What can i do to stop my site from dropping in the rankings

[ClaireH-184886]

Hi, we were number one in google for the keyword lifestyle magazine but now our magazine website www.in2town.co.uk is doing very bad in the rankings. One week ago we were around 8 then we went to 12 and now we are on the third page and i am not sure what is happening.

We wanted and needed our home page to rank for the keywords of lifestyle magazine, lifestyle news but none of these keywords are doing very well with google

can anyone please point me in the right direction so i can stop my site falling any further

I am not sure if the home page is properly optimized but i have never had trouble with it before

many thanks

[ClaireH-184886]

Hi thank you for this. Yes i do need guidance. that is without a doubt.

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Diane

I think you need to do a couple of things.

1. Clean up some of the very worst links to ensure you don't end up with a penalty or problems from some of the link building that has been done. Check out linkdetox.com to help with this and then do a manual audit.

2. Look at the biggest and best sites in your industry OR sites where you feel there is a big cross over audience - that is readers of that site would enjoy reading your site and then see if you can pitch them a guest blog post. The idea is to go for exposure here and if you win a link in the bargain then all the better!

With regards to getting links you need to have great content and to really network with other bloggers. Once you get established and people start to talk about what you are doing then people will want to link to it.

There is more to this, obviously, but it starts with great content. I wrote something about this here if it helps:

http://www.bowlerhat.co.uk/blog/earning-links-work-talk-hustle/

Really, as I see with most of the people I work with, you lack strategy. Nothing is terribly wrong with what you are doing, you just need some guidance with regards to the content creation winning links and to help you from straying to the dark side.

Cheers!
Marcus

[ClaireH-184886]

hi thanks for this. we have never been great at getting links, we have really struggled on this.

can you explain more about this please

do a small amount of triple A guest posts on big sites with the intention of generating exposure with a bonus link (rather than a link with bonus exposure).

What we have been trying to work out, is to get people to link back to us. we have just started allowing guest posts, and we are trying to work out ways of getting the people who write for us to link back, would love to hear your thoughts on this

many thanks for your help

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Diane

From a quick look at things I would say the rankings for 'lifestyle magazine' were predominately based on the link building done for the site as we have some heavy usage of 'lifestyle magazine' as the main anchor.

Links on pages like these:

http://brownsvillebankruptcyattorney.com/resources.php?cid=8&page=7

http://brownsvilleaccidentlawyer.com/resources.php?cid=8&page=8

None of which are currently indexed are doing you any good and looking at the general ratio and type of linking sites, it is lucky you have not fell foul of this before now.

On a plus note, you don't seem to have a penalty for these terms (from the briefest of looks) and it seems that you are really just seeing the result of the devaluation of lots of your linking pages / sites.

Ultimately, you can't rely on a single keyword as your traffic strategy for your site and you would be far better focusing on a wide range of lifestyle related keywords with your blog content. It seems you are a magazine with lots of content so I would make this your focus and try to bring traffic in via a wide range of pages.

Ultimately, you need to flip your strategy on it's head.

• focus on content and building a readership
• build traffic via a wide array of content items
• bring people back to the site by generating social sign ups and seeding your content
• Be careful with regards to quality and who you let guest post on the site
• do a small amount of triple A guest posts on big sites with the intention of generating exposure with a bonus link (rather than a link with bonus exposure).

Really, you just need to focus on making your site great, forget about  these very general and vague keywords and set some real business related goals and track those rather than rankings and you should be good to go. A well ran content strategy will outperform a well optimised single keyword tenfold with enough time and effort behind it.

Hope that helps!
Marcus