suggested changes, they can make a re-inclusion request via. the same console. Users are just required to sign-up for the Google Webmaster Tools and upload an XML Sitemap onto your site. To make it even simple, Google has prepared a Video Tutorial that describes the process of reconsideration. There the users can check the tips about what Google expects for when assessing the re-inclusion of any website.

To completely recover from the effects and rank well in SERP’s of Google, would probably take around 2-3 months once all website problems are rectified. Though no one except Google can gurantee you about the time required for completely recovering from the down fall.

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