• Trying your hardest?
• Failing to rise above the masses?
• Visitor numbers static?
• Google's spider not interested?

Does your site have Sick Site Syndrome?

According to "It's A Wonderful Life", a bell rings every time an Angel Gets Its Wings. Similarly, a cheer goes up every time a spammer gets dinged.

But there is no cause for celebration when an honest webmaster building a clean and honest site, cannot get listed in the search results - or rather, can get listed - but too far down to be useful.

In some cases, of course, it's fair competition. If there are 50,000 Dog Lovers' sites, not all can appear in the top ten. But every site should appear where it deserves to appear; and if your site is regularly beaten by sites you know to be inferior, it may be a matter of Sick Site Syndrome.

The point about Sick Site Syndrome, is that it really is treatable, and much of that treatment involves simple common sense; following Search Engine Guidelines, checking for broken links and so on.

But some problems do require a little bit of judgement to get right - especially when you've previously acted on a fair bit of bad advice, and the site needs a thorough Spring Clean!

We cannot promise your site eternal life - but most sites can benefit - and sick sites can go a long way!

So What is Sick Site Syndrome?

"A combination of benign signs and symptoms that - taken together - damages a site's relationship with the search engines"

SSS is a combination of issues that can hog-tie your site. No site is perfect, and minor errors will not make a lot of difference. But taken together, these little things can add up to serious optimization damage.

Check My Site Now

Price held until 31 July 2008
- then it must rise to $75.00

Thought For The Page

Some people look at this site and think "He's crazy - he thinks he can advise on optimization, and yet his own site is hardly optimized at all"

They Miss The Point! - Worse, they forget Basic SEO:

What do you think the main key phrase is for this site? Yes, you got it - Sick Site Syndrome. Now search for that in Google.

The site also performs well for several other useful terms.

So why would I optimize? For PR fans, I have a respectable (if unexciting) PR=3. But what matters, the site is exactly where I need to be. At some point, I may need to optimize. But at this moment, I don't. And I'd be a fool to. A simple, navigable site is all I need.

Over-optimization is major cause of sick site syndrome, and is to be avoided; read up here on that, and for Google, read their guidelines with special emphasis on linking issues. Get them right, and Google is generally pretty fair.