One of the more common emails we get is from people who think their website has disappeared from Google. If you’re in a similar situation, we have some ideas for you in this article.

If your previously high-ranking website seems to have fallen out of Google altogether, you are probably teetering somewhere between panic and desperation. As friendly consultants who care about your mental health, we want you to know this first:

Don’t panic! You probably didn’t get banned.
Give this a few hours and see if it works itself out.

We say that because it’s the most common scenario that we’ve seen.  But if you can’t bear to wait around to see if the problem will resolve itself, read on.

The first thing you need to do is clarify the problem. Specifically, has your entire site been removed from Google, or has it just been knocked down in the rankings?  To figure this out, you can do a site search, by typing this into Google:

site: www.myurl.com

(replacing “myurl” with your own URL, of course).  If Google doesn’t display any pages from your site, it’s likely that your entire site has been dropped.  Another way to check is to take a unique string of text from your website, one that is unlikely to be on anyone else’s site, put it in quotes, and search for it on Google. If Google displays the page from your site that contains this text, then your site hasn’t been dropped from Google.

If your site is still in Google, but your ranks have taken a sudden and dramatic nosedive, skip down to the “What Happened to my Ranks?” section, below. If, after several strategic searches, you still can’t find your site on Google, then yes indeed, your site has been removed from the index, and it’s time to figure out why.

Unintentional Spamming?
It’s possible that your site was found guilty of spamming in Google’s eyes, and got banned. Websites can be banned for SEO spam techniques such as “white on white” text, blatant keyword stuffing, or tricky redirects. J.C. Penney’s website was famously banned temporarily for using a link-buying SEO technique.  It’s not likely that your website would be banned if you’ve never done anything to intentionally trick Google into thinking that your site deserves a higher rank than is appropriate.

If you’re not sure about your status as spammer, SEO expert Jill Whalen has a forum that discusses “SEO No-nos.” Read it to get some indication of whether your site was spamming inadvertently.

You’ll also want to check all your messages in Google Webmaster Tools.  There, Google will sometimes (but not always) alert website owners that their site has been penalized for spam.

Victim of Foul Play?
Whether you’re into conspiracy theories or not, you should entertain the idea that someone else did the spamming for you, causing your site’s disappearance from Google. We’ve seen it more than once: a site’s domain expires for a short time, and during that period, the pages are taken over by a domain squatter that displays not-so-nice content. Or, your site may have been hacked and stuffed with nuggets of spammy badness (this is especially common with outdated WordPress versions, so keep your WordPress up-to-date, yo!).

The fallout from one of these scenarios is something we describe in our case study of Providence Restaurant. (It’s worth noting, by the way, that even though that site temporarily displayed spam content, it suffered with terrible ranks, but wasn’t entirely dropped from Google’s index.)

Again, Google Webmaster Tools can help you diagnose this problem.  Check your messages to see if there have been any alerts describing malware or other problems on your site.

Another form of devious doings on the web is content scraping, which is when other websites steal content from your site and then republish it, often multiple times.  If this has happened to you, it is possible that Google banned your site along with the “bad guys” who copied you. Try doing some searches on other search engines, looking for strings of text from your website.  You just might find an unexpected match.

Redirects or Canonical Tags Gone Wrong?
We once had a client who inadvertently added  a canonical tag on every page of his site pointing to a different domain.  Google followed this instruction diligently and removed every page of his site from its index.  Yeowch!  The good news: once the errant canonical tag was removed, ranks and indexing were back where they belonged within a couple of weeks.

We have also seen examples of sites that redirect their pages to another domain using a 301 redirect, and then are surprised when their domain is dropped from Google.   A 301 redirect is like a permanent change-of-address for search engines.  If you redirect your entire domain to somewhere else, Google is not going to continue to display your domain in its search results.

Robots.txt or Robots Meta Tag Deindexing?
Have you double-checked that you didn’t accidentally deindex your entire site with the robots.txt file or robots meta tags?

Here’s the line you really don’t want to have in your robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

And here is a tag that really shouldn’t be on every page of your site:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>

Go on… check it now.  We won’t judge you.

Server Outage?
Your server might have hiccupped just when Googlebot came to visit your site recently, but that shouldn’t cause your site to be dropped from the index.  We believe that Google will check a site at least a couple of times before dropping it.   But, if the site went down for an extended period (days, weeks), this could be an explanation.

Most likely, the bot will come back and rediscover your site, and you’ll find your site back where it belongs after that.  But how long will you have to wait?  It depends on how many links there are to your site and how often Googlebot visits it. While there’s no sure-fire way to trigger a visit from Googlebot, getting some new inbound links, refreshing your content a bit, and submitting to the free URL submittal page probably won’t hurt.  You can submit an XML Sitemap via Google Webmaster Tools, which has the nice fringe benefit of telling you how many of your URLs are indexed.

In the future, if your site has anticipated downtime, set a 503 server status so that search engines will know it’s just a temporary glitch.

Reinclusion Request
If you are certain your site has been penalized for spam or malware, you can submit to Google’s request for reinclusion page. Matt Cutts of Google has posted some information on how to file a reinclusion request. But before you file a request, be very, very sure that there’s nothing spammy on your site.

What Happened To My Ranks?
If Google hasn’t actually removed your site, but you just noticed a sudden and substantial drop in rank for your favorite keywords, there are several possible explanations:

• Google could have made an intentional change to its results or its algorithm.  Panda and Mayday are a couple examples of famous algorithm shifts that blew some sites out of the water.  SearchEngineLand.com is a good place to look into industry chatter about algorithm updates.  See also our post about recovering from Panda.

• Google could be experiencing some temporary weirdness that makes the results different from what you’re used to. As we mentioned at the top of this article, we’ve seen this so many times with so many clients that this is probably the most likely scenario. In this case, just check your ranks again in a day or so . You might once again see that good rank you were used to.

• Your competitors could have gotten their acts together. OK, if your rank dropped by a few hundred spots, it’s probably not your competitors, as that would mean a lot of competitors getting their acts together at the same time!  But if you’re just being outranked by legitimate competitive activity, then it’s time for you to work on your site. And this work includes optimizing for, and tracking, additional keywords.

• Is there something funky going on with your homepage, but not other pages?  We’ve seen sites that have suffered big rank drops because their homepage had been deindexed due to redirect or canonical issues, and no other page had as much power as the homepage, so no other page on the domain was making it into those previous ranking spots.  If you’re seeing only a portion of your site in the index, run through the diagnostic steps above to see if you can figure out why.
• Is your website new?  Sometimes, websites show up in search results briefly after being launched, but then seem to drop dramatically out of the rankings after a couple of days, and are stuck in the depths for months.  It’s a phenomenon that some have called the “Google Sandbox.”  How to get out the sandbox? Get some inbound links to your site, and be patient.

• Is it possible that something has dramatically changed on your website? Say, you intended to update a single page but accidentally changed the page titles on every page of your site?  Don’t forget to check your site and make sure everything is in order.
• Could you be seeing different results because your personalization has changed?  We’ve known people who thought their ranks were phenomenal – only to be brought down to earth when they realized that the ranks they were seeing were personalized just for them by Google.   Read more about Google search personalization.

Hopefully we’ve given you some ideas about how to track down the source of your site’s disappearance from Google. Regardless of what you find, it’s always a good idea to make sure you’re offering lots of great content that makes people want to link to your site, and do some link building. In this way, you’ll have other sources of traffic that makes a Google problem like this less devastating.

Upon bouncing back to Google from a search result, you may see a notice allowing you to block that domain from future Google results.  Or you may see a notice encouraging you to +1 that domain.  It all depends on the amount of time you spent on the page.

Google is well aware of what listings searchers click after performing a Google search.  But did you know Google continues to care what a user does after clicking on a listing?  The search engine monitors whether the user clicks right back to Google, and even pays attention to the length of time the user spent on a site.

Here’s an example.  After searching for “eco-friendly down comforters” I clicked a page on the domain www.beddingdowncomforters.com, reviewed it briefly, and clicked the Back button to return to Google.  This is known as a G-bounce. When I landed back on the Google search results page, Google had added the message ” – Block all www.beddingdowncomforters.com results” to the listing:

Click on the “Block…”  link, and you’ll never be bothered by this website’s listings again.

Later, I was searching for “how to decant wine” and clicked on wineintro.com.   I spent a long time on the page and eventually clicked the Back button to return to Google.  Upon landing back on my Google results page, I saw a popup suggesting that I +1 the site on Google:

This experience got me wondering:  How long do I need to spend on a website before Google stops suggesting I block it, but instead suggests that I +1 it?  What is that magic length of G-bounce time that Google deems to represent a successful website experience?

I tested it out by G-bouncing after various lengths of time, and here’s what I found:

• 15 seconds — block
• 30 seconds — block
• 45 seconds — block
• 1 minute — block
• 1 minute 15 seconds — block
• 1 minute 30 seconds — block
• 2 minutes — no message
• 3 minutes — no message
• 4 minutes — no message
• 7 minutes — no message
• 7 minutes + 30 seconds – no message
• 7 minutes + 40 seconds -  +1 message
• 8 minutes – +1 message

So apparently, according to Google, the 1-1/2 minute mark is where a site goes from hateworthy to just OK, and at the 7-1/2 minute G-bounce mark, the site has clearly served you well and deserves a +1 for its trouble.

I anyone else seeing these same times?  Different ones?

Q: We have tons of great videos on our website. How can we get those little video thumbnails that sometimes show up in Google search results?

A: When Google understands that there is a video presented on a web page, it will often display a thumbnail as part of the search result for that page, as shown here:

(The exact layout of your results may vary, since Google is constantly tweaking its video result display.)

For the best chance at getting video thumbnails for your pages, you should embed videos on your site in a way that Google can easily recognize AND send Google as many signals as possible indicating that you have a video on the page. Here are some tips that can help:

• Include each video on a separate URL
• Embed your video in Quicktime or a standard Flash video player.  Google can’t crawl through a complicated Flash file, so if you use Flash, so we suggest using the built-in Flash video component for FLV playback using a hard coded URL path to the FLV streaming source (it’s OK if this is an off-domain location).
• Create a Google Video Sitemap and submit it to Google Webmaster Tools: click here for Google’s video sitemap instructions.
• To add even more signals that Google can read, tag the videos using RDFa: click here for Google’s video RDFa instructions.
• Use Video OG tags.  These are intended for social media, but Google sees them too, and we’ve seen clear evidence that Google will recognize video information in OG tags. See more about how to use Facebook OG tags.
• It is OK to host your videos on streaming service such as Brightcove.  However, you will probably be on your own when it comes to generating a video sitemap or well-formatted OG tags.

Video SEO is changing fast! About two years ago, video thumbnails were dominated by YouTube and Metacafe.  These days, YouTube still has a dominant role, but other domains are presented among the featured thumbnails more and more.  Watch this blog for updates in this quick-moving space.

As of December 4, 2009, Google’s search results will never be the same. Seriously, they’ll never be the same, even from one computer to another.

Google’s expanded personalized search is a game-changer in search engine design. It’s a big deal but it has gone largely under the radar. All Google searchers will now get customized results that are influenced by past searching and clicking behavior, bookmarks, and other factors. Any time a user clicks through from Google to a website, it gives that site a boost in that user’s future search results. Organic search results – previously considered an “objective” third-party viewpoint – now differ based on who is doing the searching.

Personalized search is activated for all Google searchers whether they are logged into a Google account or not, unless they opt out. We don’t expect many people to opt out.

Why isn’t this making more headlines? For one, we’ve all grown comfortable with seeing localized results (“bakeries near San Francisco, California”). Plus we’re all starting to get used to more and more personalization in advertising, particularly on Facebook screens (“37 year old woman in San Francisco California? Click here”). Enhanced personalization of search results is a natural evolution.

Personalized search will affect your business

The full ramifications of this change are still unknown, but here are our preliminary thoughts on what personalized search means to website owners:

• When you check Google, don’t assume that the ranks you see for your site are the same as what your customers are seeing. To turn off personalized search, opt out, or add the tag &pws=0 to the end of the Google page URL.

For example, if you search for “early reader comic books” in Google you may get a URL like this:

http://www.google.com/search?q=early+reader+comic+books

But you’ll get unpersonalized results with this URL:

http://www.google.com/search?q=early+reader+comic+books&pws=0

• Personalized search will increase the importance of search queries that occur early in the buying cycle. If people click on your site during the browsing, comparing, and information-gathering phase, you’re likely to get increased Google exposure later, when they’re ready to buy. Does your site offer a good destination for keywords containing “compare” and “review?” Do you know what people search for in the early stages of buying your product?
• The advent of more personalized search places a higher value on clickthrough rate (how many times a person clicks from Google search results to your site). Your clickthrough rate can be improved with compelling, well-written titles, URLs, and meta descriptions.
• Personalized search may increase the percentage of site visitors who are repeat visits. Does your website offer something useful for the second and third visit and beyond?
• Do you have a website with an easy-to-remember or easy-to-guess domain? Lots of people are probably typing your URL directly into the browser instead of finding you in Google.  This is very good for your site traffic in general, but now there is a down side to having an easy-to-remember domain name: if users are less likely to use Google as a navigation tool for your site, you  might be at a disadvantage in personalized search.
• It isn’t clear what percentage of Google search results are personalized. If personalization is very heavy, it may be more difficult for newly established websites to use SEO to gain market share from already-established business.

Can personalized search results be influenced? Certainly. Your website’s ranks in personalized search results will be improved by any method that encourages people to navigate to your site using a Google search.

In our next post, we’ll discuss ways to influence personalized results.

Q: I am a small photography business with no technical expertise. I started building my photo portfolio website in iWeb, but someone told me that an iWeb site would never have any ranks in Google. Is this true?

A: iWeb sites in their default format can have huge flaws that could severely hamper the search engines’ ability to index and rank them nicely. For example, the program might put blocks of text into graphics rather than search-engine-readable text, or it may not give each individual page a unique HTML page title. These flaws can be at least partly overcome with an SEO add-on called Rage’s iWeb SEO tool.

If you’re not wed to the iWeb idea, we suggest using a blog authoring tool instead. WordPress is great for non-technical folks and there are many free templates (called “themes”) available. Visit WordPress to choose a template that will meet your design needs and also set the site up with good search engine optimization without a lot of heavy lifting.

Q: Etsy users are all abuzz about this article: “Etsy is Lowering Your Google Search Rating by Messing with Your Meta Tags” Just wanted your expert opinion as to whether this is accurate.

A: In the article, an Etsy member complains vehemently about Etsy adding text at the front of the crafter’s HTML Title. So, for example, if the crafter’s title was: “Yellow Fuzzy Bumpy Hat” the Etsy title would read: “Handmade Accessories on Etsy – Yellow Fuzzy Bumpy Hat”.

Technically, it’s correct that Etsy’s additions to people’s titles might be messing with ranks. We always keep our HTML titles at 66 characters or fewer because that’s how Google truncates the first line of the search listing. In addition, we have reason to think that the first part of the title is the most important. That is, we think it is weighted more heavily by Google and has a bigger influence on ranks.

HOWEVER, let’s look at the big picture: Etsy.com is a very high-authority site on the web. It has over 600,000 links pointing to it from other sites, which is very impressive and difficult to get. It has a Google PageRank value of 7 out of 10, which is, again, very impressive and difficult to get. In addition, Etsy appears to be keyword-optimizing its page titles in a strategic manner, so it’s adding good keyword-optimized text like “Handmade clothing on Etsy” and “Vintage on Etsy.” It’s not like they’re adding irrelevant text like “cheap mortgages die crafters die” – they’re trying to be found for what their crafters are selling!

Etsy is an internet heavyweight and, if you want your product to benefit from Etsy’s visiblity and traffic, then co-branding seems like a reasonable tradeoff to us. In fact, co-branding a search listing as “Etsy” is likely to increase click-throughs in the search engine because the name lends a level of familliarity and trust. Displaying products on the Etsy.com domain is giving the average crafter a shot at good rankings that they wouldn’t likely get otherwise.

And, one last point: It’s Etsy’s site, and Etsy has every right to brand its site the way it wants to.

Our suggestion to crafters: Check the HTML titles that Etsy is generating for your products, and tighten up your product titles with the foreknowledge that you are losing some characters to work with.

Q: In organic search, Google is coming up with my legal statement and privacy statement pages for certain unrelated terms. These two pages do not house any of the search terms in their copy. How can I get Google to see other more pertinent pages for these keywords instead of these two pages which have nothing to do with the terms?

A: This is a common problem, because so many websites point links from their footer or global navigation to their privacy & legal pages. Google and other search engines interpret this as meaning that these are very important pages on your site. There are a few ways to remedy this – review the list, and choose the method that’s best for you:

• Using the robots.txt file, you can exclude these pages from being listed. This option is the most extreme, and will also cause any previously accumulated search engine “power” (aka PageRank) to be lost for these pages.
• Add the following code to the links to these pages: “rel=”nofollow”" This code will cause the search engines not to follow the links, thus focusing power onto other pages of your site This is a good solution if you have links to undesirable landing pages in your global nav, and you don’t want to pass a lot of search engine power to these pages. Here is an example of what your link would look like: Visit my <a href=”http://www.example.com/legal” rel=”nofollow”>privacy</a> page.
• Change the pages to make them into decent landing pages. Perhaps adding navigation, links, or other information at the top of the pages would be an option?
• Create a Google XML Sitemap, which allows you to give the various pages on your site your own relative level of prioritization. (We have yet to see this work in practice.)

In addition to the above, be sure that your preferred landing pages are linked from the home page as well as the global navigation if possible. That will help inform the search engines of what pages are most important to you.

Q: The listings for my website don’t look very good. The titles and descriptions are weak in the summaries captured by these search engines. I have tried everything: writing new descriptive text on the page, correcting the meta description and page title, but the SERPS are not responding to the changes. The titles and summaries always stay the same.

A: Here are two possible explanations for the problem you’re having:

(1) Your listings may be showing titles & descriptions culled from directory listings rather than your page HTML Title & Meta Description. To find out your site has a listing on Yahoo! and Open Directory, try searching within those directories. Open Directory can be found at www.dmoz.org, and Yahoo! directory can be found at http://search.yahoo.com/dir . If the listings you see in those directories match the titles & descriptions that have been bothering you, then you’re in luck – this is an easy fix. In order to stop Google & Yahoo! from showing directory titles & descriptions in search results, you simply add a tag to the <head> section of the page instructing them not to do so. The format of the tag is this:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noydir, noodp”>

The next time the robot visits your page, this change should go into effect and you’ll see your own titles & descriptions (or snippets from page content). For a full list of tags that you can use in the “robots” meta tag, see our page: How to Use the Robots Meta Tag.

(2) Another possibility is that the robots are coming to your site so rarely that you aren’t seeing your changes in place in a timely manner. This is possible if your site has no – or few – links pointing to it. To find out if this is your problem, you can do two things: look at the cached version of the page listing, by clicking on the small “cached” link that shows up in your Google listings. Here, you will see a date when Google last gathered the page. You can also find this information by signing up for Google Webmaster Tools and looking at the indexing statistics from inside the tool. If it turns out that your problem is a lack of visits, your best bet is to increase the number of links pointing to your site.

The short answer is: Yes.

On July 1, 2008, Adobe announced a breakthrough improvement in Google’s ability to index Flash content.

But – did you know? Google has actually been able to index text content and follow links inside Flash for years. Trouble is, even with the recent improvements, Google and the other search engines still need a significant amount of hand-holding to even do a half-decent job of indexing websites that are built in Flash. That’s why we recommend Flash best practices for SEO.

Flash Best Practices for SEO

To help search engines see and properly list your website contents in their search results, we recommended the following best practices for Flash SEO:

• Use Flash only when necessary, and consider wrapping decorative flash elements in HTML navigation if possible. Pages should degrade gracefully for users who do not have javascript or Flash.
• Build separate HTML landing pages (with distinct URLs) for your separate Flash landing “pages.” Each separate HTML page should deep link to the appropriate part of your Flash movie.
• Embed your Flash using SWFobject so that you can display alternate HTML content. Make sure that the text content in the alternate HTML is as identical as possible to the Flash content. Graphic elements can be described, just as you would describe a photo with a caption or an image ALT tag.
• If you generate your Flash content from an external XML file, use the same XML file to generate the alternate HTML content.

Essentially, for an all-Flash site, you should create “shadow” HTML pages, which display deep-linked Flash for humans, and mimic the Flash experience and content for search engines. These pages can serve as entry points from search engines.

Interestingly, the 7/08 Adobe announcement has not changed our recommendations much. Here are the reasons why:

• Google can see text and links inside the Flash file, and it will even click around within your Flash file to see more content; but it will not split up a Flash file into multiple pages and index them separately. That means that your Flash file will be the equivalent of one, massive HTML page, unless you break it up into multiple HTML landing pages as recommended above.
• If you have content dynamically loading into your Flash movies from an external XML file, this content may not be indexed. UPDATE: We have observed this content indexed as a separate XML file, but not within the HTML page, where you want it seen.
• There is no way to review what the search engines are seeing in your Flash files.
• Using alternate HTML content allows a great deal more control over what search engines see – and allows you to represent the user’s experience of the page more accurately than the search engine’s approximation.

Search engine indexing of Flash is in flux, and we are keeping a close eye on these changes, with the following questions at the top of our mind:

• Will Google start clamping down on alternate HTML content being displayed rather than the Flash movie? This has been a common practice in recent years, but was never officially sanctioned in Google Webmaster Guidelines. With the 2008 announcement, Google may decide that the SEO workarounds are spam – and penalize accordingly.
• What is the best way for us to see what Google sees in our Flash file? The Macromedia Search Engine SDK, which previously provided a rough approximation, is no longer supported by Adobe. Is there a replacement?
• Can content within the Flash file be optimized, with meta tags?

We’ve created a several experiments to better understand the new indexing. Read our Google-Flash-Indexing experiment findings here. If you’ve created something similar and you would like to share your findings, please feel free to contact us.

Future-Proof Your Flash for Google

As we mention above, we do not recommend any immediate change in Flash SEO strategy. However, Google has never officially advocated the common practice (and our current recommended practice) of showing alternate HTML text – and could decide this is “spam” at any time. If this happens, you’ll need to rapidly switch over to a strictly .swf indexing approach. Here’s how to build your Flash so that you can be nimble on your feet if this has to happen:

• Follow the best practices above, but additionally, do the following:
• Optimize your Flash content by matching the name & description in the Accessibility panel to the HTML Title and Meta Description in your HTML page.
• Use actual text in your Flash movie, not bitmaps or vector graphics.
• Make all of your photo images and videos into “movie clips” or “buttons” and then apply the Accessibilty panel to them. Give a unique, descriptive Name and Description to every one of them.
• Read, read, and re-read the Flash accessibility page.
• We confess – we don’t own a screen reader. But if you’re a Flash developer, you should. It’s the closest you’ll get to understanding what a search engine sees in your movies.

With the above optimization in place, you’ll be able to switch off your HTML alternate text at a moment’s notice, and Google will still see an optimized page. Subscribe to our feed and we’ll be sure to keep you up to date on our findings, and future developments.

Read more: Google Flash Test Experiment Findings

Q: I have a brand new website that already ranks well on Google, but I have a problem. Currently, the page being returned by Google is the ‘About’ page, which is not ideal. The key landing page is the Home Page. I am now thinking that I should perhaps take the ‘About’ page out of the SEO equation altogether – perhaps with a no-index, no-follow tag. Is this a good idea?

Essentially – I’m trying to figure out how to get my Home page returned in Google in place of the current ‘About’ page. Can you help?

A: We don’t recommend removing a high ranking page from robot indexing. Assuming this page contains robot-friendly links to other pages in the site, this page is transferring authority to the other pages, including your home page.

Since your site is new, it’s probably only a matter of time until the Home page makes its debut in the search results. In fact, you could probably just wait a few weeks and let this whole problem iron itself out. However, if you are feeling impatient, here are some ways to address your problem:

1. First, check that the Home page is indexed. Perform a “site” search on Google, following this syntax: site:www.yourdomain.com. (see our handy search shortcuts page for more on special searches such as this one).
2. If the Home page is not shown in the site: search results, add a text link pointing to the Home page from the About page. Next time the search engine robot comes around, it is likely to follow the link and discover the Home page.
3. You can also sign up with Google Webmaster Tools and check for indexing problems and make sure that Google isn’t having a problem with your home page.
4. If the Home page is, indeed, indexed, but just isn’t getting ranks compared to your About page, take an honest look at the two pages and ask yourself: does the About page contain more descriptive text? Juicier, more keyword rich text? Is the home page dominated by flashy graphics and not providing content that search engines can sink their teeth into? You may need to adjust your design if you want the Home page to have a better search engine presence.

Whether you take the above steps or not, we always recommend thinking of every page on your site as a potential landing page. So, if you’re not happy with the About page as a landing page the way it is now, go ahead and add great content to make it a better destination for your search visitors. Here are some ideas for making an “about” page a good landing page:

• Include a nice, juicy description of your company, offerings, and principals
• Add a call to action and a link such as “learn more about our services!”
• Make sure there’s a prominent link to the home page
• If you have a prominent company logo in your page header, make sure that it links to the home page as well – most website users expect this.
• Add a footer with contact information, and possibly even a short and snazzy tagline that describes what you do, who you serve, and why you do it well!

In the long run, your link-building efforts (which are great for SEO in general) are likely to improve your Home page’s ranks more than other pages on the site, since there’s a good chance you’ll get more inbound links directly to your Home page than to your About page. You could have worse problems – keep up the good work!