The search engines caught up with the tricks these webmasters were using and introduced another factor which would influence a site’s position on the results pages. This was the number of incoming links to the site. This was around the same time that Google’s Page Rank Algorithm came about. Google’s page rank essentially states that each link to a page represents a ‘vote’ for that page, so the more links a page has the more authority that page has.

The focus on the number of inbound links led to another form of spamming. People started buying links or swapping links just to increase the number of links they had. It is evident that just because a web page has 1000 links doesn’t make it more of an authoritative page than one with 100 links, when considering that links can simply be bought.

So once again the search engines had to re-evaluate their criteria for gauging the importance of a Web site. This time they focussed attention on the relevancy of the Web site the link was on to the Web site at the other end of the link. If the subjects were related, this was deemed good by the search engines. If not, this wasn’t so good and even potentially harmful.

Search engines are constantly tweaking their algorithms so SEO professionals have to keep their wits about them in order to stay ahead on the game. Google’s recent Panda update zapped Web sites that were reliant on huge numbers of links from sites known collectively as link farms. These are Web sites that have many links and very little content, and are therefore not very useful to anyone other than for SEO purposes. It would appear that search engines since the dawn of the Internet have been following the same path – that is to rank Web sites higher based on their usefulness to people surfing the Internet, not for SEO people. This would imply that the future of good search engine optimisation techniques would focus more on what the user wants and less on how search engines can be manipulated.

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In the video below, I show a few common ways of identifying whether your website is suffering from search engine ranking problems or not. One way is to use the site:domain.com search operator at Google to see if your website is being indexed. Watch the video below to see the other way of identifying if your website is suffering from search engine ranking problems:

I have been keeping a list of the most common search engine ranking problems, and have come up with a list of what I would say are the “most common” search engine ranking problems. Many of these issues can easily be fixed, of course it will take time or money (or both).

1. Lack of links
Easily, the number 1 issue I see in client websites preventing higher search engine rankings is lack of links. This is likely obvious to most of you, but we still need to include it. Many people out there still don’t understand the importance of continual link building. With enough link building, Google will overlook many other issues.

2. Repetitive Title Tags

The other most common issue is the number of repetitive title tags used. This is something Google heavily penalizes for and something that is easily fixed. Make sure every page on your site has a unique title tag.

3. Too many 404 errors
You can spider your site or check to see if you have error pages in the Google search results. A shortcut is to perform a search on google for site:website.com, and it will list all your pages, which you can then go through and check for errors.

4. Too many 301s
301 redirects do not pass through credit like they once did. Newer websites need to be careful not to have too many 301’s, because this can cause the site to get ’sandboxed’. This is especially common when performing site re-designs and initial SEO audits, making it increasingly important to make sure and do the proper SEO and keyword research initially, to avoid having to redo this later.

5. Purchased links
If you saw your rankings go down overnight, then chances are you paid for a link that google frowns upon. We all know that google frowns upon and technique that attempts to artificially increase rankings, so here it is vitally important when engaging in link building that you continually check analytics to notice traffic declines.

6. Unclean URLs
Search engine spiders have to be very efficient, so, they are leery of anything that seems like a risk to them, even though it may not be. Dynamically generated pages present a risk to them because the spiders could get caught up in an infinite loop within the site. So, make sure to clean your url of special characters such as question marks, equal signs, ampersands, etc. URLs having long, complex query strings will have a harder time getting indexed with everything else being equal, than a shorter url with no special characters.

7. Bad Links to your Home Page
All web sites have a home page, www.domain.com and a www.domain.com/index.html. This is diluting the effectiveness of all your seo efforts. Make sure and modify all internal links to go to / instead of going to /index.html. Then make sure you redirect the index.html page to /. It is important that you do both, because merely redirecting all /index.html pages to / will not be as effective.

8. Unnecessary Text in Title Tags and Link Text
Are you using phrases such as “click here” in anchor text or phrases such as “We sell” or “Come visit us for” in your title tags. If you do, stop it. Use only the keyword phrases you are targeting. You are diluting their value when using unnecessary text.

9. Slow web page load time
If you noticed a rankings decrease in April of 2010, it could have been due to a slow web page load time. Google is now including site speed in their algorithm.

10. Not Enough Patience
Perhaps the biggest mental shift needing to take place in clients minds is being patient. Effective SEO takes time to implement. There are techniques that can be used to increase rankings much quicker, the same way crash diets can work for the short term, but in the long term, they can hurt you. You want to make sure you do ample work up front, which unfortunately means spending more time and resources which are usually scarce, but with the proper plan, you can be well on your way to utilizing perhaps the most cost efficient form of marketing that exists.

Whether it a lack of links to your website or another internal issue with your website, you can certainly take steps to correct your search engine ranking problems.

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CheapTweet has addressed a great need by harnessing the power of Twitter to help make consumer dollars stretch further. All day, CheapTweet indexes about 30,000 tweets about deals, filters out spam and duplicate content, and adds more than 10,000 new deals to the web site – many of which are different one-of-a-kind deals from boutique sellers. Deals are then ranked by how much they are talked about on Twitter and CheapTweet user votes. With so many diverse deals pouring into the system in real-time, CheapTweet has developed the DealStream to help visitors find the ones that are right for them.

CheapTweet’s DealStream is a real-time, personalized deals system where you can set up your own stream to track categories of deals, brands, merchants or keywords which are filtered and organized based on a relevance algorithm that takes into account your preferences and deal quality. Visitors can get these results on CheapTweet.com or via a convenient RSS feed.

As well as the DealStream, CheapTweet has recently made upgrades to its search engine, that uses particularized algorithms to combine tweets about the same deals, helping you speedily see what deals are hot, as well as sort through spam. There are also changes to the CheapTweet voting mechanism, allowing you to give deals a thumbs up or a thumbs down. Finally, CheapTweet clearly labels official accounts so shoppers know when they are looking at legitimate deals from a real merchant. Together these changes allow a clean but intelligent means to save money.

CheapTweet (www.CheapTweet.com) is a social deals search engine that scours Twitter to find any and all money-saving opportunities available to consumers. To date, CheapTweet has indexed more than 5 million deals from tens of thousands of sellers. CheapTweet is operated by Appozite (www.Appozite.com), an Austin, Texas-based startup developing social e-commerce software to connect unique and interesting retailers with customers. Appozite also makes TweetReach (www.tweetreach.com), a tool for measuring Twitter campaigns.

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