Solving SEO ranking problems
An SEO professional has advised website owners on what steps to take if they find a key page is ranking better than another page.
When deciding rankings, search engines like Google use a range of metrics such as keyword focus, external links, internal links, meta data and age. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to meet all these SEO criteria and sometimes pages with a poor conversion focus can achieve higher rankings than optimised pages. For example, website owners may find an old piece of content reaches page one on Google while a newer page flounders.
Top five SEO tips
In an effort to counter this, Rand Fishkin, chief executive officer and co-founder of SEOMoz, has outlined his top five solutions:
- The 301 Redirect (or Rel Canonical) and Rebuild - Mr Fishkin suggests that site owners might find it beneficial to redirect traffic from the old page to the new page. By using a 301 redirect or rel=canonical tag, they can ensure viewers and search engine bots focus on the right page.
- The Content Rewrite - This tactic is best used when the content of the old site is failing to attract conversions. Put simply, site owners should rewrite pages to make the content more relevant.
- The Link Juice Funnel - If a site owner wants to build up a certain page in the search engine rankings, they could add more internal links from the rest of their site and reduce the number of links from the undesirable page.
- The Content Swap - Swapping the on-page text and meta data between the two sites is a simple way of working out whether the content is responsible for the ranking problems.
- The Kill 'Em with External Links - Although potentially costly and time consuming, attracting external links from other sites is a good way of boosting the profile of key pages.
