Six Step Survival Guide: Search Engine Updates
Search Engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing are always changing their algorithms in order to try and improve the search results provided to a searcher. There is nothing more frustrating that seeing your web design plummet from the number one position to way off page one following an algorithm change. Brick technology provides you with a six step survival guide to eliminate this problem!
Quality and Authoritative Content
As much as our clients hate it there is so much value in having content which is high quality and extremely authoritative. Among the considerations following an algorithm change are page quality, relevance to a search query and the number of quality inbound links. These are important but search engines provide the highest quality results for their users. Publishing content on your site in the form of blogs, latest news and even information or product pages is a great way of ensuring you rank highly. This content needs to be unique, engaging and fully optimised so as not to have the reverse effect and damage SEO.
Avoid Bad Backlinks
Other internet marketing providers may well get you numerous amounts of backlinks; these are any links to your site from another website. However what you need to ask is how qualitative these backlinks are. Search engines will be looking out for backlinks which are back and have come as part of say a “buy 100 backlinks for £80!” so you have been warned. Bad backlinks will have your website penalised within the search engines and even in future algorithm updates. To get around this try and get links from high quality and relevant websites. Publish authoritative content which people want to share amongst themselves through say social networking and then you will gain natural high quality backlinks to your website.
Put An Investment into Socials
Google the major search giant is using socials and social signals inclusive of links from Twitter and Facebook “shares” as one of the ranking factors which will influence where sites fall within the results for a particular keyword and phrases. You need to be active on social networking sites and find out about your ideal customers and start to share content and connect with them on here.
Note Your Web Design
Perhaps one of the trickiest ones as web design is forever changing its definition about what is good and what isn’t. What you need to ensure though is that you do not make a visitor to your site have to keep clicking through various options to get to the page they want. You need to make your content accessible to them and also do not duplicate content across pages. Add internal links from page to page just to make the navigation of your site simple and easy.
Get Those Eggs Out That Basket!
Bit of a strange one but never put your eggs all in one basket is a common saying and this needs to be applied when your thinking about where you’re going to source your traffic from. If the majority of your traffic comes from search engines how would you manage if suddenly your ranking dropped? What you need to do is have a diverse variety of traffic sources from socials to email campaigns, advertising and other items. Just ensure that if one fails you’re not left with no visitors to the site.
Be Current and Be Relevant
This year we have seen Google make several updates to Google Panda and these changes were supposed to reduce the presence of low value content farm sites on search result pages. It affected around 12% of search queries and so in order to stay ahead you need to ensure your aware of any Google Algorithm changes and then follow the trends so you can anticipate and prepare for the future.
Follow our six step survival guide and you will ensure that even when Google changes or search engines change their algorithm then there will still be traffic to your site and less damage will be caused to your positioning.