First, in order to be listed on CitySearch you have to have an account and claim your business via another company called CityGrid.com – don’t ask me why. My business was already listed, but the address was incorrect. So I logged in, but the address fields were greyed out.

At the bottom of the page, there’s this place where you can send them an explanation of your changes to your CitySearch business listing. So I asked for them to unlock my address fields.

And I waited.

After a week, I tried again. And I waited.

So today, I actually called them (there’s a contact link at the very bottom of the page, and if you scroll down, you will see their phone number) – CitySearch that is.

I called them, got a person very quickly, explained my issue. They asked me for some personal info, and then explained that the address updating part of their website is broken, and so the nice person from CitySearch would push it through for me. Said it would take 3-5 days. I’ll update this post either way, if it works or it doesn’t.

It pays to be persistent. Especially when it appears that being in Local search directories may influence search engine rankings, or so I’m told.

Here’s the link to the actual Google Webmaster Guidelines.

Here are some of the highlights that a small business owner could ask about:

1. Did you create a sitemap.xml and are you keeping it updated when pages are added, deleted, or their names change? Did you create a robots.txt file?

2. Did you redirect www to non-www or vice versa, so only one version gets indexed?

3. Does the navigation make all the pages easily accessible from all pages?

4. Is the content unique and contain appropriate keywords?

5. What are the title tag and description tag for each page?

6. Do all images have “alt” tags – what are they?

7. Has the HTML been verified to be correct? (try using W3C Validation Tool)

8. Make sure there are no broken links on your website

9. Make sure your pages load quickly

10. Make sure your web designer has NOT done any of the forbidden (black hat) things that try to trick search engines. There is a long list on the Webmaster Guideline website.

So I did what you’re supposed to do, and fix whatever you think is wrong and then submit a request for reconsideration.

I watched a video on this topic. The people from Google said they promise they actually read all of the requests, but it might take a few weeks. The most important thing, was to confess all of your SEO sins and fix them. But what if you are not really sure you have sinned? Fix something and tell them. That’s what I did.

So you want to know how long it took to get a response? Three (3) days.

Here’s what I got back:

“Dear site owner or webmaster of http://aldebaranwebdesign.com/, We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://aldebaranwebdesign.com/ for compliance with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site’s ranking in Google. There’s no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team. Of course, there may be other issues with your site that affect your site’s ranking. Google’s computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users. If you’ve experienced a change in ranking which you suspect may be more than a simple algorithm change, there are other things you may want to investigate as possible causes, such as a major change to your site’s content, content management system, or server architecture. For example, a site may not rank well if your server stops serving pages to Googlebot, or if you’ve changed the URLs for a large portion of your site’s pages. This article has a list of other potential reasons your site may not be doing well in search. If you’re still unable to resolve your issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support. Sincerely, Google Search Quality Team”

Ironically, what was really wrong, was that my website had been marked as “parked” due to a bug. This bug had already been resolved by the time I got this reply. So I must have gotten a canned response, because they didn’t mention the bug at all in their reply.

But hey, at least I would have known I wasn’t under a penalty in 3 days. That’s pretty fast turnaround, don’t you think? Maybe if you are actually under a penalty it takes longer, I don’t know. If you’ve been penalized, how long did your response take?

So I assume I’m under some penalty. I go into Google Webmaster Tools, and fix every missing 404 page, make sure the sitemaps are all ok, I triple check everything, no warnings, nothing. I spent all day trying to understand what might have caused me to be in the horrid google penality.

Next I applied for reconsideration, because that’s what you are supposed to do. You confess your SEO crimes, and beg Google to let you back in. But I didn’t have any crimes to confess, so I simply told that what I had tried to fix, knowing they weren’t crimes. But it seemed folks were saying yes, you must be in a penalty.

Then I went into the famed Google Webmaster Forum, where while some of the folks were nice and tried to help, most were aggressive and assumed I was some low life spammer who deserved the penalty for something I did.

Then I waited. Next day, still not in Google. Visions of being forced into early retirement loomed before me. With no traffic and nothing to fix, what could I do?

So I emailed a friend of a friend of an ex – who worked at Google, explained everything. He said he would send it to the spam folks and to hold on.

The next day, he said my domain had been mislabeled as “parked” and to just hold on, they were working on it.

And sure enough, later that evening, my rankings came back.

But not all small business owners with a website know someone to actually contact at Google. Very scary experience. Google can totally kill a small businesses traffic with a single bug. Sleep well folks.

And I wasn’t the only one:

Search Engine Land’s Article

Search Engine Roundtable’s Article

First thing to understand is that your web pages are made up of code, mostly html, with perhaps other languages mixed in (javascript, php, etc). Your web browser interprets this code and displays your website. But some code isn’t about how your website looks. There are certain “tags” (part of html code) that are called “meta tags” because they contain “meta” information, or a summary of the web page.

These meta tags do nothing to your website’s appearance, and you can’t see them unless you view the source code of  your website. When you view your source code of a particular page, you look at the top, in the <head> section, and look for two meta tags: <title> and <meta name=”Description“…>.

These two meta tags, “title” and “description” are the only two meta tags that matter. There used to be a meta tag called “keywords” but Google ignores it so I do as well.

To understand how search engines use these two tags, please watch this video that Matt Cutts from Google made.

Ok, now that you’ve seen the video, you understand that these two tags are used by search engines to do two things. First they help your search engine rankings, assuming that the title tag actually matches keywords that are on your page. Secondly, the description tag helps humans to decide whether or not to click on the title that is showing up in search results.

In general, the title tag should not be more than 60 or 70 characters. Descriptions can be longer, between 160 and 200 characters. But remember from the video, Google may or may not display the description tag in it’s search results depending on the keywords entered in the search.

So to see your own meta tags, just view the source code of the page, and look up near the top for “title” and “description”. Each page should have a different title and description tag, because each page has different content and keywords. The most important keywords in the content, should be reflected in the title tag of the page.

For example, if you are a psychologist who does therapy in Miami, your keywords are “psychologist” “therapy” and “Miami” – and they should be both in the title tag, description, and all throughout the content of the home page of your website.

This is a picture taken of my hummingbird feeder that’s on my office window. Sometimes working from home gets lonely, and this little bird has been wonderfully entertaining. I think it’s a “she” and that she’s an Anna’s Hummingbird. It took many, many weeks to attract her to the feeder, and now that’s she’s visiting regularly, I’m working hard to keep the nectar fresh and environment welcoming, so she returns often. Which got me to thinking about how hummingbirds are a little like a search engine. Hang in there with me on this one…

When you build a new website, much like when you put up a new hummingbird feeder, you are hopeful you’ll get traffic. You don’t know when they’ll visit, but you’re just hopeful, and you wait. And wait. And wait. And maybe hang some red ribbons to attract attention (hummingbirds only).

And to make sure that hummingbirds like what they find when they visit, you’re supposed to keep the nectar fresh, the feeder clean, etc. To make sure search engines like what they find when they visit, you work hard to make sure the website architecture is sound, and the content contains important keywords.

And one day, magic happens…and the first visit happens. It’s very exciting, and you hope that the hummingbird likes what she’s found and will rank your feeder above your neighbor’s. And when Google visits, you are very excited and hope that Google ranks your website above your competition. Hopefully you’re seeing the similarities by now. Nectar = Website structure and content.

Both ranking well with hummingbirds and Google take planning, preparation, execution and lots of patience, and hopefully by now, you see the similarities too. Ok….back to work.

Virtually all of my website clients aren’t aware of what redirects are and when a web developer should use them. They don’t understand how important it is to tell search engines where to find renamed pages. It’s similar to notifying the post office when you move that you can now be found at a new address. (It’s the best analogy I could come up with).

When search engines “crawl” over your site, they make a record of what pages they found. If you want to see what pages Google has found when crawling your website, read this article. If you follow these instructions, you can actually see what Google has indexed – what pages Google thinks comprise your website. In order for a page to come up in a search engine result, it must have been indexed.

So, imagine you have a page called “widgets.html”. Google comes along and crawls your site and now in the Google index there’s an entry for “widgets.html”. Time passes, and you decide you want/need to change the page name. Your web developer makes a new page called “newwidgets.html”.

The best way to inform Google that the old page is gone and has been permanently changed to the new page, is to create a permanent redirect. Your web developer makes a file (a plain text file) that’s called .htaccess and creates redirect commands/code for each page. The actual code will vary depending on your website hosting server. I use DreamHost, so any examples here work for them, but might not work for you if you have a different hosting company.

The .htaccess file has code that basically says “if you’re looking for a page with the name of “widgets.html”, it’s been permanently moved to this new file named “newwidgets.html” and please update your records”. When search engines encounter this code they will update their index and replace the old page with the new one. Pretty neat!

So why did I write this article on redirects? Because I often find that clients are unaware of what they are and when their web developer should use them, and some web developers don’t always use them when they change page names, change domain names, or redesign a client’s website.

Why? Well, frankly it’s a fairly tedious process if there are many pages to redirect, but it’s very important to make sure your web developer does this if the URL’s of a page are going to change.

So if you are shopping for a web developer to redesign your website, ask them if they are going to redirect the old pages to the new ones and how they will accomplish that. If they don’t say “.htaccess” as part of their answer, you might want to keep shopping.

More Information on 301 Redirects:

Here’s a wonderful article I found on redirects: htaccess 301 redirect tutorial. I learned that you can even redirect page names that have blanks in them (a bad web design practice) by putting quotation marks around the page with the blanks:

redirect 301 “/old page.htm”  http://www.example.com/newpage.htm

And if you have a WordPress blog and you change the URL/Permalinks, you’ll need to create redirects using a redirection plugin like this one.

You wouldn’t move without telling the post office your new address would you? Don’t change a page URL without using a 301 (permanently moved) redirect!

When Luis contacted me for help with his website, he was in awful shape. He was getting around 2 visitors  a day, around 60 visitors a month. He was having trouble with his current web designer, who was also hosting his website and over-charging him. We moved his website to DreamHost, installed a traffic tracking tool, and set about working on SEO. I did my best to educate Luis as to the rules of the SEO game, and after a few months, Luis agreed to install a blog to further add unique relevant content to his website. The results are amazing, and today, he emailed me a picture of his most recent stats:

Last September, he had 256 visitors. This July, he had 1,742. That’s an increase of nearly 700%!

This increase is a result of following Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, good basic SEO principles, and adding lots of unique relevant content. It’s also a result of the website owner, Luis, carefully watching his website stats and continually using the data to improve his website.

As you can see, working together as partners, we’ve done good job at improving his website traffic. And it’s not just traffic, Luis has gotten many new clients because of the SEO work we’ve done – remember, SEO is not just about rankings or traffic, but about getting new clients and customers for your small business. Before you hire someone to do SEO on your website, ask to see real data from past clients!