Every now and then we have customers who want to cancel their service because the SEO effort has not generated an ROI in terms of sales through the website.  While this is certainly reasonable to assume, it’s almost an unfair proposition given the amount of external factors unrelated to SEO that can drive a “sale” on a website.

Consider that the first and foremost goal of search engine optimization is to raise the visibility of the website in the search engines, by increasing the organic rankings for a variety of keywords related to the business.

So the basic equation then, is that SEO leads to higher rankings, higher rankings lead to an increase in traffic, and the increase in traffic leads to an increase in sales.  Seems reasonable on the surface, right?

However, as we analyze this thought process, we see that the “increase in sales” goal, or directive,  is all the way at the end of the funnel.  When most SEO engagements start off, the conversation revolves around keywords of importance, content, links and maybe expected traffic increases — but almost never conversion rates.  You might be able to fairly assume that the existing conversion rate could be applied to the new traffic generated from the SEO effort, but the discussion really requires further investigation of the design, usability, and other factors that lead to a sale.  Now we’re not just talking about SEO; we’re also talking about conversion optimization, and A/B testing to get to the desired results–a service that the SEO firm may not be performing, involved with, or even have control over.

The second problem lies in the “keywords related to the business” statement.  I can tell you that most customers don’t know for certain which keywords drive sales.  If we did, we’d just focus on only those words and solve the sales problem.  But the answer is far more convoluted than you would think.  They may know what they’d like to be found for, but for the most part, those terms are not keywords with “buying intent.”  Also, what about click attribution?  When does PPC get the credit, versus SEO?

So I offer an attempt at a solution to this madness.

First, with customers who are “green” at the whole SEO or Internet marketing thing, you could propose a 3 or 4 month PPC campaign, target a variety of keywords, and measure which had the best conversion rate.  You could take this same performance logic and apply it to the SEO campaign, and hope for the same, or similar results.  In my opinion, visits through a paid channel should come with increased buying intent, as opposed to the organic channel, which could be more research-oriented visits — but I can’t say for sure.

Second, we could perhaps do a better job as SEO-ers in terms of classifying the keyword targets into the marketing/sales funnel.  The typical marketing or sales funnel has 3 sections:  Awareness, Consideration and Purchase.  Ideally, a keyword in the Awareness channel will create a lead for you to nurture, but not a hard sale, as might a keyword in the Purchase funnel.  In my illustration of a fictitious hosting company, you can see how you might bucket these keywords:

So as we get better as marketers about driving results, it’s clear that the most important step is to set the expectations correctly up front — not just in terms of rankings or traffic, but also about sales. Have that conversation up front and make sure everyone knows what they’re signing up for.  Because if you’re used to a sprint, you’ll need to start training for a marathon.

Is It Fair For SEO To Be Tied Directly to Website Sales? is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

Many of the local directory websites are now selling “SEO” services to their customers, but they employ questionable tactics. After submitting a free local listing to Local.com to help bolster our customer’s local search results by adding more citations for his website, their sales staff bombarded our customer (David Magill of Ultimate Construction who does things like bobcat services) with phone call after phone call, “guaranteeing” placement in the search results. I wondered what “guarantees” they were making, and asked David to just have them call us next time.

Note: I don’t really worry about other SEO companies calling my customers – especially ones like these. We’ve never lost

I transcribed most of the phone call I had with the Local.com rep as accurately as I could (I did not record it, although I wish I had) so you can see how they sell you, and what to look out for.

———————————————————————————————————————

(Call transcribed as of December 14, 2011 at around 3pm). RJ=sales rep from Local.com, RK=Ryan Kelly from Pear Analytics.

RJ: Hey Ryan, this is [name here] and I’m calling you because David Magill gave me your number, and I wanted to see if we can work with you guys because we can guarantee a first page placement in Google, or we work for free until we do…

RK: (cutting him off) Hi [name] — who are you with?

RJ: Oh sorry, I’m with a company called Local.com.

RK: OK, gotcha. So how is it that you “guarantee” a first page placement? Are you talking about a listing on Local.com, or optimizations you’re going to do to his website? Like how does this work?

RJ: The way we do it is that we go through and research the keywords that will make money, and then we buy those domain names and we monitor them 24/7 to make sure you get to the first page pretty fast.

RK: So wait, are you talking about getting exact match domain names, and then trying to rank those? Where do you get the content from?

RJ: Exact match?? Yes, that’s what it is. Because we are one of Google’s Top 10 customers, spending about $3.1 million with them, we’re able to get you ranked faster than if you were to do this on your own. We look at the quality score of the keywords and assess them to see which will drive more revenue for you.

RK: Quality score? That’s a term used in Google AdWords. Are you talking about doing PPC? I thought we were talking about SEO here?

RJ: Let me see here…. (scrambling though papers)

RK: And what do you mean by “$3.1M” — is that per year, per month, per day?

RJ: Yes sir, that’s $3.1 million per month.

RK: OK, so I don’t understand how your advertising spend with Google has anything to do with ranking David for some exact match domains you guys would manage for him.

(This is where the conversation starts to take a dive, as the rep struggles to articulate what he is trying to sell and the benefits of it, and is clearly working off a bunch of pre-written scripts and rebuttals.)

RJ: Well, look, I’m doing a search for “contractors in San Antonio” and I see Zachary, Bartlett Cocke, ……(mumbles some other websites) — but I don’t see you guys.

RK: I know, but we don’t care about that word. We’re going after “bobcat services San Antonio”

RJ: OK let me write that down. Let me see… Well, you guys are all the way down at the bottom of the page for that term. Nobody gets any calls down there.

RK: Sure, but you just said you guarantee a “first page” position — isn’t that what we have here? Not only that, but a) we just started the campaign less than 2 months ago; b) you’re calling me from Las Vegas, so I bet your search results are slightly different than mine here in San Antonio; and c) we have placement in the paid section all the way at the TOP of the page so we can measure conversions to see if it is ultimately a good candidate for SEO.

RJ: Well look, I’m not trying to educate you here, but we’re a publicly traded company on the NASDAQ. Are you publicly traded?

RK: (laughing) No, do I have to be?

RJ: I don’t know, but you know, you’re dealing with the “big boys”

RK: Fantastic! Now I know who I need to call when what we’re doing doesn’t work anymore.

————————————————————————————————————————

The Local.com sales rep later phoned my customer and continued to berate him, and even removed his free listing from Local.com.

Flaws with the sales pitch

First, the sales rep tried to confuse me with paid advertisement versus organic listings. He used the word “quality score” which is a term used only in Google AdWords, and that’s not what he was selling — he was trying to sell organic search engine optimization services.

Second, he tried to make a correlation between how much they spend with Google each month, and the results of their organic listings for customers. Study after study proves this to be wrong, and it misleads the potential buyer. Just because Local.com is writing big checks to Google every month doesn’t mean their exact match domains are being pumped up in the SERP’s.

Third, the rep tries to associate some kind of “24/7 monitoring” with rankings, as if that busy activity is going to somehow rank the site higher. Who writes and posts the content? Is it spun, or is a professional writer going to interview me first? How are links built and maintained? With Pear’s products, these are all tasks that must be carefully constructed and deployed, or it could result in a disaster for the customer.

Fourth, he uses the term “guarantee” — a word I don’t like because it means that they can choose absolute junk keywords, and then say “see, we got you to the first page of Google for ‘quality construction services in San Antonio’” or something like that.

The Exact-Match Domain Theory

What Local.com is selling is a strategy in which they determine several keywords the customer should rank for, purchase those domains for the customer, put up a website such as “bobcatservicessanantonio.com”, and hope they can get it to the first page of results in a fairly short amount of time. How they initially determine the “right” keywords is not only questionable, but many in the SEO community are just waiting for the day in which Google cracks down on these types of websites.

In a sense, Google overcompensates for exact match domains because with many searches, like “ny times” or “southwest” they typically serve up the exact match domain because it’s highly likely that it was exactly what you were looking for.

Here is a great article on SEOmoz theorizing that their time is limited.

So, what Local.com will do is choose several “easy” keywords that they can create quick websites for, and get ranked on the first page of results, thereby fulfilling their contractual obligation.

At Pear, we prefer to build value to the main website, not some shell website for lead generation that might not exist a year from now. In fact, after only about 42 days of working with David, we’ve got him on the first page (position #8) for “bobcat services San Antonio” — a word HE wanted to rank for because he gets a lot of business from that service. We still have a lot of work to do, but so far everything is progressing, and it’s building trust and value for HIS website –not some knock-off site with crap content on it.

Why You Should Avoid Local.com’s SEO Services is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

A while back, we wrote a post suggesting that Google serves up its own products over other brands in organic search.  It’s pretty obvious – just type in words like “voice”, “images”, “maps”  or even “plus” and Google assumes you’re looking for their products.  How convenient.

Well, they’re at it again.

A story reported by TechCrunch’s Eric Schonfeld yesterday identified a “classy” move by Google, whereby they bid on the keyword “yelp” to serve up an ad which takes you to Zagat.  On the surface, no big deal, right?  Companies bid on other competitors’ names ALL THE TIME.  The only rule is that you are not supposed to use a trademarked name in the actual ad itself (like it is here).

courtesy of Mashable.com

In fact, here is the official statement from Google, which says in part:

“Google recognizes the importance of trademarks. Our AdWords Terms and Conditions prohibit intellectual property infringement by advertisers. Advertisers are responsible for the keywords they choose to generate advertisements and the text that they choose to use in those advertisements.”

So how did this get through the Google AdWords filter?  Clearly, this misleads the person searching for Yelp.  If you’ve run a PPC campaign lately, it’s not all that hard to get a “your ad has been declined” message, prompting you to dig a little deeper to make sure you’re not using any trademarked words, or among other errors, doing any kind of “bait and switch” tactics.

Ah, well it gets better.  It turns out Google actually purchased Zagat last month (Sept. 2011) for some $151 million.  How convenient that this ad wasn’t “disapproved” by the Google catch-all filter.  It is for this exact reason Google also had to take the stand in front of Congress last month.

Google Violates Its Own Policy (Again) is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

If you’re serious about online marketing, SEO is one of the main areas you are budgeting.  You also have other forms of paid marketing that you’re using to drive immediate leads.  I call this “short-term lead generation”.  The reason for the name is because you can literally generate leads within hours of getting your ads up and running.  Not the case with SEO, particularly if you’re not doing it well currently – but the idea is that as you become better at SEO in terms of driving qualified leads, you can choose to become less dependent on paid sources, particularly if the ROI is not there.  SEO is a long-term strategy, and hence why I feel it is the marketer’s long-term lead generation strategy.

That’s right – I said it.  SEO is more than rankings and traffic.  It’s about the right traffic by increasing rankings for the right words.  But how do you know what the right words are?  You can mine data from paid sources who are actually converting into leads to feed your SEO activities, from premium content to link building to press releases.  After all, you want to fail fast, and fail cheap.  That means if the keyword(s) are not converting well after several tests, then you may be attracting the wrong customers with this keyword.  You will begin to identify which set of keywords tend to drive the “researching” crowd, versus the word sets that tend to drive the “buying” crowd.

Once you have that, you can then nurture the “researchers” by offering free downloads or other resources instead of hard-selling them.  For those who have already done their research and are ready to “buy,” you can present them with pricing and test your call-to-action copy, button colors, and more.

As you hone your SEO performance, you will begin to see that your cost per lead will decrease significantly compared to other paid sources.  But, that doesn’t mean that you should discontinue your paid lead generation.  Determine what your max cost per lead is (15% of your total cost per acquisition, or what you’re willing to spend to get a new customer) and keep your sources under that threshold.

SEO: Long-Term Lead Generation is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

Adding an XML sitemap to your site is not only a good way to ensure all of your pages are properly indexed, but it’s also the way Google would like you to tell them where your content is.  That’s right folks, Google is getting you to do their work for them.  So why do you need an XML sitemap anyway?

According to Google, these are particularly helpful if:

1) Your site has dynamic content that you would like to be searchable.  Dynamic content is hard to get picked up unless it is linked to or Googlebot happens to stumble across it.

2) If you have pages that are not easily discoverable, or you use a lot of AJAX.

3) If your website is very new and does not have a lot of links pointing to it, then Google will take longer to find it and prioritize it.

4) If you have a large section of content that is archived, or not well linked.

So basically, if you have crappy site architecture, then you’ll want to have an XML sitemap.  You can create one here for free, or if you are in WordPress, download the Google XML Sitemaps plugin.  Once you have your sitemap, and you’ve placed it in the root folder of your website (some of you may have to FTP the file up to the server), then all you have to do next is go into Google Webmaster Tools, create your account, add the little meta tag to verify ownership, and then add the sitemap.  It’s actually pretty easy to do, and should take you about 15 minutes from creating the sitemap, placing it, and then adding it to WMT.

Video XML Sitemaps

Another way to let Google know what kind of content you have is to submit a video XML sitemap.  You would put it in the same place in WMT, or you can add a URL path to the sitemap in your robots.txt file.  Check out these guidelines for video XML sitemaps.

How to Add an XML Sitemap is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

In one of our recent blog posts, we posted an ROI calculator that helps you figure out whether you’re getting enough value from what you spend on SEO by targeting the right keywords. The results were based on an extremely conservative “fudge factor,” or an estimated margin of error, of about 90%, meaning that we only used 10% of given search volumes in our calculations. However, the numbers weren’t all adding up, so we conducted an experiment using several websites. The results showed some rather major discrepancies in the search volume numbers returned by Google AdWords.

Currently, Music.com ranks #2 for the keyword “music” on Google. According to Google AdWords, this should give them a high percentage of the estimated 124,000,000 global searches that Google says occur monthly. Using the belief of Chitika Research Director Daniel Ruby that ranking #2 for a specific keyword will earn you about 17% of all searches (we use 16.96% in the ROI calculator), Music.com should be getting 21,080,000 visits from the keyword music alone per month. This may seem like an attainable goal for a keyword as common as “music,” but based on traffic estimates from Compete.com, the actual number of hits Music.com gets from this keyword is nowhere near 21 million.
So there appear to be three logical explanations for this discrepancy. First, the percentage of a given search you can expect to secure is unrealistically high. Second, the Google AdWords tool is overestimating the monthly global searches. Or thirdly—both are correct. Our initial hypothesis was that the second option was the most likely, given the large amount of research done by Chitika on the traffic percentage of Google’s search results. Our experiment’s procedure looked like this:

Step 1: We identified 4,000 sample keywords from 7 websites which we have Google Analytics data for (Peer1.com, Serverbeach.com, Voxeo.com, Music.com, Brandstack.com, Unbounce.com, and Missionrs.com)
Step 2: We then found the Google rankings for all 4,000 keywords.
Step 3: We then sorted the 4,000 keywords by the best ranking to the worst ranking and narrowed the list down to the words which ranked in the top 10 results (roughly 1,000).
Step 4: For the remaining words, we gathered the individual search volumes (broad, global)
Step 5: Next, we went to each sites respective Google Analytics account and pulled the actual traffic from each keyword.
Step 6: Per each SERP, we took the actual visits and compared that number to how many Chitika’s calculations would project it should get. The percentage of difference between the two numbers is what we call a “fudge factor”, or the percentage that Google AdWords inflates the global search volumes for a given keyword.

The results of the experiment told us two things: firstly, that Google AdWords was significantly overestimating search volumes and secondly, that this overstatement tended to rise exponentially with popularity of a keyword. Looking at the necessary deflation of Google AdWords’ search volumes for the top ten rankings on Google, we found that, on average, AdWords is overstating global search volume by 42.29%. This fudge factor is an important part of our ROI calculator and determining realistic traffic figures. So if, for example, you were to try to target the keyword “cheap dedicated hosting”, it would be wise to apply this 42.29% fudge factor to Google AdWords’ estimate of 8,100 monthly global searches.

So ranking #1 “cheap dedicated hosting” would earn a website 1,606, not 2,782, because of this 42.49% fudge factor. This is demonstrated on the graphic below.

The graph below illustrates our second finding: Google AdWords exponentially overstates search volume as search frequency of keyword increases. The Y-axis shows the true market share of a given keyword by a website which ranks #1 for that keyword and the X-axis show Google AdWord’s estimated volume. As you can see, once the search volume moves past 3,000, it becomes extremely difficult to obtain any sort of significant share of the searches. The market share is certainly nowhere near the 34.45% warranted by ranking #1. The data for the second through tenth position tell a similar story. It seems the only way to obtain a decent percentage of hits for a keyword is to target and rank for moderate keywords. So while a fudge factor of 36.8% is a good average to use, this will typically need to be increased for higher search volume keywords and decreased for lower search volume keywords. You can see from the graph below that, on smaller keywords, the market share is as high as 160%. Obviously, this isn’t accurate either, so while a fudge factor is an important factor in calculating traffic, it is far from an exact tool.

The take-away from this experiment is to exercise caution when targeting a specific rank and market share for keywords if you are relying on Google AdWord’s estimation of search volume. While it may not be an exact figure, we recommend using 42.29% as your fudge factor. This number becomes more subjective when dealing with extremely high or low volume estimations as well. For very large keywords, with volumes of 15,000 or greater, an accurate fudge factor would be about 90% and for smaller keyword, under 1,500 searches, the fudge factor is actually under stated by about 60%. The range on these percentages, although just an estimation, shows the inconsistency of Google AdWords’ estimations. The bottom line is if you’re going to spend a majority of your budget trying to target a specific position for a high traffic keyword, just know that the reward is a slice of a much smaller pie than Google would have you believe.

How Accurate are Google AdWords Search Volumes? is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

Black Hat SEO – Dilbert Style is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

One of the most challenging aspects of promoting SEO services to new businesses and contacts is getting in the door.  We are fortunate to have built some name recognition, and to rank well for a wide variety of search-related keywords.  But even with strong inbound traffic getting in front of and helping people realize the impact that good search placement can deliver is difficult.

The amount of SEO-related spam that is delivered on a daily basis to business and website owners often creates the impression that SEO is a shady business, or that SEO companies are willing to use unethical means to try to even temporarily increase search position of a client’s site.  Of course that impression is often incorrect, but it remains an obstacle to get past when explaining SEO services.

Additionally, explaining the advantages of a good position on a search engine results page really does not do justice to the potential revenue that can accompany such placement.  For some, ranking well seems more like a feather in the cap of their business – a point of pride – but with little actual value.  Of course, that position is usually one adopted by the businesses that do not currently rank well.

In order to better approximate the actual value of a well formulated SEO plan, Ryan Kelly, our CEO, has created a more comprehensive ROI Calculator.  Many people tend to focus on just one or two major keywords that they would like to rank better for, but in reality there are potentially hundreds of search terms and phrases that could be providing traffic to a site.  Usually those most-desired keywords also have considerably higher search traffic, and the competition for placement that comes with it.

Targeting several lower trafficked keywords provides an increased likelihood of ranking well, with the additional advantage of being able to target keywords more specifically related to the business model.  By targeting more specific keywords and keyword phrases, we can focus on words and phrases that convert well while lowering the level of competition we are up against.

For this example, we’re starting with just nine keywords, but that can be increased or decreased by adding or removing rows.  Also this demonstration assumes that a site currently does not rank within the top three results for any search terms.  We tried to be conservative by using a conversion rate of 2% for our example, but that rate will change dramatically depending on what action actually constitutes a conversion – buying a car will have a lower conversion rate than, for example, filling out a form or even purchasing a book.

As far as instructions go, the orange cells are the cells to edit (on the copy you download, of course).  For keywords, you can create your own, or visit Google’s Adwords site and use their keyword tool by entering a few keywords or by entering your own site to have it generate keywords for you.  That tool can be found here: adwords.google.com.  You need a (free) account, so sign in, click on Reporting and Tools, then Keyword Tool, and you’re able to enter keywords or your site to generate additional, related keywords.  Enter those in the column marked “Keyword.”  Search Volume will be available in Google’s Keyword Tool as well – copy those figures in column “B” on the spreadsheet.  Then, visit Compete.com’s website to find out approximately how many views your site has in a month, or if you already  have Analytics installed you can use your actual traffic numbers for column E, row 12.  Estimate your own conversion rate as well as your average revenue per conversion.  Then, the spreadsheet will calculate the potential increased revenue you will likely experience if you’re able to increase the rank of those keywords to one of the top three positions.

Keep in mind as you perform this exercise that the higher the Search Volume of the terms you are targeting, the harder it will be to show up in the top three results.  For example, if you try to target a keyword such as “business,” with search volume of 55,600,000, you probably are not likely to end up anywhere NEAR the first page regardless of how hard you try.  However, if you are looking to target a keyword phrase such as “business owner search,” with 1,300 approximate searches per month, you will likely be able to reach the front page with good content and a solid link building strategy.

We might go in and produce a more polished version of this tool for use on our site, but in the meantime we wanted to share the spreadsheet prototype that we created.  You can download the document from Google Docs here: ROI Calculator for SEO.  I hope you find this tool useful, and if you have any questions, please feel free to let me know!

ROI Calculator for Search Engine Optimization is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

When you’re setting up your WordPress site for SEO, or search engine optimization, there are a few plugins you will want to install.  One of them is going to be either the All in One SEO Pack, or the Platinum SEO Pack.  For quite some time, we were installing the All in One SEO Pack, but then found several advantages to the Platinum SEO Pack that made us switch over.

Both plugins are relatively easy to install – the usual click of a button with most WordPress plugins.  However, both require some SEO knowledge before you start clicking on all of the endless settings.  Let’s go through some of those:

For the All in One SEO Pack, you start by configuring what you want your homepage tags to have.  It will become the defacto tags throughout the site if you don’t modify them on your individual pages and posts, or set the option to “rewrite titles,” which is generally set to %post_title% | %blog_title%.  All of this is nearly exactly the same for the Platinum SEO Pack, except for one thing: the option to “automatically do 301 redirects for permalink changes”.  This is a HUGE deal because most site owners are going in and changing page names (i.e. URL’s) and fail to realize they created a bunch of duplicate content by having multiple versions of the same page indexed in Google.

Both the All in One SEO Pack and the Platinum SEO Pack have the canonical URL option, which allows you to tell the search engine what your preferred version of the URL should be.  While rel=canonical works well, you still want to “noindex” a lot of the duplicate pages WordPress will produce from a single post.  For example, if you create a single post with one tag that is only assigned to this post, and in one category that is only assigned to this post, you will inadvertently create several duplicate pages:

www.site.com/blog/the-example-post/

www.site.com/blog/the-tag-you-used-for-the-post/

www.site.com/blog/the-category-you-used-for-the-post/

plus the comments and RSS feed pages that could also spawn off of this one post.  What the Platinum SEO Pack offers in terms of options to thwart this kind of activity are much more controls for noindexing that will be useful to the 95% of websites who don’t post often, or categorize and tag properly.  For instance, I can easily no index categories (unless you have an SEO strategy for these pages), date based archives, tags, comment pages, RSS feed pages, search results pages, sub pages and author archives.  All In One SEO Pack only lets me noindex tags, archives and categories.

Also, have you ever wondered where Google is getting the meta description or title tag for your website, and it’s not one you’ve written, or you changed it?  Sometimes Google pulls those from the ODP (Open Directory Project, or DMOZ), or from the Yahoo Directory.  In the Platinum SEO Pack, I can choose to add a “noodp” or “noydir” meta tag, which tells Google not to get my meta data from there, and to use what’s on the site instead (note however, Google still may override you and create their own meta description tag if they don’t like yours – I can’t do this in the All in One SEO Pack.

The rest of the options are generally the same, but keep in mind you can’t have both of these plugins installed because they will not work properly.  You will have to uninstall one of them.

SEO for WordPress: All in One SEO Pack, or Platinum SEO Pack? is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

We’ve been helping out our customer Zahn Development with their WordPress site recently.  They came to us with an unusual problem – their website does not show up in Google when they search “zahn development.”  (By the way, these guys build some of the most beautiful, contemporary eco-friendly homes in South Florida….I want them to build me a house someday when I can afford them )

It turns out this is not that “unusual” of a problem, really – and it’s a super easy fix that takes a few minutes.  I’m going to show you 3 things you can do to diagnose your website if you have the same issue.

Step 1:  type in “site:www.yoursite.com” into the Google search box (but without the quotes, or the results will come back with “nothing found”).  If it returns back all, or most of the pages from your website, this is a good sign.  If it returns back nothing, or it can’t find pages from your site, this is a sign that you are blocking the search engines.

Step 2: view the source code of your home page by right clicking on the page, and selecting “view source”.  Scan the header section for a meta robots tag.  If it says “index, follow” then you are good.  If you find a tag that says “noindex, nofollow”, this is a clear indication that you are telling Google to NOT index this page.

Step 3: in WordPress, check the Privacy tab under Settings.  Is it set to block search engines?  There is the culprit.  Note that even if you have the All in One SEO Pack, or the Platinum SEO Pack installed, and have it set to index/follow, the Privacy tab setting overrides this.

So that was it.  A few clicks of the mouse, and in a couple days or less, we’ll see all of Zahn’s pages back in the search engines.  Note that this issue really only occurred in Google – it turned out that Bing and Yahoo didn’t care about the noindex/nofollow tag and completely ignored it, so their pages did show up in those engines.

Can’t Find Your Website When You Search For Your Own Company Name? is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.