Ranking Problems – Poor SEO
Ranking problems are nearly always blamed on poor SEO efforts, but in this article I will show you that this is not always the case!
After weeks of hard work optimizing every aspect of SEO on your website pages, how often have you then carried out a ranking check, only to stand there shaking your head in disbelief..?
Yes we have all been there at some point & boy is it frustrating. But what can you do ? Everywhere tells you (& rightly so), to fully optimize for search engines or you’re not likely to get any sort of decent ranking. So you put in hours of brain numbing keyword research only to find that your efforts are a waste of time, YOUR STILL STUCK ON PAGE 3, 4, 5 etc
Well My Blog Review had just reached 6 months old & I decided the time had come for yet another ranking check, I expected this one to be so much better than the last, due to all the effort I had put into keywords & page optimizing, but unfortunately it was not! Don’t get me wrong , for a 6 month old site, it was pretty good, but I had expected much better. As usual I spent some considerable time racking my brain trying to fathom out the problem, until luckily a buddy of mine appeared online, so after the usual greetings etc I explained what the problem was & damn it he spotted the cause almost immediately!
He had taken a quick look at the source code and spotted that some of the html heading tags & also bold tags were actually missing, jeeze my blood pressure almost hit the roof, this is the 2nd theme that has had this problem & yet again after spending months hacking & tweaking the theme to get what I wanted!
Example Code
Now in the snippet of code above, you can clearly see there is only the h1 heading tag & I know there should be a H1, a H3 & there should also be a sentence in bold using the ”strong tag“. All three of these html elements are particularly important when optimizing your pages as these 3 elements carry more weight with the search engines than anything else apart from your post title.
Well after about 3 days of searching and asking questions all over the internet, I finally find the culprit! One small line of code in the functions.php code sheet of the theme, which had in it, the phrase ” Strip Tags “, just look at the bottom line of the following piece of code..?
That small line of code is part of the section that produces the excerpts for display on the home page & funnily enough, on checking further I found that the source code did in fact display the heading tags correctly if viewed as a single post, although it still failed to show the bold text.
Examples Using SEOBook Toolbar on Firefox 3.6:
Image 1
By using a tool called XRay on the SEOBook Toolbar, we can clearly see that this page has the h1 & h2 tags showing but there is no h3 to be seen..? Yet I know there are 4 x h3 tags used on this particular area of the website.
Image 2
Ok now I am sure the difference has become quite clear as this image was taken after dealing with the line of code that had “remove_tags” in it. The h3 tags & the bold text are now showing correctly. It would not matter whether you were using h1 & h2 tags or h2 & h3 tags, the effect would still be exactly the same. Now is this the reason I have not been ranking as high as I thought I should…??
Image 3
This shows the stats from CPanel’s AWS & it doesn’t take a genius to see the profound difference that changing that line of code has made to the site ranking in just a few days. It is pretty obvious that as I have done nothing else to the site, then changing that line of code has in effect improved ranking, which in turn has produced more organic traffic.
So What Did We Change In The Code.?
Well after researching a little on the internet & in particularly on the W3C site, I discovered that you can actually insert exceptions into that line of code, these would be the html tags that you wish to keep and are inserted as follows;
The last line of this snippet of code now allows the h2, h3 & bold HTML tags, the effect of which can be seen below.
My advice to you all is this, don’t assume that everything is fine & dandy with your site /blog, if you cannot do it yourself then get someone to check it for you, but you really need to check that the SEO effort you put into your site is actually capable of having an effect..? Otherwise your just going to continue the uphill struggle & ultimately be wasting your time !
If at anytime, you have felt that your SEO efforts were not reaping rewards, then a simple check may show it is not due to poor SEO after all & your ranking problems may in fact be due to a poorly written theme instead !
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Posted by Steve Nickson
on Mar 11 2012. Filed under SEO Optimization.
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