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SEO - Review :: Recover from the sand box

Posted by: buzz42 06/07.

By Lord Matt, Super Geek.

The sand box is where Google puts sites until they get themselves sorted out. It's bad for traffic.

Google is a difficult lover. She smiles at you and your site fills with visitors but then the one thing that caused her favour then beings her disfavour and your site grows cold and dead.

What can you do about it?

One answer is to build a community so that even if every search engine blinks out tomorrow you still have visitors. But how do you get the first visitors so you can build on something?

You must rely on the flighty love of the search engines.

One such sufferer of the flightiness of the big G! is sammysouthallphotography.co.uk who finds himself slipping out of the search engine results as fast as he gets in.

After he left three comments mentioning his problem at buzz42.com I felt that this deserved the personal attention of Lord Matt, Super Geek.

So have spent several moments getting to know his site.

First I am going to break down the problems and then I am going to sketch out a cure.

The listings are not all bad his business shows up top for his post code but not the site.

The first issue is traction. The site has no traction with the search engines.

what grants traction is text.

What takes traction is bad SEO. For example:

<p align="left"><!--//TopListed Link Code Begins//-->
<a href="http://weddingphotographersuk.toplisted.net/index_12354.html" target="win_weddingphotographersuk.toplisted.net"></a>
<!--//TopListed Link Code Ends//--></p>

This snippet is just for the search engines and is leaking PR to a leech site. Google hates this sort of thing. (Plus the site timed out on me).

I never understand what this sort of thing gains for a site but I would guess that some sort of bad neighbourhood with blackhat techniques is the source of this devaluation of the site. This will keep you in sandbox mode forever.

A sure sign of sandbox mode is lack of back link registered:

Google :   0.
Yahoo  : 136.
MSN    :   0.

There is also some on site blackhat (or bad) SEO. Like some keyword stuffing.



This will also get your site sandboxed.

It's a shame to get sandboxed for something like that because it easy to do it right (read on for that).

One last fault is that there is some bad link text.



The screen shot is from the site map. Notice the anchor text has all those dots in. These dots are going to do three things to you.

1. They upset the grammar police who will be upset because it is incorrect (it's a pet peeve of mine too)
2. They look messy and distract from the aim of the text. There are better ways of denoting hanging meaning like this: "Wow(!)"... if you must have them keep it two three dots to cure point one and two
3. You are telling Google that this page is related to "..." or "........" which is just silly in SEO.

This adds up to a site that will have a hard time returning results for people because there is very little actual content beyond the glam of the look.

Fortunately the doctor is in.

There needs to be more content. content is the King of SEO. Content is the gold of search engines. It is spidered and indexed and this is what is searched for.

For your site to show up in results there needs to be content for the search engines to return results on. This means using words to talk about stuff. Your sites stuff.

If, like sammysouthallphotography.co.uk you are a photography outfit then you must talk about photography. Photographs, prints, sittings and so forth.

If you are Lord Matt, Super Geek (me) then you talk about geeky things. That's what I do. PHP, News, Promotion, SEO, MyBlogLog and Web 2.0... I talk a good line on geek.

Words! This is what is needed. Words communicate well and search engines are fixated on them.

A good way to achieve good wordage is to document the work you do and do it "on site". If you find putting words on paper is hard you can hire people to write for you. You will need to pay a lot to get a writer or wordsmith that will make it sound half as good as you could.

A professional writer of good quality might charge up to £1 or £2 per word. It's not unheard of for free lance writers to ask for and get thousands for a few hundred words. While £50 to £150 is more common the best words may come at the top price. You will pay this price in money or in time but you will pay it.

So you must choose between taking on a writer or sitting down one evening and bashing out a few short essays.

Design wise sammysouthallphotography.co.uk looks great but I did not know where I wanted to go. There were too many options and much of that was lazy linking.

Most of this navigation related to galleries. Lots of them. The links for these should have been on a page by themselves. They are interesting end pages but they have so little text on them that they act as dead wood.

There were too many other sites carrying content on topics that should have been written up for the site. This missed opportunity is dead wood SEO wise. Also all the graphical links for this phase of examination shall be considered SEO deadwood As they are great for people but duff for engines.

Shed this dead wood from the front page and the site shows its true colours - it's empty. There is nothing on the site.

That is the problem. No content.

This can be easily improved by written at least 25 to 50 words for every page. Especially the galleries so that "in text alone" the page says what's on the page.

The gallery flash pages should say what's in the gallery. Where you took the images and what you had to overcome would also help along with any interesting stories about the day.

Go further! Tell the stories behind the photographs. Talk about your art - Show the human being.

This is a full time business so there must be something to share each and every day? If this is too pressing there must be something of significance every week. Share it.

A free blog platform like NulceusCMS can be skinned to look like the rest of the site. This gives us something to put into a site feed which is like a low maintenance mailing list. In fact run it through feed burner and you can have people get your content via email.

this also gives an easy platform to add your content.

The blog platform also gives you access to specialist search sites that will send you traffic.

The bad SEO need to go in favour of internal links.

Where keyword lists exist try phrases that use the words. Make the phrases mean something so that people will want to read them. This will give your site more traction.

Again a blog platform would make this very easy.

Having done all this you will have something to tweak for SEO. You will have something fresh to offer Google to keep her coming back to your site and you will have some traction for the engines to rate you buy.

Now were you to hire me to do this work you would be looking at a few thousand pounds plus time and expenses which would cover support and tuition. However, given enough time you can do it all for yourself just by following the advice here.

I have been known to do content but if some one wanted me to do that they would want to have a reasonable resource of funds as I charge hourly rates plus expenses and would travel to where you were to get to know the business. I quite fancy a holiday to the USA, France or maybe Holland so anyone living in those countries is especially encouraged to hire me as I am less than two hours from two main London Airports and have a local airport less than 12 minuets from my house.

Once more do you need to bring me from my home in Kent to you (or you to me) when you could write your own content and you only charge yourself the cost of lunch.

It's a pipe dream to expect anyone to pay me to travel as far as France or Holland but not unheard of so if not for hope what do we have? On that track I'd travel to Birmingham for the right price. (I happen to know that our main site for analysis has it's HQ near there). I'm not entirely sure why people pay others to do what they can do for themselves.

That's not totally true. sometimes your time is worth more to you to have someone else do "the hard stuff".

I may have done myself out of lots of work but on the whole I would rather give than watch people suffer. Most all problems with a website can be cured by removing dirty tricks and replacing with solid content.

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