Did any of you notice a MAJOR reduction in your Google Adsense earnings recently? It could be from Google’s recent Panda update in July 2011.

Why did Google do an update you ask? The Panda goal is to remove poor quality sites from Google’s results pages.

Tips on what to do to Improve your Site so Panda Ranks Your Website Better:

1. Remove any “article directory” non original content and replace with fresh original content
2. Edit any ‘over-optimized’ pages so its less SEO spammy
3. Build your brand awareness across the web wherever you can – so you get more searches by company name and your personal name.
4.  Make sure pages load fast
5. Reduce bounce rates
6. Make clean navigation – bread crumb helps
7. Make sure SEO tags are super relevant to the page content.  Be sure to use Title tags.
8. Get people to LIKE, GooglePlus, and Tweet about your content.  Put buttons on every content page so they can easily do that.
9. Post links to your content on social media

In our last post, we talked about our goal to boost traffic from AblePlay.org and how we set benchmarks. Our next steps were to do keyword research for SEO and create an action plan based on what we found.

KEYWORD RESEARCH TIPS:

Step 1: Review website for keyword clues:
I started by looking at the AblePlay.org website and writing down keyword phrases that came to mind while reading the site content.
It was evident that ableplay, play products, toys, product reviews, special needs children, children with disabilities were main phrases.

Step 2: See what meta tags are on the website.
Next, I did “view source” and looked at the existing meta tags to see what clues I could find.
This is the Title Tag:
AblePlay – Play products for Children with Disabilities and Special Needs

Step 3: Competitive Research
Another step I like to take is to do a Google search for the main keyword phrases for your website site. See what competitive websites come up high in Google for those phrases. Then do “view source” to see what their meta tags are to get ideas you can draw from. It may give you ideas for phrases to research you hadn’t thought of.

Step 4: Perform Keywords Research and Make A Targeted Keywords List
Lastly, I took the clues I had and checked in Google Adwords Keywords Tool

Google Adwords Keywords Tool

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

This is a free keyword research tool that allows you to type a main phrase and see the actual search phrases people are using and how many searches each month that phrase receives. It also shows you which phrases have high competition and which low competition phrases would be easy to rank for.

I write down the most relevant phrases and the number of searches they get. Then I group then into keyword families. Then I prioritize the keyword families by importance.

I type “bikes for special needs kids” in the Google Keywords Tool and see what phrases come up.
I jot them down. Then on my Keywords Summary Sheet I list all the major keyword families I found and what
specific phrases I found under that main keyword topic.

EX: BIKES

special needs bikes 1600
special need bicycles 1600

NEXT STEPS:

Now that we have a BASELINE of where traffic is currently at and KEYWORDS that we want to target for traffic, we are ready now to form an action plan. Stay tuned next week to see our master traffic plan we put together.

Part of my mission at Webmomz is arming work at home moms with the information they need to succeed in their home based businesses. That’s why I wanted to share with you an insider view of a traffic building project I am working on. Each week I will share with you the strategies, action steps, techniques, and results gained.

CASE STUDY: I am working on a website traffic boosting project for AblePlay , the latest initiative from the nonprofit National Lekotek Center, a division of the nonprofit Anixter Center. AblePlayTM is the leading authority on toys and play for children with disabilities. In November 2005, the National Lekotek Center launched the AblePlay website at www.ableplay.org providing access to authoritative ratings and detailed reviews on toys and other play products for children with disabilities.

PROJECT GOAL: Increase traffic to AblePlay to provide the maximum traffic and exposure for their Lekotek Partner companies.

WEEK 1: CREATE BENCHMARKS: in order to measure the results gained, we needed to create benchmarks to show where AblePlay currently ranks. In addition to traffic and unique visitors, here are the benchmarks we used.

Google PankRank, Alexa Rank, Back Links, Google Analytics

Google Page Rank: PageRank is Google’s system of counting link votes and determining which pages are most important based on them. Pages that Google believes are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results. On a scale of 1-10 TEN is the highest Google Page rank.

• Free Google PageRank Checker: http://www.prchecker.info/

Alexa Rank: Alexa Rank is a relative measurement on how popular a web site among the Internet community. Alexa Rank is calculated considering how many Alexa Toolbar users visited a certain web site and how many distinct pages they viewed in that site over a period of 3 months.

• Check Alexa Rank: http://www.alexa.com/

Link Popularity: After finding out their Google PageRank and Alexa Rank, I looked to see AblePlay’s Link Popularity and how many Backlinks they had to their website. Backlinks: are a measure of the number of incoming website links pointing to a website. The more websites that link to a website as an authority, the higher the link popularity and rankings in the search engines. Building more incoming links to a website improves SEO and drives traffic to a website. Link popularity. I did a quick check to see how many links AblePlay had in Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

Free Link Popularity Tool: http://www.mikes-marketing-tools.com/link-popularity/

Google Analytics: AblePlay has a Google Analytics account. This allows us to track how much traffic the site is getting, what keywords are driving traffic, and what he key traffic sources of traffic are to the website (ex: search engines, direct traffic, referrer sites etc)

• Sign up for a Free Google Analytics Account here: https://accounts.google.com/ServiceLogin?service=analytics

ACTION: I compiled all the results into a report and sent to AblePlay. I documented the Google Page Rank, Alexa Rank, number of links in Google, Yahoo, Bing, top keywords driving traffic, and number of hits this month and last to the website. This gives us a good baseline to judge how effective our marketing is. For their privacy I won’t post their exact traffic information here, but I will track percentage increases regularly to show results gained.

NEXT STEPS: Follow along as next week I will share the action plan we put together for AblePlay.