Starting around the end of April Google rolled out not one, but two updates aimed at cleaning up their index.  The second update, code named “Penguin” seems to have had the largest impact to many sites.

While Google insists this update targeted about 3% of all search queries, I’ve heard from many site owners who were impacted and read hundreds of other stories of sites that were ranking at or near the top of the page which suddenly lost a bunch of important rankings.

Continue reading “Google’s Penguin Update – How to Recover if You Have Lost Rankings” »

Has this happened to you? You are searching on Google for your site only to find that you cannot find it? In this article we look at some things you can do to find out if you have been penalized or this is just a bug in Google

Yes it is true, Google does make mistakes. In fact, we recently went through this so know what you are going through! This site disappeared from Google for about 24 hours. It was there on Sunday, but gone Monday. Gladly, it was back on Tuesday. But it was a stressful 24 hours to say the least.

After all, we are a search engine optimization company. How would it look to our current and future clients if they searched for us and couldn’t find us? So let’s look at what happened and how you can use our experience to help you determine if you’ve been banned by Google or the search engine just hiccuped on your site.

Continue reading “Help! My Site has Disappeared from Google!” »

If you have gotten this far it means you are serious about trying to get your website to the top of the Google rankings. You have done some key phrase research, as well as identified your ONLINE competition. You have likely also already begun optimizing your website. But if you are serious, you can’t just stop there.

That is because content on your pages is not the only factor Google and other search engines consider when ranking a site. So it’s time for a very brief lesson on the history of Google.

Continue reading “How to be number 1 in Google – Part 3” »

In our last article we showed you how to do some basic search term research. These are the words you want to try to get your site to #1 on Google for. Now we talk about step 2:

Step 2 – Optimizing!

Optimizing your site really means adjusting the visible and invisible text found on your websites pages to improve their chances of ranking for the terms you chose during your search term research. It isn’t really rocket science but there is a certain mix of art and understanding one needs to properly optimize a web page. (You can always contact us and have us do it for you )

Continue reading “How to be number 1 in Google – Part 2” »

So you have a website and you have decided that you want to be #1 in Google. How do you do that? Let me start by saying it IS POSSIBLE if your expectations are realistic.  But I also must be brutally honest with you, it is going to take a lot of work.

For example, if you are an Indie Band trying to make it big, don’t expect to rank number 1 for “MP3″ because it isn’t going to happen. And unless you are Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber, don’t plan on ranking anywhere near #1 for these 2 search terms because you aren’t them.

But if you are realistic and want to rank highly for something in your geographic area, for example, then it is quite possible and can be done in as little as 3 months.

In this article I will explain what you need to do to get yourself competitively ranked in your local niche and how to maintain your rankings once you get there.

Continue reading “How to be number 1 in Google” »