Standing Out

Phew - it was not fun at all having that painful Google page rank of ‘0′ for the last month, especially after all of the stuff out there saying that a page rank of ‘0′ means you’re being penalized…yada yada yada. It was devastating! I kept racking my brain trying to figure out what in the world I could have done to be penalized.

But alas, it’s over. Both my blog and my website are out from under the ‘0′ curse. The rankings are still not great (3 and 2 respectively) but they are not terrible, either, all things considered. I haven’t done as much linking as I would like to yet and I’m still getting articles together to publish, which adds a pretty big stream of incoming links.

So if you’re out there biting your nails like I was, here’s my advice. Hold on! And do these things. I can’t be absolutely positive they helped, but they most certainly didn’t hurt.

1. Create an account with Google Webmasters and upload your sitemap. If you have already done this - CHECK IT. I’m almost positive my site was ranked ‘0′ because I had broken links in the index, because I indexed my site and then went and changed it without telling Google (bad bad bad). If you need a sitemap generator, use this one: www.xml-sitemaps.com/
2. Submit URL removal requests to Google for the broken links. I used their “expedited” process rather than waiting for the site to be crawled again.
3. Submit at least ONE article to a large, popular site like ezinearticles.com. I did this recently, and voila! My site climbed in the rankings. I can’t be positive that just one article submission helped, but again, all I know is that I did these things and the next thing I knew, my rank was improved. So take it for what it’s worth.
4. Get some incoming links - really. Just try. You can hook up to startupnation.com and get involved in the message boards, creating a signature that includes a link to your site (make sure that the links are in keywords, not just a URL). Example: Tia is a virtual assistant. Notice how the URL is linked to the keywords “virtual assistant” rather than, Tia is a virtual assistant and this is her website: http://www.allamericanadmin.com. Google doesn’t really care about links like that.
5. Learn about improving your site. I’ve done this. Admittedly I am addicted to my website and my blog and I have more email newsletters coming to me about SEO and SEM than I can possibly take in. But why not? If you have the opportunity to learn something, do it. A great place to start is: Young Entrepreneur blog’s weekly posts on SEO.
   
6. Make sure your site has content. I have at least 300 words on every page except the contact page. And my blog posts are typically on the long side. You need content because tags mean nothing unless the keywords are actually on that page. You can’t just put a keyword in the title tag and leave it unsupported in the document itself. Remember writing paragraphs in grade school? Your teacher said that you must “support” the opening statement. Likewise, you must “support” your meta keyword tags by including those keywords throughout the content.
   

Hope this helps! Those simple changes improved my site.

Cheers,

Tia