Not too long ago, Google made a major algorithm change known to the SEO world as the Penguin update. In this update, Google made a massive change which forced companies to do a more complete and well-rounded job of generating backlinks to their sites. In essence, if all your links to your site looked the same, Google would penalize this type of activity.
What has spawned from this Penguin update is a number of questions. Just when I think I have learned a smart way of developing backing links and optimizing for the best search engine performance, I find a new change that completely messes up what I have been doing, how can I be sure that my SEO work will last?
The truth is the only way to make your SEO work last is by dedicating a lot of long hard ours into developing a quality website. The goal of Google’s panda update was not only to go against the quick hacker methods of generating backlinks, but it was also to reward those that work hard to generate quality backlinks through legitimate means.
Take a look at these free tips on how you can make sure your SEO work will not be wasted due to a massive search engine update:
- Use pages or blog posts to focus on certain keywords – If there is a certain keyword or phrase that is important to you, make sure you create a page that talks about that topic. For example, lets say you are working for a medical clinic website. Say you wanted to target people that had a question if the “Lap Band is good for losing weight?” You could then create a blog post (or page) that talked about the medical reasons why or why not the lap band was good for loosing weight. There is value in writing about topics that not only answer questions the medical facility clients have, but also bring in new eyes to see information the clinic has knowledge about.
- Create links to pages within your site from the main content area – Search engines put a lot of value into links that are within the content area of your website. It is very important that whenever you talk about a certain topic, that you highlight the text and create a link to the area of the website that discusses it. The words that are used within links are thought to be important by search engines. So for example, if you were writing about the “lap band” on some content, you would then make sure that you would then link that text to the “lap band” page or blog post on the website.
- Content is King! – I can’t stress it enough. Search engines love to see that a website has a wealth of information on a variety of relevant topics within their niche. It is important that many of the pages of your site use a decent amount of words showing that you are relevant to you market. Still focus on giving the user the information they want early on in the content, but if you can then expand on the information presented further down a page, that is going to help you rank stronger for keywords and for more relevant keywords. Blog posting will also be a strong way to continue to make your site relevant to search engines. Search engines like to see that sites are updating, so that will help out a lot!
- Network with other similar websites – Once you have your quality content that you love to share, make sure your colleagues and peers are seeing the content and linking to it. Many website will gladly link to your content as long as it has been proven high quality. After a certain amount of time, you will automatically get more and more backlinks coming without even having to work at getting them.
If you are passionate about your work, make sure you demonstrate it with your website’s content. Sure it takes a lot of time to do, but the time will certainly be repaid in the long run.
