Tuning Your SEO For the Mythical Google Sandbox

Tuesday, September 11
Time to clean out your online garage this fall? If you're like me you haven't spent the time to go back and clean up old site pages, links and broken, worn out HTML. What a surprise it was when I went back to some of my old posts on this site and other sites only to find a batch of bad links that had either expired or moved. Once I noticed that, I then started thinking about re-examining my entire portfolio.

Search Engine OptimizationPart of the reason I embarked on this effort was due to an article I read about the mythical Google sandbox, that is, the temporary place where you live in Google's search engine space when building out a new website, blog or community mashup page.

The deeper issue posed by this article was the effect of proper search engine optimization on your site's ability to jump out of Google's sandbox into a higher ranked page. Whether or not the sandbox exists I still believe that the Google algorithm to change my site rank is what happened to the site I mentioned in my last three articles on The Online Money Making Secret You Shouldn't Know. I happened to notice that my search volume jumped last Feb without really knowing why. This was exactly six months from the time I created the site.

Could I be on to something here? Typically, I can get some faster page rank on new sites (about six weeks) for low volume keyword phrases. But maybe things have changed a bit with Google's formulas. Leaving the mythical sandbox might take longer now. Nevertheless, trying to improve your site is critical to your search engine optimization success. You should always revisit your sites, blogs, lenses, etc. to build for the future.

So here are the things you should do in your fall cleanup:

1. Fix all broken links - if the link is gone then remove the hyperlink tags and just underline the link with a broken link annotation.

2. Check your site's HTML and CSS consistency - have you been fiddling with your site layout but forgetting to check if it is completely clean? Did you happen to leave out an end tag?

3. Optimize for SEO - do your pages have titles that are keyword friendly? Are your page titles optimized to remove the site or blog name on every page?

4. Get your critical section headers optimized - be sure all keyword focused pages have H1 tags on the section or paragraph headers. Move any unnecessary H1 tags away from deep within the main flow of the html - in other words, have the title and H1 tags be near the top of your page source.

5. Highlight keyword phrases - be sure to add bold headings around your optimized keywords.

6. Add alt keys to your images - always add descriptive keywords as alt tags to your site images.

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