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Find Out how You Rank in Google’s Search Results

admin — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 14:21:53 +0000

A lot of the traffic to YLF comes from search engines like Google, Yahoo and Live.com. This is easily the highest volume source of new readers right now. So it is important how YLF “ranks” for keywords that relate to YLF subject matter. For example, when someone goes to Google and searches for “smart casual style”, www.youlookfab.com is the often the first result at the top of the page. This is excellent. For other keywords, like “body type”, the ranking is less impressive.

One way to find out how your site ranks is to do a search on Google and see where you end up. This is time consuming, however, and there are online tools that make things a lot easier. The SEOBook rank checker is one such tool. Just type in the keyword and your site URL (in my case, the URL is “www.youlookfab.com”) and click “Check Rank”. The result comes back pretty quickly.

Here are some examples this morning (rankings in parentheses):

smart casual style (1)
structured clothing (1)
what to wear to a black tie event (7)
pretty tops (9)
smart casual (10)
how to get rid of deodorant stains on darks (10)
dress over leggings (10)
clothes to make you look slim (28)
body type (44)

There are some mysteries about Google keyword ranks. For example, the keyword “what to wear” doesn’t rank at all for YLF. It only appears in the paid results on the right hand side of the page (because we pay to put it there – more on that in a future post).

There are many other tools like the one I used above. Some of them will also check other search engines, like RankChecker, which gives results for Google, Yahoo and MSN (Live). Note that most of these sites are covered in advertising for products and services that promise to improve your rankings in the search engines. Be very wary of these promises – there are a lot of good search engine optimization (SEO) professionals out there, but there are also a lot of snake oil salesmen.

Google Takes us Back into the Fold

admin — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 03:44:26 +0000

During July our traffic from Google, which had been growing steadily since we launched YLF in 2005, suddenly dropped more than 50%. To combat this I installed the All in One SEO Pack plugin, removed meta descriptions altogether, and resubmitted the sitemap.

Well, something worked. Our traffic returned to pre-plunge levels a few days ago. Courtesy of Google Webmaster Tools, here is a chart of our traffic from Google over the period.

The Google Plunge

admin — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 03:16:07 +0000

Our traffic from Google organic search is still way down at youlookfab.com. About 3 weeks ago it dropped more than 50%, and has stabilized at that level. Pretty alarming, given that this represented more than half of our organic search traffic.

Since the plunge I have…

Installed the All in One SEO Pack plugin. Google’s content analysis tool (part of Google Webmaster Tools, or GWT) told me that I have duplicate title tags. This plugin ensures that each page has its own unique title tag.
Removed the meta description from the header. GWT content analysis also told me that I have duplicate meta descriptions. Some research on the web revealed the consensus that no meta description is better than duplicating the same meta description across all the pages.
Resubmitted the sitemap. I also installed the latest version of the Google XML sitemaps plugin.

One thing I noticed in GWT was that our incoming external links had dropped very low. the reason? Our home page was not the list. I checked that our site was indexed and it was. Recently the external link stats returned to normal and our home page is back in the list.

We are also getting quite a few web crawl errors that don’t make sense. Perhaps our server was down while the Google crawler was doing its thing, but I don’t see that in the server logs.