If you run anything that requires an online presence of any kind (an online business, a blog etc.), you need to be on-the-ball with everything SEO.
The SEO minefield changes so rapidly that what may be working 6 months ago might not be effective any more today.
Google is getting smarter at detecting wonky SEO practises, so it’s best to keep things as legit as possible.
Which means no more link building for the sake of link building, no more stuffing your articles with keywords you want to rank for.
If you don’t already know this, valuable content marketing is the future.
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And yes, most of you have already hopped on the ‘creating valuable content’ bandwagon. But you’ve got to understand these algorithm changes.
See, with the latest updates you could still ‘accidentally’ get yourself slapped.
Figured you don’t want to wake up every morning in a cold sweat, wondering if Panda has chomped up your site and left nothing behind. So you’ve got to know your SEO well.
In fairness, most marketers aren’t even trying to be dodgy.
They just don’t know what they don’t know.
Want to know how to keep your online presence afloat and dominate the search engines? Here are some tips you can start implementing right away to prevent Google Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird (or whatever animal they come up with) from slapping your website to page 50.
Fear the Google animals!
1) Loading Speed
This is something almost nobody considers when it comes to SEO.
Nobody loves a slow loading website. And neither does Google.
You should start thinking about how to make your website go turbo because speed is now a major factor when Google decides who deserves number one.
Tell your web developer to start removing unnecessary lines of code that only serve to slow down your site, and start removing some of the unnecessary bits and pieces of content (I know you’re probably guilty of this!)
If you’re running your own WordPress blog, consider getting a premium SEO optimized theme like Thesis or Genesis to help you out.
Don’t want to pay for a new theme? There are plenty of speed plugins to help you out.
Consider installing caching plugins like W3 Total Cache and jQuery Lazy Load.
Here’s a great article on how to make your WordPress site load faster.
After you think you’ve done all you possibly can, head over to speed test sites like Pingdom and Alexa to find out how your site is performing.
Fix up those remaining errors and you’re good to go.
2) Improve your internal and external linking
Internal linking means inserting hyperlinks within your content that link off to other relevant pieces of content that you’ve written in the past.
For instance, THIS is an internal link to another SEO related article on the same website.
Think about what this does for a moment.
Bounce rate goes down due to your readers viewing multiple pages, and this means your ranking goes up.
However, don’t go overboard with internal links.
Only link off when it makes perfect sense to do so.
External linking is the opposite: linking off to other relevant websites.
In the past, I actually didn’t do any external linking because I was afraid that my site visitors would ‘leak’ off to other sites.
However content marketing is all about providing massive amounts of value to your readers, and if there is an amazing resource out there that complements your article, don’t be afraid to link off to it.
You’d get more readers in the long run and this is great for SEO.
As a general rule of thumb, I’d aim for about 2-4 internal links and maybe 1-2 external links per post.
3) Sign up for Google Authorship
If you don’t already have a Google Plus account, what are you waiting for? Get one now.
It only takes about 5 minutes to set up.
Why, you ask? Because it gives you access to Google Authorship.
That image that pops up next to websites on the search engines? That’s Google Authorship.
Smile for the camera!
Having an Authorship set up shows that you’re a credible writer. Google will rank your articles and posts much more quickly.
Plus, people tend to click on search results with faces next to them compared to the ones without.
So go here and set things up if you haven’t already done so. Follow the instructions and you’re good to go.
Just bear in mind that Authorship can take a while to kick in (dependent on how often you actually put up a post), so don’t worry if your face doesn’t show up right away.
4) Fix Webmaster Tools errors
Sign up for a Google Webmaster Tools account right away.
Contrary to what you think, Google isn’t the lean, mean website destroying monster most people make it out to be.
Google WMT actually gives your website a health check and comes up with a list of errors you might need to fix to improve search engine visibility.
Set up your account here, and sync it with your website. There are plenty of guides out there that teach you how to do this.
Once you’ve set everything up correctly, you can use the tool to check out Google’s suggestions for your website.
Fix them accordingly and you’ll be on your way.
Like Google Authorship, these errors might not show up right away, as it takes a couple days for Google’s robots to crawl your site. No fuss.
Remember, Google WANTS you to succeed, as long as your content is relevant and valuable.
5) Noindex ‘weaker’ pages
This one is huge.
If you’ve been online creating content for a while, you’ve probably created a couple of sub-par posts in the past.
Don’t worry, we’re all guilty.
Google takes these articles into account, and if you’re not careful you might get pinged.
What you need to do is go back and start removing them from Google’s search index.
In case you’re wondering, a ‘sub-par’ post includes articles that are poorly written, too short and does not provide enough value.
Two options: either you go back and delete them altogether, or just add a no-index tag.
Check the ‘noindex’ box to remove your post from search engines.
The no-index tag tells Google you do not want a particular page ranked on the search engines.
You can do this from every post edit page on WordPress, or by adding the HTML code in the meta-tags.
If you’re rocking WordPress and do not have a check-box at the bottom of each post, try downloading this SEO plugin by the good folks over at Yoast.
Do the same with any duplicate content you might have as well. (See next point)
It took me many hours of sifting through dirt to figure out which of my pages I want ranked, and which ones I don’t.
6) Mind the duplicate content
This is something you need to be watching out for constantly, especially if you’re using WordPress.
Google hates replicate content on your website (number one sign of spam), so go back to your site and start looking for signs of ‘same content’.
First off, never put your articles in more than one category.
If you do, your article will show up under both pages, and this means duplicate content. A big no-no. One category per article only.
Next, if you’ve been using the ‘tags’ function on WordPress, cut it out immediately.
Stop using the ‘tag’ function. It does nothing for your website.
This not only serves as even more duplicate content, but also adds unnecessary content to your website, which will slow your site down.
Finally, if you’ve used any ‘cookie cutter’ programs to generate specific pages, go back and consider deleting them.
For instance, the privacy policy on my website was generated from a free service on the internet.
That means there probably are hundreds of the same privacy policy pages swimming around the internet out there. Not good.
Go ahead and ‘noindex’ these pages, as mentioned earlier.
Conclusion
Whew. I hope you’ve got a great deal out of this article.
So start killing those SEO bad practices right away.
Final disclaimer: Just because you fix these errors doesn’t mean you’ll pop up all over the search engines right away.
You’d still need to put in the necessary work, because it just makes the whole ranking on Google process that much easier.
Should you have any questions or comments, please leave them below and I’ll get back to you!
This article is an original contribution by Erik Lim.
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Article source: http://www.business2community.com/seo/surviving-googles-wrath-2014-updates-0867856
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