There are a number of factors that influence your rankings in the search engines. There are also a number of mistakes that you can easily make that will negatively affect your rankings and send that coveted free Google traffic to your competitor. You certainly don’t want that to happen, right?
Avoiding Google Penalties: Hummingbird, Panda, Penguin
As I’m sure you can imagine, there are quite a few ways to screw up your search engine optimisation. This will cause you to feel the sting of Google as your sites get slapped and disappear from the face of the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Harmless animals or deadly traps for webmasters?
This can be especially difficult to deal with if you previously had high rankings, loads of free traffic and sales galore due to your keywords ranking at the top of the first page of Google. It can be devastating to watch your business disappear overnight. Nobody wants to see this happen to you, so heed this warning and avoid Google penalties altogether.
Backlinking: It’s All About Quality And Relevance
Whilst links are still important, it’s the quality of the links rather than the quantity that rule the day now. Make sure your backlinks are coming from relevant blogs and websites where possible. You cannot always control this, but do the best you can. Notice I said ‘relevant’? If you are in the automotive industry, say a motor mechanic or automotive electrician, it doesn’t make sense for your site to have back-links from sites that are predominantly about religion, politics or health. Google can and does look at the relevancy and quality of your backlink profile and if things don’t add up then your keywords could take a battering.
Now don’t get these links from just anywhere. Make sure they come from websites with high quality content that people know, like and trust. Hint, there are many many social media sites where your company can set up a profile and leverage the authority of the site. Sites like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest are perfect for this purpose. Now, these sites are not for every business, however by having an active involvement on Facebook say, you can interact with potential customers.
Don’t Fall For The Over Optimisation Trick
Over optimisation can take many forms. Predominantly it’s to do with your on-page keyword usage and the anchor text used to build your backlinks (off-page). Other forms of over optimisation can be with the naming of your page extensions i.e. http://yourdomain.com/keyword, the use of hidden text and the meta titles, descriptions and keywords. On that last point, all niches are different and you need to find out what the standard is for your niche or industry.
Don’t Get Sucked Into A Cheap SEO Deal
Keeping up with Google is a full time occupation these days. We’ve had clients who’ve had success in the past. I’m talking 3 to 4 years ago when SEO was pretty easy. Those days are long gone and unless you’ve been lucky enough and intuitive enough to have done all the right things to keep ranking, you are going to need an expert SEO company to help you achieve and maintain an effective SEO presence.
Not only does it take several hours of study, research and discussing tactics and strategies with mastermind groups every cost an SEO incurs is in US Dollars. This has increased our costs in the last 6 months by 35% and that doesn’t include the time factor.
If you’re looking for cheap SEO, you’re in the wrong place! If you’re looking for a quick, temporary fix, you’re also in the wrong place. We can help you increase your online presence and your bottom line BUT unless you have a long term view you won’t succeed on-line. SEO is not a sprint, it’s a marathon.
