This site had a lot of problems early on that included duplicate content, broken links, wrong internal linking structure, non-canonical homepage, poorly optimized header & title tags and much more – these problems resulted in a heavy penalty from Google. After we fixed all of the problems with the site, we requested reconsideration with Google and were pleased to see things start to turn around.

If you have questions or comments about how LUCID Public Relations can help get you results like FBE Spa, feel free to contact us any time.

To family members, friends, and other observers, it may seem to be a “no-brainer” that a woman who is abused by her partner should leave the relationship. But, in fact, research indicates that leaving a relationship that involves intimate-partner violence is a complex and, often, dangerous process. First, empirical studies suggest that a woman (and, at times, her children) may be in greatest physical danger when she is attempting to negotiate separation from an abusive partner. In fact, it has been reported that the most deadly time for a woman is when the batterer believes that she intends to end the relationship.

Second, separation is a process rather than a one-time event. It is not unusual for a woman to consider physically leaving her relationship and then reconsider; it is not unusual for a woman to actually arrange to move out and then cancel all plans. And, according to a new University of Illinois journal article describing the research of Lyndal Khaw, there are several stages of the leaving process, each one complicated by unclear boundaries. For example, even if a woman physically leaves and establishes a separate living environment, practical and/or legal issues often necessitate her continued contact with her partner. If the couple has children, court-ordered child visitation with the partner contributes to the confusion over the partner’s physical presence in the woman’s life. Further, in addition to the issues of physical separation, the woman must negotiate emotional separation from her partner, including memories of more positive times with her partner, her dreams of a happy family, and other emotional ties to her partner and to the relationship.

Mental health professionals who are experienced in the assessment and treatment of domestic violence can offer crucial, and, at times life-saving, assistance to the woman caught in intimate-partner violence, as well as to her family and friends.

Before you run off and hire the first SEO firm you can find, there are some things you should know. Hiring the right SEO firm is essential, because hiring the wrong individual or company to do SEO for your website could result in penalties or even a ban from Google and other search engines. You need to find an SEO firm/person who knows what they are doing. This article will show you what questions you should ask an SEO company, what qualities a good SEO company has, and how to avoid bad SEO firms and SEO scams.

Questions to ask an SEO Company

This list of questions is based off of Google’s Search Engine Optimization article on the Google Webmaster Tools Help website.

• Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?

The potential SEO company or consultant should have at least a few clear SEO success stories. The best answer involves not only verifiable keyword rankings gained for a website, but how those rankings converted into sales or other goals for the client. Ignore any SEO company that tries to impress you with #1 results on Google/Yahoo/Bing for keywords using more than 4 words. Focus on how much traffic they brought to the client and how that traffic generated sales, sign-ups, leads, etc.

• Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines?

The answer to this should be: YES, YES, YES.

• Do you offer any online marketing services or advice to complement your organic search business?

Most legitimate SEO firms should (and do) also offer advice and/or management for pay per click services like Google’s Adsense.

• What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe? How do you measure your success?

You want an SEO company that is realistic with you about what you can expect. This is obviously something that is decided on a case-by-case basis, but I think most results can be expected within 6 months. Success can be measured by gain in traffic, increase in website conversions from search engines, or top 3 result presence for specific keywords.

Other good questions to ask an SEO company:

What are your most important SEO techniques?
How long have you been doing SEO?
How can I expect to communicate with you? Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site, and provide detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them?

Qualities of a good SEO company:

Honest & Transparent – Your SEO company should be able to explain to you in plain English what they are doing for your site (both on-site and off-site) to increase your search based traffic.

Communicative – You should be able to contact your SEO company with questions about your SEO project and they should have time to talk with you no more than 24 hours later. They should also clear any changes to your website with you before making them, ensuring that you understand what they will be doing before they do it.

How to avoid bad SEO companies and SEO scams:

There are literally hundreds of thousands of scams that have sprung up around Search Engine Optimization – in addition to that, there are hundreds of thousands of ‘SEO experts’ who, despite good intentions, just don’t know what they are doing. The field of SEO is not regulated by any official body and has not been (until recently) taught in any schools in the United States – as a result, anyone who knows how to use a computer can jump up and claim: “I’m an SEO Expert!” As an SEO firm we have been contacted numerous times by people who claim to be SEO experts who ask us questions about simple SEO related tasks that any real SEO expert should already know.

So, how do you avoid SEO scams and poor quality SEO imposters? Ask lots of questions when interviewing your potential SEO company (the list above is a good place to start, but also ask some that are more specific to your website).

Also, watch out for any individuals or companies who:

Send unsolicited emails about their services

Guarantee 1st page or 1st place rankings

Don’t have a website

Can’t give you references

Can’t explain their SEO methods

Good luck and remember: take the SEO hiring process slowly and seriously. Find an SEO expert who understands your business, your goals and has an established track record of success to show you.

1) Make sure you have properly attempted to find your website in Google search results
Go to Google and use the site search function – this will show you all of the pages that Google has indexed for the specified domain. Example: site:yourdomain.com – if nothing shows up, also try site:www.yourdomain.com , site:http://yourdomain.com, and http://www.yourdomain.com . The results are not likely to change, but it’s worth trying a few different ways just to be sure.

2)  Was your site indexed by Google before?
If this is a new problem for your website, you may have been blacklisted by Google – if this is the case see our article about removing and avoiding Google Penalties

3) Is your site new?
If your site is new, it may take Google and other search engines some time to find it – post some links to your site on popular websites around the web and Google will follow those links to your site soon enough. Also, submit a sitemap to ensure that Google finds all of your pages. See the Google webmaster central article on creating and submitting a sitemap for more information.

4) Website has been around a while, but STILL isn’t indexed:
If your site has been around for more than a month and has still not been found by search engines you either need more inbound links or you have been hit by a penalty. Try getting some links to your website on other sites – if this doesn’t rectify the problem within a week or so, you are almost definitely looking at a blacklist problem. Rectify any violations of Google’s webmaster guidelines and submit a reconsideration request once you have made your site comply.

We wish we could take credit for this great piece about alcoholic mothers on Fox 11, but our newest client KLEAN did so well with their first media hit this week that we just had to show everyone.

KLEAN Treatment Center in West Hollywood, California focuses on younger adults, and has developed a unique approach that incorporates the Pennsylvania (or medical) model of treatment, which focuses heavily on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and appropriate psychiatric care.  KLEAN also incorporates the traditional twelve step model, as well as several other methodologies in an effort to expose clients to a variety of treatment models.

KLEAN Treatment Center press inquiries should be directed to Jonathan Franks of LUCID Public Relations

This keyword costs an estimated $29.60 PER CLICK when advertised for on Google Adwords – with 880 searches per month on this keyword could cost up to $26,048 per month! By getting ranked organically with LUCID, Mr. Artz enjoys a large volume of high quality clicks for a fraction of the cost of advertising price.

Let’s get straight to it – if your website has stopped showing up in search results, has dropped for certain keywords or has experienced a large drop in traffic lately you may be worried that you have been penalized by Google. you may be right, or you may have experienced the drop in rankings for a variety of other reasons (which we will go over at the end of this article).

Has your site been banned by Google?

Double check by performing a site:yourdomain.com search like this one: for LUCID Public Relations. The site search will show you all of your website’s pages that are listed in Google’s search index. If your website doesn’t show up for this search, you have been banned and need to find out why, then submit a reconsideration request with Google (2-3 weeks processing time).

How can you find out if your site has been penalized by Google?

Search for your domain name (not a ’site: search’ just the domain – example: http://lucidpublicrelations.com) in Google – if it doesn’t show up #1, you have a penalty. Jump to the Webmaster Guidelines List list below to see where you might be violating Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Next, search for unique page or article names – if your article titles are common, this may not work, but if you have an article or page with a name like “SEO Tip: How to Remove (or better yet, Avoid) a Google Penalty” this should work. For unique names your site should show in the first page of results. If not, Jump to the Webmaster Guidelines List.

Have your dropped off completely for your major keywords or have you dropped from first place/first page to 3rd page or worse? This is probably due to a devaluing of your inbound links by Google. Basically, Google has determined some of your links to be spam, advertisements or the result of SEO work. See the section below on building quality inbound links to avoid penalties like this.

Webmaster Guidelines List: Most Common Penalty Causes:

This list is not an official Google list of the most common Google penalty causes – these are the causes we have noticed from years of SEO work & through our discussions with other SEO experts.

1) Bad Link Building Penalty:

It can sometimes take Google a while to discover bad inbound links. The problem is simple – when Google devalues your inbound links your site loses authority for the keywords that those links helped you with (the keywords used in the Anchor Text or on the page the links pointed to).

Building Good Links:

Content of linking site should be relevant to yours

As a general rule, there should be very few other outbound links on any given page (as a general rule we use 25-30, but even that is a lot, shoot for 5-10 if possible)

Build links consistently, not for volume of links – If you are manually influencing the number of links that are coming  in to your site, you want to give Google the impression that these links are being created naturally (through user interest in your content). Natural links will either build or remain consistent over time – avoid situations where you are building a large amount of links then dropping that number off in any given period of time.

2) Recently Changes Effecting Accessibility:

If you made and changes to your site and/or content recently, make sure that search engine bots can still see all of your content – you may have also dropped in ranking just because your content changes have reduced the relevancy of some keywords for your site. Check your website using a LYNX text-only viewer to see what your website looks like to search engines and other bots. If all of your content isn’t visible, you have some accessibility problems that need to be addressed. Make sure that your content is written in text, not in iframes, javascript or image based Flash on your website.

3) Duplicate Content:

Some webmasters have duplicate content problems without even knowing it – any time you have multiple URLS with the same information you are facing a duplicate content problem. Google created a short snippet of code that can solve this problem. In addition to using this code on sub pages, you should use it on your home page so that all versions of your URL point to a single, preferred version.

Example: http//:yoursite.com, http://www.yoursite.com, http//:yoursite.com/index.php, http://www.yoursite.com/index.php should all point to one version (usually http//:yoursite.com or http://www.yoursite.com) as the preferred version. This will clear up any possible confusion Google is having about preferred versions of your content.

See the full list of potential Google Penalty Causes in Google’s Webmaster Guidelines Article