Category: On SEO

Google is literally punishing sites for bad SEO habits. Not just black hat tactics, but all non-ethical spammy techniques. (The grey area stuff). On April 24th of this year Google unleashed the Penguins. Here’s a link to Google’s official announcement.

Any serious Google update gets a name. There was Google Caffeine, when Google started to account for page load times in their algorithm. Then there was Google Panda, when Google changed everything. Now there is Google Penguin, the SEO crackdown. What does this mean for you? If you have used good SEO habits, nothing unethical or borderline unethical then you have nothing to worry about. However, you may accidentally be doing something that Google will punish you for. Maybe you are already noticing that your traffic has dropped dramatically.

What SEO tactics are being punished?

Keyword Stuffing:

Websites that stuff their articles and blogs with keywords that either don’t make sense or are overused, are being punished. They do this to get more search traffic. That is changing very fast.

Unnatural Links:

Apparently Google is gunning after paid links. They use links in their algorithms to determine content value. To increase link SEO some people pay for links in other sites. However, Google is cracking down on any paid links, link spam, comment spam and or unnatural links within content.

So if you don’t do either of the above, you are probably going to be okay. However, if you have noticed a big drop in your traffic in the last 4 weeks, it is likely that Google Penguined you. You will want to remove keyword stuffing and unnatural links pointing to your site.

The following is an exerpt on a talk I gave about using blogging to increase your Organic SEO.

SEO which means Search Engine Optimization, is critical to rank well on Search Engines like Google. You probably already knew that, but do you know how search engines actually index content? It may surprise you. Search engines want to give their users the very best information possible, so they use a formula to determine the most relevant content to display on the top search results. They look at keywords, links, site authority, social media links, domain authority, and the load time of your site. You may be wondering, “Where should I focus my time?”. If you are new to search engine optimization, and are looking for a strategy, focus on blogging. Fortunately writing articles on blogs targets nearly all of the major SEO variables at once.

1. Keywords

Search engines love keywords. But not just random keywords, they like phrases and sentences too. When writing a blog post some words will be used over and over again. For example, if you write a blog about a vacation destination, it is likely that the word “vacation” will be used multiple times. These words are known as keywords. Search engines calculate the number of times keywords are used within content as part of their page ranking algorithm. They also look at the surrounding content and sentences used near the keywords to ensure that the words are used naturally. (Important note here. Don’t stuff your article with way too many keywords. Spammy sites do this and search engines are aware of this technique and punish sites for it.)

2. Relevance

Search engines want to provide the most relevant information to their users. In many cases, such as news feeds or topical information, they use the date the blog post was written to calculate its relevance. Often a day or two after posting a blog post you will see it ranking at the top of the search results, and then its rank will start to fall again. Blog posts help get websites on the top results when people are looking for the latest articles.

3. Authority

Site and Page Authority are calculated in a couple of ways. Firstly search engines look at how old a domain is. If it is newly registered then it won’t have the same age authority as an older domain. They also look at how many inbound links are pointing to the website. Blogging is a great way to increase inbound links. By providing valuable information, people will often link to your blog posts from their own websites or from Facebook and Twitter. It is generally agreed among SEO experts that direct links from other websites are ranked higher than links from social media sites.

4. Meta tags are dying

This is something that may surprise many people. It used to be that search engines relied heavily on meta tags in the top of your website’s html to index page results. Search engines still use them today, but not in the same way. Search engines rely on content within your site to index page results and then use meta tags to confirm the site’s purpose. Blog posts without any meta tags can still rank at the top of search results. While including meta tags is considered good practice, they have become secondary to site content.

5. More landing pages

Every time you write a post, a new page is created on your site. If you think of your website as a fishing net, every time you write a new post, the net gets bigger. Search engines index each blog as a unique page. Blogging also helps keep people on your site longer. By including links within your blog posts to similar older posts on your website, people are likely to click on the links and stay on your website longer. Search engines also use those internal links in calculating the articles relevance.

The Outcome

If good SEO is important to you, then writing blog posts is the best way to improve it. If you write just one new blog article a week, at the end of the year your website will have 52 new keyword rich, authority building, SEO haven web pages.