SEO Introduction – Google Rankings
Before starting to make changes to your site, first you need to check your Google rankings and find out if your site has been hit by Penguin, Panda or both algorithms. If you can see a drop off in search traffic around the 24th April 2012 then it is the Penguin algorithm that has penalized your back-linking profile.
Whichever keywords dominate your anchor text profile will usually be the ones hit hardest by Penguin. The easiest way to assess your backlink profile is to use majesticseo.com to analyse your links. The summary page will show you the anchor text volumes for each keyword.
Linking Profile
The Google Penguin algorithm requires text link density of less than 5%. The majority of your linking profile ought to be comprised of Brand links, URL links and junk links.
Ideally Brand names include your company name or the name of your website. Mixing up your website domain links makes your linking campaign look more natural.
Getting links from different Class C IP addresses is now more important than ever. Target your link building on web sites with a similar niche topic to yours. The authority score and trust score are crucial for your back-links. The Google rankings algorithm wants to see that your back-link pages have back-links themselves.
Google Rankings & Linking
Don’t take the linking shortcut of using an automated linking network to build your links. You might get a short term gain, but the links are generally low quality and in the long run Google will find the network eventually and devalue the hyperlinks it provides, often penalizing sites that are linked to.
On-Page Requirements
In order to comply with Google’s on-page keyword density requirements, aim for 2%. Adding a link to a .gov or .edu site from your content will enhance your websites ‘quality score’.
Content Quality
You should focus on producing high quality, unique content for all your site pages. If you are unsure if your content is good enough, get it checked by CRWD who specialise in creating websites that Google loves.
It’s a good practice to link out from your content using ‘contextual’ links from suitable related words in your text to relevant information pages. You can also hyperlink to authority web content using contextual links.
The quality of your content and indeed everything related to your website design is critical to your long term success. If your website has any fundamental issues (click here to get Deeho Web Design Bedford to review your website & they will analyse it totally free of charge), it will be affected in the traffic it can receive, it needs to be fast loading, clean coded, W3C compliant, mobile friendly, neither under, nor over optimized and above all search engine friendly.
Use of Images and Photo’s
Graphics and videos are a good way to break up your text and a video will also help to increase the time that visitors spend on your page. The image alt text attribute is the best place to put long tail keyword rich image descriptions. Use different variations of keywords for each image.
Before you publish new content it is best to run it through a spelling checker, which will highlight any errors. You want your content to imply quality and bad grammar and spelling errors will decrease your website quality score.
While it’s important not to write words simply to fill space, articles and page content with 500 words or more have proved to be beneficial in SERP’s.
If real people like your content and engage with it, spending time on your site, then Google, Bing and Yahoo will reward you with better rankings. Writing content just to manipulate search engines like google is very 2007!
It is good practice to use different phrases with the same meaning throughout your content because this making your writing appear more natural. Google associates those terms using latent semantic indexing (LSI).
Best Use of Metatags
You must add bespoke meta data tags to every page of your site. If pages have the same meta-tags on more than one page you will then be penalized in SERP’s.
The meta description tag is frequently used in SERP’s below your page heading. For this reason you ought to compose it to get a better click through, not for keyword spamming.
Bounce Rate Metrics
It is important that your site pages load quickly otherwise you will never rank very high in Google search. Your website bounce rate measures the volume of traffic that leaves your website straight away.
If you want to know more about your website’s bounce rate, talk to Dave Holland and let him show you how to reduce yours so that Google loves you. As a rule of thumb, the lower you can get this number the better, but the highest bounce rate you can have without incurring any ranking penalties at all is 55%.
Time on Site
Average page views is an additional metric used to determine the quality of your website content and it directly affects your Google rankings. The more pages each person looks at, the better your site is considered to be.
The average time spent on your website is an indicator of content quality. People should stay on your site reading your content for as long as possible.