Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links to http://www.yourwebsite.com

Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.yourwebsite.com/,

We’ve detected that some of your site’s pages may be using techniques that are outside Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.

We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you’ve made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google’s search results.

If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.

If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.

Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team

If you have received a similar email then we suggest you act very quickly but don’t panic.  Some sites received this warning without penalties, and some sites were penalized immediately. In either case, the links need to be taken down to retain or regain rankings.

The email is the result of a regular Google search update known as Panda [webspam] and has already been sent to many websites so you are not alone.  This latest update penalizes websites based on the link strategy they are using and has already caused major problems for the impacted websites with large drop in rankings, thus visitors sent from Google and ultimately revenue.

The reason not to panic is that Google finds it very hard to know if your links are actually bad links, some are obvious because Google knows the website is bad but by you panic removing a whole lot of links just tells Google their guess was correct.

Your first step after not panicking is to examine all of the links that point to your website and evaluate if they are ‘bad links’ or not. You are looking for links that come from link farms, blog networks or bad sites, these are often identified by 100′s of links per page and no real content, often provided by cheap SEO services from outside of the UK.  Also Google becomes suspicious if all the Anchor Text [the text the person clicks on] is the same on all your links, this just indicates the links are not natural.

Any bad links need to be removed or Google will penalize your site, sending it down the rankings and significantly impacting your website visitors numbers.

Once you have removed all offending links you can ask Google to reconsider your website but when you send your request you need to be honest and provide details of the links you removed, you have to show that you’ve made an effort to sort your website out.

If all of this is giving you a headache then give Praeparo a call and we will explain, in plain English, just how you can avoid the penalties of Google.

It is now more than ever all about building a balanced and natural Internet Marketing Strategy.

This release was really about website owners or there SEO companies Over Optimising!

So what is over optimising?

Over Optimising, also known as webspam, is where a website owner tries too hard to get a website page to the top of Google results to the cost of the visitor. Sometimes when you look at a website page it looks confusing and seems to repeat, this basically indicates the page has been written to keyword stuff to help rankings but at the cost of visitor experience. This also includes techniques used external to the website to help rankings, for example the purchasing of links on other websites to point at your own website.

At Praeparo we are strong believers that if you research your keywords well and then create unique content aimed at the website visitor and not the search engines then your website will get to the top of Google, you don’t need these techniques.

If your website has a problem or think you have been impacted then please contact us for a chat.

At Praeparo we believe we can save you money in the long term. All too often small businesses are either not marketing at all or putting effort into the wrong areas first. For many small businesses getting your own website into order will be sufficient and it is not worth doing anything else until you have done this.

We guess you have asked the question “What do people search for when they are looking for my products or services?”

But, who did you ask? Often you as the business owner are not the best person to answer this as you understand the product, services and the problems trying to be solved. It is all to often seen that a business owner makes assumptions that are just not valid for the person looking on the Search Engines.

For example, are you using keyword phrases that are very technical, in which case would a member of the public outside of the industry use such a phrase.

In any digital marketing campaign your success criteria is to increase business by a % greater than the marketing spend, i.e. go for the highest possible Return On Investment (ROI).

The simplest way to achieve this is to get as many of your website pages, facebook page or twitter tweets in front of the people looking. This is not just about how well your home page performs on the Search Engines.

First of all don’t think about keywords but ask the question “What problems am I solving with my product or service?”

We often see that website pages are written targeting the answer but you rarely get a search engine query looking for the answer but instead they state the problem and hence are looking for the answer. i.e. the searcher has no idea on the solution.

Once you have a list of problem statements you then need a page on your website dedicated to solving each problem. You should not duplicate but keep a single page focused on solving a single specific problem or need. For each question and thus each page you need to turn the questions into keywords. We would suggest selecting no more than 3 keyword sets, one primary 3 word objective and two secondary phrase sets (3-4 words each) per page. It is the primary one we will first target.

The aim is to have as many of your website pages on the first page of a search engine’s results (SERPS) that solve the searchers question. If you have the solution then it stands a good chance you have a new customer.

This is just party of your overall keyword and website content strategy that also needs to consider other elements, like brand and customer up-sell and retention.

Your ultimate aim is not to get 10,000′s of visitors a day to your website but to get very targeted visitors that make a purchase.  It is a lot better to have fewer visitors that purchase than more that just browse. Think like a high street shop, it costs money to open the shop and gets depressing if you get lots of people arriving every day but the till is empty. In fact if you don’t make a profit they typically shut up shop and relocate to another area.

At Praeparo we believe we can help you adjust your existing website so that it organically arrives at the top of the search engine results for phrases that bring purchasers. No need to spend large sums of money on adverts. You need to think of this as an iterative process just like that high street shop where you constantly manage your inventory (in your case website pages) and adjust those that don’t sell and promote more those that bring in a high ROI.

They clearly show that the England receives a massive spend in the travel and tourism sector:

• £8.3bn is the amount spent on domestic holidays in England between Jan and Sept 2011.
• £225 is the average amount spent per overnight holiday trip in England between Jan and Sept 2011.

A number of surveys predict that as money gets tight more domestic holidays will be taken, add this to the focus of the Olympics and Diamond Jubilee celebrations, 2012 is a year of opportunities to UK travel and tourism businesses.

How can you as a small business help yourself get full occupancy, more visitors to your attraction, full teaching groups, or a greater number of visitors in through the door?

Well you can compete against the large corporations. In today’s online world a simple well thought out website can get you in front of the many potential clients searching around the World Wide Web. Unlike a few years ago people will book with small websites as long as the website obeys a few simple rules:

• Has a postal address and landline phone number.
• Has an email address the same as the domain name (www.praeparo.com, sales@praeparo.com)
• Has a privacy policy.
• Has clear, relevant terms and conditions.
• Has clear descriptions and pictures.

As well as the above you must be able to take online bookings and a deposit. If you force someone to pick up a phone or write then you may well loose out on the point-in-time purchase.

This all does not have to cost you a fortune but as more people start using mobile devices like smart phones and iPads then you need a website that works well on these devices. If you have not touched your website for a few years then you will more than likely look very outdated, why not compare it with some of your competitors to see how far you have fallen behind.

2012 is the year to get your website working as people expect it to work or risk loosing valuable business.

I know it is only October but people are starting to plan and get ready for Christmas.

You need to be putting the final elements to your Christmas internet marketing plan now in order to make the most of the high volume Xmas purchasing.

In a lot of cases this is:
- a small content change to focus on Christmas,
- a blog entry or article seeding present ideas,
- a new focused adwords campaign,
- or to just increase SEO work already being done.

Why not give us a call 020 8123 8159 to see if we can help. No obligation to purchase anything just a chat to bounce around some ideas.

Affiliate marketing is a business model in which you get paid for helping others earn profits. This is done by marketing their product or service and receiving commission for each sale that happens through your efforts.

You will see lots of reports of people earning millions and millions of dollars each year. Although, you have a few that do earn this type of money, it is hard work. Remember you don’t get money for nothing!

Affiliate marketing can be approached in many ways, but is in effect internet marketing for somebody else’s product. As you are promoting another’s product you have the same internet marketing challenges but without the expense of product development.

Affiliate Marketing basically falls into a number of techniques and a clever affiliate marketeer will combine:

* Review Site Marketing: Here you build a website that offers a review of the product. Review pages can be placed on your own website, social media or one of the many free blogging sites.

* Article Marketing: Here you write short articles related to your affiliate product. The articles need to be to article sites, directories, blog sites and social-bookmarking sites. Every article site has the bio of the submitter and this is where you promote the affiliate link. The bio can have the affiliate link or point at your own website.

* E-mail Marketing: You need an email list before this will even get off the blocks. If you do have a list then an excellent way to upsell. The success rate will be directly related to the product you are promoting and the reason you captured the email address. Note, please obey all spam laws.

*PPC( Pay Per Click) Marketing: This is a very profitable marketing model but requires an upfront investment as you will have to try a few times before you are successful. You must make sure and monitor carefully your cost per click against the percentage of people that purchase. It is easy to get carried away and spend more than you make.

Where now?

If you want to read up some more why not have a look at The Complete Guide to Affiliate Marketing on the Web: How to Use and Profit from Affiliate Marketing Programs

We will sit down with you in front of your website and generally walk through it and answer any of your concerns.

So if your business is local in towns like Hemel Hempstead, Berkhamsted, Tring, Aylesbury, Chesham, Amersham, St. Albans, Watford, Wendover or even as far as Milton Keynes just send a message on our contact us form or give us a call.

If you are further afield or you represent a trading body or business group then by all means contact us and we will see what we can do.

Some of the questions already asked include:
- my website looks dated, any ideas?
- how can I get more control over my website content and not always have to pay for changes?
- what does SEO mean to me?
- website review please?
- keyword selection tips?
- am I spending enough or too much on pay per click advertising?
- should I concentrate on local search?

As you can see we have covered and helped a lot of businesses. Again, no obligation to purchase anything.

If you’d like to know more, call us today on 020 8123 8159.

So what do we mean by split testing?

• For every keyword targeted we will create two ads with slightly different content.
• These are then monitored daily by our marketing professionals and we will identify a winner. A winner is where we get the best click rate that converts to a buyer, we have to get the click that converts as this tells us the content of the landing page (product or service) is what the person expected when they clicked.
• For the ad that didn’t win we adjust the text and then start to monitor the two new ads.
• This is repeated continually until we have constant dead heats, or we have an excellent acceptable conversion rate.

When we have finally settled on this winning ad we can then start to execute standard search engine optimisation on the landing page against the winning ads keywords, this can’t be done until we have a stable winning ad. Then as the click through rate increases in organic search results we can reduce our spend on the PPC campaign and re-focus the spending to new areas.

This strategy is often not used as it takes time, but at Praeparo we have the people and tools set-up to handle 100′s and potentially 1000′s of ads per customer based on a split test per keyword, where a campaign can have many keywords. See our Pay Per Click Services page for more information.

What do you need to do?

• Decide how you will track success. Often this is easy…it’s when you make a product sale, other times it can be harder to spot. If you’re a selling high value services, you’ll most likely be tracking leads and not sales.
• Decide how to assign a monetary value to leads so you can determine how much advertising to spend in order to get it.
• Do the keyword research.  Identify the core ones and include people outside of the business, look at the advertisers who already show on the results and then use other tools to expand this core list.
• Build focused landing pages. You may want different potential customers to go to different pages within your site. This is often the case to enable you to highlight the different value propositions to solve their particular problem.
• Set up your adwords campaign using the keywords and landing pages.
• Monitor and test; use split testing, adjust bids and remove non-performing keywords …EVERY DAY.
• Then SWITCH! As soon as a great term is found that returns a high value you must start the search engine optimisation (SEO) process for that term so you get natural or organic search engine results (SERPs). Over time you can then reduce the PPC ads on that term and put your money into finding the next winner.

This probably looks complicated and overwhelming. However, if you know what you’re doing you can get a good return on any investment. Praeparo can help and with just a bit of effort on your part, you can beat the opposition.

Too often website owners believe Page Rank is SEO. Well it is not, with over 200 factors that Google uses Page Rank is only one.

Praeparo believes you need to get your own website in order first! Make sure your URL, page title & description, content headers and actual content should all be good and be targetted at what the user wants and expects on the topic concerned.

Once content on an individual page is good then make sure it is a good fit into the overall website through internal linking with appropriate anchor text.

Now with good content it will start to return results from Google SERPS. To get better results we need people to find it and start talking about the page, viral marketing is the best where other people like the content and so will talk about it on blogs or sites like Twitter and facebook.

In summary don’t spend too much time on getting external links and monitoring your Page Rank until you get your website in order!