In case of severe contravention of Google’s rules, the search engine may block a particular IP address from its result pages. If you share the same IP address, your website may also be blocked.That’s why SEO companies will advise businesses to get a dedicated IP.

If you notice a sudden drop in your search rankings, it can be due to a penalty. Being aware of the search engine’s quality guidelines can help you confirm whether or not your website has suffered a penalty because of a bad host neighborhood.

To get your website reinstated, you need to convince the search engine that your site is a good quality website that follows all the guidelines. Before trying to get your site reinstated, you should change your web hosting provider. A dedicated IP address is one of many tactics SEO companies use for top search engine optimization.

You can check to see if you are on a dedicated ip by going to www.domaintools.com, type in your URL, click on server stats ad the reverse ip. Don’t sweat it if you see 17,500 on the same IP. Its customary for web hosting companies to lump thousands of websites on the same IP. Just call your web host and tell them you want a “dedicated IP”. The additional cost is minimal and its worth the investment.

Google wants to deliver the best experience to their customers and that means the best search results, plus a site that loads well to back up that search query and deliver the complete experience to their customers.

Google says they are passionate about speed and making the web faster, (note: that video is almost 2 years old). Five months later Googles anti-search spam guy Matt Cutts came out and dropped the biggest hint (forward to 3:07 min) about how this may effect ranking and quality scores.

Now they have come right out and said it in a recent blog post from May of this year ‘it can also impact AdWords Landing Page Quality and therefor your quality score, plus ranking in Google natural search’. Now this could effect your budgets in a few ways and not to be taken lightly.

More recently they have incorporated the webpage load times into their ever popular analytics program, btw, this needs an extra line of code in your webpages to work. However, it only records a sample of the total page views.

This is one graph in your analytics account you want to see decreasing!

So for the last 2 years Google have been telling us they are serious about it, providing tools to test our current situation and now show ongoing feedback from potential customers who visit our site. Do we need anymore of a nudge?

We have started to include this in our reports, and very often see the top 5 sites that rank for a keyword term with a page speed score in the mid to high 80’s /100.

Test out your website using some of the tools below, try it with your competitors to see how they are doing and let us know if your website is up to speed!

We used our website for the test in each one of the sites below, click on the images to see the result.

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/
Shows a list of every HTTP request, if it’s been compressed, and total loading size of the page.

http://www.webpagetest.org
Shows a list of every HTTP request, if it’s been compressed, and total loading size of the page.

http://tools.pingdom.com/
Gives a visual display of each webpage element load times.

http://whichloadsfaster.com/
Has added a fun element where you can compare your site and your main competitor.

http://gtmetrix.com/
Then my favorite which gives great feedback with priority rating and grades the page. It also includes a PDF download of the results that you can send to your programmer.

“Some 62% of shoppers,” the WSJ reports, “say they search for deals online for at least half of their shopping trips, according to a survey by consulting firm Booz & Co. and trade group Grocery Manufacturers.”

And Internet marketing firms are not just concerned with national or regional advertising. Local search is, or should be, an ever-more important aspect of all retailers, according to the newspaper report.

“Google Inc.’s user queries for local searches (like store locations), coupons, recipes and product reviews have doubled or tripled year on year,” Google’s national industry director for consumer-product companies, Kevin Kells told the WSJ. “Those are just proxies for this more informed, more sophisticated shopper,” he says. “The shopper is saying ‘I can’t really afford to be wrong.’ “

“It’s well known that consumers research expensive products like electronics online,” according to the piece in America’s leading business paper, “but coming out of the recession, consumers are more scrupulous about researching their everyday products such as diapers and detergent, too. More than a fifth of them also research food and beverages, nearly a third research pet products and 39% research baby products, even though they ultimately tend to buy those products in stores, according to WSL Strategic Retail, a consulting firm.”

This has led both large and small retailers, as well as name-brand manufacturers, “to target customers via blogs, social-media sites such as Facebook and Twitter and campaigns on retail sites, in addition to in-store campaigns.”

The devolution of online market research by consumers from high-end items to ordinary household goods, should serve as a shot across the bow for both large and small retailers. It is no longer sufficient to have a static website to serve customers, an interactive online marketing effort, with a large social media marketing component, is becoming the price to compete for everyday consumer spending and not just their discretionary household spending.

Encourage reviews

Reviews are very effective in improving local search ranking, but good reviews are difficult to come by. You can do a number of things to encourage satisfied customers to write reviews like including an effective call to action, asking visitors to write reviews, on your websites and sending messages to your email list and Facebook fans, encouraging them to write reviews on your Google Places page.

Ensure that your profile is complete and consistent

Google Places profile has many field and all are not mandatory. Google aims to provide the best experience to the users and complete information means a better experience. Providing as much information as possible through your profile will improve your ranking. Apart from the required fields, ensure that all the optional fields in your profile are also filled out. It is useful to include additional details, videos and photos of your business. Along with completeness, consistency of information across different citations is also important. Such consistency makes your Places page look more trust worthy.

Google AdWords Keyword tool

You can organize keyword data in many useful ways with the help of Google AdWords Keyword tool. It enables you to select a site, enter a root keyword or select a category to get the desired keyword data. You can further filter the list based on location, match type, loose or tight keyword groupings and much more. Although there is a possibility of slight inaccuracies, it is a great tool, especially as a starting point.

Xenu Link Sleuth

If your competitor’s site is well optimized, it may be a good idea to take a look at it. Xenu Link Sleuth is a free tool which will help you crawl any site. This data can then be exported to a spreadsheet. Screaming Frog is another tool with similar functionality. This data can be a great help in improving information architecture at your site.

SpyFu Keyword Groupie

This tool enables you to take a look at the top 100, 500 or 1000 keywords used on a competing site. You can have them organized by a root word. The tool can be a bit slow as it is not just applying a filter, but going through a database.

According to the findings of a survey conducted by Econsutancy and SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization), a majority of companies are considering traffic generation as the primary objective for SEO. In 2010, marketers gave almost equal importance to both website traffic generation (34%) and lead generation (32%) as primary objectives for optimization. But this year, as many as 87% companies cited that they were focusing on driving traffic to their websites using SEO.

The results of a separate research conducted by MarketingSherpa were consistent with those of the Econsultancy and SEMPO survey. According to this study, a majority (57%) of search marketers in the US think that SEO is most effective in traffic generation compared to a minority (35%) who think that it is more useful for generating leads. Although traffic generation is given more emphasis, it does not indicate that marketers have abandoned other objectives like conversions and lead generation.

In line with the change in objective, there has also been a change in the metric being used to measure the success of SEO campaign. This year, 57% companies are considering traffic metrics to measure SEO success compared to 49% last year. Also, there has been a drop in the percentage of companies considering conversion rates and the number of sales/leads as the primary metrics. These results indicate that marketers are focusing on SEO strengths and adjusting their success measurement metrics accordingly.

Research your competitors

You can get a lot of useful information by researching your competitors. You can start with the competitors having the top rankings for your targeted keywords. Find out the link building strategies used by them and the sites linking to them. This data will help you develop a successful link strategy.

Evaluate your existing inbound links

You may use Alexa, Google search box or any such tool for this purpose. Developing a list of all the sites linking to you and working with them to ensure usage of proper anchor text for the links can make a big difference. For instance, if you sell organic fruits, link with anchor text ‘fresh organic fruits’ will be much more effective than the link with a random anchor text.

Create socially sharable, good quality content

Good quality content is essential for most link building strategies and good search rankings. By providing such interesting content, and encouraging readers to share, bookmark or comment, you can get many quality backlinks.

Before you start..

Before trying out any of these strategies, evaluate your website thoroughly. This includes examination of keywords, ranking, links and the like. You may use any paid or free tools for this purpose. Unless you know exactly where you stand, you can’t come up with a successful link building plan to reach the desired position.

Crazy Egg

Assessment of site usability is essential for the success of your business website. Crazy Egg can help you improve your website usability. It offer overlays, lists and heat maps that give you an insight into habits and behaviors of your website visitors. You will find this tool at crazyegg.com.

Kontagent

Today social media marketing forms an important part of the overall internet marketing mix for most businesses. Kontgent can help you get better results from your social media marketing efforts. It offers metrics to measure ‘virality’ of your Facebook apps and other social media services and applications. This tool can be found at kontagent.com.

Clicky

This is the perfect tool for you, if you are not the nerdy kind, but need analytics tool to monitor your online business. It provides loads of useful information with regards to campaign tracking, traffic patters and segmented visitor information in an easy to understand manner. This business analytics tool is available at getclicky.com.

GoingUp!

Use this tool to improve your search rankings. The free ‘lite’ version of GoingUp provides many useful tools for search engine optimization and web analytics. You can find this handy tool at goingup.com/seotools.

Since a website serves the purpose of a marketing tool, it needs to keep evolving in tandem with changes in your marketing strategy. Most people make the mistake of asking web developers to build them a ‘basic five page website’.

Creating a static website with limited content to begin with will eventually end up adding to you long term costs. Since you have to keep your website updated with all the latest information, you need a website that you can expand at will without sacrificing excess resources. Armed with the right technical knowhow and a content management system, you can optimize your website to incorporate SEO strategies.

Being able to control your content rather that your page design is the key asset. Advanced design features can easily be sacrificed for the ability to update your content, embed codes from external sources and add graphical elements like photos and videos. Using template applications and content management systems will enable you to do all that without being an expert on subjects such as HTML and CSS. Remember to optimize you page content by compressing images before you upload and update your page with fresh content. This is especially important for effective search engine optimization marketing.

A flexible website which can be updated with fresh content as and when you like is an asset. Your website needs to be as dynamic as your marketing strategies.

Don’t be misled by your assumptions

You may think that you know which keywords your target users are most likely to use to find your website. This assumption is usually based on the keywords that you yourself would use to find your site. But the keywords used by the owner of a website, and internet users, to find the same website, may be very different. It’s best not to be misled by assumptions and depend on real keyword research.

Estimate your traffic levels

You need to have an idea about the expected traffic levels for the keywords to select keywords both for optimizing website or AdWords. You can use Google’s traffic estimator tool to find out expected number of clicks for your ads and average value of bid for the keyword used. Also, you can use your analytics report to find out the average number of visitors required to make a sale. All these figures will help you find out if a keyword is profitable or not.

Use keywords you already rank for

You can find out the keywords popularly being used to find your site from your analytics report. You can use this list to find related keywords with Google AdWords keyword tool.

This will also help improve your keyword list.