What should an seo strategy include? Like most people, you may be wondering what is the best way to shaping your seo strategy to rank higher in Google.
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| Shaping Your SEO Strategy to Avoid Google Penalties |
Google constantly updates and implements an intricate algorithm to determine which websites deserve to be ranked the highest, and this algorithm rewards sites that are the most relevant to a user’s search.
In order to achieve phenomenal SEO results, you need to constantly keep up with Google’s algorithm changes, and that’s anything but easy.
Avoiding Google Penalties
Each year, Google changes its search algorithm around 500-600 times. Usually, at least one or two of these updates alter the SEO landscape in an enormous way that results in devastating ranking dips and penalties for unsuspecting businesses.
All of these major algorithm updates have been named after animals except for one. Five of the biggest updates are:-
- Panda
- Penguin
- Hummingbird
- Pigeon
- Mobilegeddon
Why might Google opt for so many algorithm updates?
While some think it’s to confuse SEO companies and to keep everyone guessing, the truth is that Google just wants to give searchers the best possible experience and penalize those attempting to game the system.
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Understanding and Avoiding Google Penalties
By avoiding the consequences of Google you can easily shape your SEO strategy harmoniously.
Regardless of how noble the search giant’s intentions may be, many businesses have lost millions of dollars due to being hit hard by a Google penalty.
When you are interested in search engine optimization as a marketing strategy or marketing techniques for SEO, you must adhere to and keep abreast of Google algorithm changes.
The following is an explanation of each of the major Google penalties, how they affect websites, and how to shape your SEO strategy to avoid them.
Panda Penalties
Panda, which debuted in February of 2011, was the first major update to the Google algorithm since its launch.
Google Panda fine-tuned the quality of search engine results by prioritizing highly relevant content users want to access and consume....
In one fell swoop, Google Panda crushed sites with low quality content while rewarding those that created intriguing content designed to inform and educate their readers.
No longer could a business get away with having sparse content and ranking highly. Almost every business realized that they would need to regularly post high-quality content if they wanted to rank well in Google.
To this day, Google is tweaking the Panda update.
How to Avoid Google Panda Penalties
To avoid Google Panda penalties and create an SEO strategy compatible with Google, There are three main things all businesses need to lookout for in order to avoid Google Panda penalties:
- Duplicate content
- High bounce rates
- Not enough unique visitors
If your site contains content that was directly copied from another website, Google is going to penalize you. Aside from the fact that it looks spam-like, duplicate content does little to enhance your brand or reputation.
A good rule of thumb is to ensure that at least 80% of the written text on any given post or page on your site is unique. There’s a bit of wiggle-room, but if a particular page has less than 70% of unique content, immediately take it down or thoroughly revise it.
If you for some reason need to keep the page up, add a no-index tag to it in order to prevent Google from indexing the page.
Likewise, it’s a good idea to run your guest posts and sponsored articles through a plagiarism checker like Siteliner or Dupli Checker. Again, the same 80% rule applies. If a guest blogger is scraping content, don’t put up his post.
The best thing you can do to avoid a Panda penalty is craft unique, high-quality content that searchers will want to read.
The second factor that can lead to a Google Panda penalty is having a high bounce rate. Your site’s bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who navigate away from your site after viewing only one page.
Symptoms of a high bounce rate include poor site design, sites that aren’t user-friendly, and a glaring lack of content, and If you have a budget.
You should pay attention to design best practices for SEO. Because not all website designs are SEO friendly, So do your design homework and make sure your design doesn't hurt your SEO efforts.
If you have a budget, you can combine paid search and membership strategies.
If your bounce rate on any given page or post is higher than 60%, you’re going to need to do some work to fix that.
Doing this might require a professional website redesign, but usually can be accomplished on your own by:
- Amplifying the content on a page (i.e. writing more).
- Adding attracting images.
- Making the page more aesthetically pleasing and engaging.
- Revamping the title.
- Utilizing a call-to-action
Lastly, Panda takes into account how many unique visitors you have coming to your site. Too few and Google will lower your search rank.
The best ways to improve how many unique visitors you have coming to your site is by regularly posting new content, improving the load time of your pages, and using more visual content.
Then it's time to find new approaches to diversify your marketing plan, or else you'll find yourself doomed in the internet world.
Penguin Penalties
penguin google penaltiesGoogle Penguin was introduced in April of 2012 to limit the unethical use of inbound and outbound links.
In the pre-Penguin era, you could quickly jump to the top of the search engine results page (SERP) simply by getting hundreds of low-quality backlinks pointing to your site.
However, since this was only a ploy by black hat SEO companies to fool Google into thinking that a particular site was an authority or content-rich, this type of link building is now penalized extremely severely.
Any kind of unnatural linking can result in a Penguin penalty. Unnatural linking takes many forms, but the most common are:
- Buying links.
- Creating link schemes.
- Offering a product for a link.
- Offering a service for a link.
- Randomly using links in content.
- Using software programs or tools to amass links.
How to Avoid Google Penguin Penalties
To avoid Google Penguin penalties and make it easier for you to shape your SEO strategy, follow the steps that we will mention.
Avoiding a Penguin penalty requires white hat link building efforts geared toward getting natural links to your site.
If you create high-quality content and promote it properly, you’ll naturally receive links instead of trying to pull one over on Google by getting placements in spammy directories or using automated software.
Penguin Strategy, If you already have tons of bad links, the best thing you can do to avoid a Penguin penalty is to use Google’s disavow links tool.
Disavowing a link tells the search giant that you don’t want a particular link to count in your link profile or for your SEO. It’s a way of purging bad links and telling Google that you’re trying to play by the rules.
Lastly, when link building, it’s extremely important to vary your anchor text.
Avoid using geographic identifiers for anchor text (e.g. “Baltimore traffic lawyer,” “Miami chiropractor,” etc.) or exact match anchor text (i.e. the exact key phrase you’re trying to rank for). Instead, try to get links that use your business or brand name, URL, or even long-tail keywords in the anchor text.
Ultimately, Panda and Penguin work in concert with one another to encourage sites to legitimately become authorities in their field through the creation of phenomenal content that people will naturally want to share on social media and organically link to on their own sites.
Google Hummingbird
google hummingbirdIn September of 2013, Google’s Hummingbird update transformed the way Google looked at search queries. It attempted to understand and account for the user’s intent behind a particular search. To do this, Hummingbird stressed the importance of the entire search query, not merely keywords. For the SEO world, this ushered in the reign of long-tail keywords.
For example, if you typed “Is black hat link building safe in 2022?” into Google, it will prioritize all of those words, not merely “black hat link building” or “link building.” Likewise, sites using that entire phrase (or at least discussing the safety of this type of link building in 2016) will rank much higher than those that simply contained the keyword “black hat link building.”
Unlike Panda and Penguin, Hummingbird isn’t penalty based. It’s a brand new way to approach search rank that your site needs to incorporate into its SEO strategy.
If you want to rank well in the post-Hummingbird strategy era:
- Adapt your style of writing to be more informal.
- Anticipate the needs of your reader.
- Create more conversational headings.
- Emphasize what your readers need.
- Use long-tail keywords.
Remember, pages matching a searcher’s entire query (rather than just a few words) will rank highest.
Google Pigeon
Google Pigeon was released in July of 2014. It was launched in order to provide more useful and accurate local search results by tying them more closely to traditional web search ranking signals.
This algorithm update rocked the local SEO world when it first went live, and Google claimed that Pigeon created closer ties between the local algorithm and core algorithm.
Just like Hummingbird, Google Pigeon isn’t penalty based, but if you don’t shape your SEO strategy to account for it, you’ll get buried by hundreds of competitors who have.
The best way to make your site Pigeon friendly and climb the search ladder is to:
- Claim, verify, and get listed in local business directories (e.g. Yellow Pages, Cylex, etc.).
- Create a Google My Business account and fully complete your profile.
- Have a consistent name, phone, and address visible on your site.
- Make your site mobile-friendly since most local searchers use mobile devices, employ a mobile SEO strategy because most.
- Receive positive reviews on sites like Yelp from people who used your service or bought your product.
Lastly, since cities are subdivided into neighborhoods, try to reflect this when shaping your SEO strategy to offer more localized and accurate search results.
Google Mobilegeddon
more clicks more clientsDespite the fact that this update wasn’t named after an animal, it’s still one of the most influential to date.
In April of 2015, Google announced that it was planning on ranking mobile-friendly websites much higher than those that weren’t optimized for mobile devices.
Basically, Google Mobilegeddon incentivized all websites to be responsive and mobile-friendly by building that criteria into their search ranking algorithm.
Google decided to incorporate mobile-friendliness into its algorithm because an overwhelming majority of Internet surfers were using their smartphones to search the web.
After the Google Mobilegeddon update, a searcher may get different results for his query depending on whether he searches from his mobile device or computer.
The impact of this algorithm update was quite nominal when searching from a desktop or laptop. However, businesses that lacked mobile-friendly sites saw a significant drop in their rankings for queries conducted on mobile devices.
The best way to ensure that your site ranks highly in Google on both computers and smartphones is to make your entire site mobile-friendly. To check whether your site is mobile-friendly, use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Tool.
If you use WordPress to power your website, invest in a responsive theme and your site will automatically be rendered Mobile-friendly SEO Strategy. It’s that simple.
If you don’t have WordPress, reach out to your site developer and make sure that all the necessary steps are taken to make your site mobile-friendly.
Keeping Up With Google Penalties - To Shaping Your SEO Strategy
It’s absolutely vital for all businesses to keep up with Google penalties.
It doesn’t matter if you’re an attorney looking into law firm SEO or a professional in an entirely different field: your bottom line depends on this.
However, to achieve phenomenal SEO results, you’re going to have to do much more than stay informed about the various Google penalties. You’re going to need to shape your SEO strategy to adhere to these algorithm changes while providing genuine value to your potential clients and customers.
As you can imagine, staying apprised of all the latest Google penalties and algorithm changes can be quite time consuming––let alone shaping your SEO strategy to account for them. Even after you do all of this, you still need to invest tons of energy and effort into adding value to your web presence.
Whether you do it yourself or hire an experienced SEO company to do it for you, your bottom line depends on it.
Two ways to shape your SEO strategy - To Become An SEO Superstar!
Shaping Your SEO Strategy: SEO is sometimes seen by people as a magical way to improve the quality and popularity of websites. The thing is; there isn’t anything particularly “magical” about SEO! Search engine optimization is, like with most things in life, a skill that takes some time to master, These are some of your SEO strategies.
If you’re tasked with managing one or more sites, it’s important you have sound SEO knowledge. Otherwise, you can forget about gaining new visitors. And if you sell anything on some sites, conversion rates will be almost non-existent!
That’s why it is crucial you have a good grasp of SEO and its best practices.
1. Avoid “black hat” When shaping your SEO strategy
There are plenty of spammy ways to improve a site’s search engine visibility. Avoid them, because Google and other search engines are getting wise to them. If they find your sites using them, expect plenty of SEO penalties!
2. Keep your content on-topic
No-one is saying that all pages on your website should talk about one particular topic. Far from it! What I’m suggesting to you is that you ensure your content is relevant to your audience. For instance, an IT-themed site isn’t the best place to talk about shed building.
In the coming days I will publish your SEO strategies Stay informed or subscribe to get everything new.
Conclusion - About Shaping Your SEO Strategy
It is Shaping Your SEO Strategy is difficult, but not impossible, but with the passage of time and experience, it will be easy.
Don’t assume you will know everything about SEO. Even if you only spend your days studying SEO, you will never become a guru on the subject. And no-one can claim they are either! Instead, it’s important to work with third-party organizations that can help with specific areas. For instance, you could hire an AB testing agency to assist with split testing. Or a marketing company for content curation.