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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.

Help Google to Understand your Site using Keywords

admin — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 16:56:13 +0000

Most websites get a lot of their traffic from search engines. I lifted the chart below from YLF’s Google webmaster statistics and it shows that 41% of our traffic comes from search engines, 32% comes from direct traffic (people typing in the URL or clicking on a link in an email message) and 27% comes from referring sites (people clicking on a link to YLF from another website).

The giant among search engines is Google. Nobody outside of Google knows exactly how their algorithm works, but if you search around the web you will find some guidelines on what to do and what not to do. The whole topic of making your site search engine-friendly is called SEO, or Search Engine Optimization.

There are two broad categories of SEO techniques:

Black Hat SEO: these are techniques that try to trick the search engines into sending people to your site. Don’t use these techniques. Getting caught might result in Google excluding you from their index, which will be disastrous for your traffic.
Legitimate SEO: these techniques just try to make it easier for the search engines to understand your site and its importance. Adding more relevant content to your website, making it easy for Google to figure out what your site is about and marketing your website to create awareness and incoming links are all legitimate ways to increase your ranking.

Keywords are one way to tell Google what your site is all about. You provide these keywords by putting some HTML before the tag on your webpage. In most WordPress themes you would do this in the “header.php” file. For example, in the YLF theme I have the following code before the tag:

Now, there is a temptation to provide a large number of keywords so that Google associates your website with many different topics, but the wisdom from around the web is that too many keywords will reduce your ranking. Based on this I cut down the YLF keywords a short while ago. It used to be:

Our organic search traffic from Google is still down, so I think I’m going to switch back to the longer list of keywords for a while to see if that helps. You should experiment with different sets of keywords to see what works for you. Note that it can take Google quite a long time to review your site, so any one experiment with keywords should probably be run for at least a month.

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.