SEO Back to Basics
February 22nd, 2010 by OnlinePressIs your site performing badly on Search Engines and you have no idea why?
Almost every day for many years now I would go and search Google Blogs just to see what is going on around, as well as Twitter and Facebook. From what I hear many site owners are complaining about terrible rankings, they say “my site was #3 on Google top 10, now we can’t even find any of keywords that were leading to our site”.
This is very simple folks, every time something goes wrong you must go back to basics, all the way where you started and backtrack. Just like when you lost your car key, what did you do? you tried to remember where you had the key last and backtrack. Same goes with search engines, start with your main page, open your Google Analytics, go back few months and compare. Sometimes when time permits I would also analyze some of this sites, just for myself to see what could be preventing them to gain their ranking back.
In most situations site owners are doing the SEO by themselves and that is great, some of them can’t afford SEO Consultant so they have no choice, but if and when you decide to take this in your own hands, please don’t push the optimization way to hard, don’t place the keywords where they shouldn’t be and for Pete sake do not stuff your pages with H1 titles from top to bottom of your page, that doesn’t help, it will only hurt you.
WordPress (Self Hosted) site owners!
If you are running a site that is powered by WordPress.org, please make sure that your index.php or home.php is properly SEO coded. If the title of the theme you purchased or downloaded for free says “SEO Optimized WordPress Theme” that doesn’t mean it’s true.
Here is what the properly optimized WordPress Theme should look like:
index.php or home.php if you downloaded a customized there, page.php and single.php should start with H1 title, not H2. sidebar.php headings should not be H2, sidebar importance level must be lower than your main page or a post. H3 is acceptable, however the perfect solution is no headings at all.
Also, don’t download anything from those site where WordPress Premium Themes are available for free and the main reason why is because the theme your downloaded will NOT be the same theme you purchased from sites such as woothemes.com, studiopress.com or wpnow.com. Why they are not the same? When you purchase one of the premium themes, you will also get their support as well, so in case something goes wrong, they will assist you. When you download the premium theme free of charge, there is no support and you will have some extra codes in your theme, as well as some missing codes too, which will make your site look good from the outside, but performing so bad from the inside.
