Search Engine Marketing - Your Questions Answered

We have been getting a lot of questions covering the same subject, so we thought that it would be more helpful and less time consuming if we put them to print rather than answer each one individually. This page will be updated weekly and is also available as XML/RSS feed.

Q1. what does SEM stand for ?

A. see title above (that was easy)

Q2. My designers have made a new site for me with a fantastic opening page, with my logo on it. I have read that this is not good for search engines - why and should I get rid of it?

A. The page you describe is commonly known as a splash page, you can keep it so long as you have an SEO orientated design team. Because this page does not have any navigation links on it and would not be spidered - your designers would need to use your logo and any other text that they could put on to it to create links into the main Home page of the site, without this the search engines have nothing to follow through to your other site pages. Personally I would remove the page and possibly redesign the home page incorporating some of the splash page design.

Q3. My site has dropped from 5th place on Google to the next page, we have not changed anything so why does this happen?

A. Google and all other search engines periodically change their algorithms, in other words they change the criteria in which they rank web sites. Something that they considered good before might not be as good as what they now look for. For this reason you should try to update your site at least once per month, fresh content always brings back the search bots. You do not necessarily need to change the copy within the site manually, if time is restricted then consider using a news feed matching the theme of your site, they are not complicated to install and there are some great free RSS readers available on the web. News feeds, depending who writes it could be updated daily - this means that your content would also change daily. Of course this may not be the main reason for your site to drop in the Google Search results, if updating the content does not resolve the matter, then you should consider hiring an SEO to help out.