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Stay on Google’s Good Side

With Google’s recent Penguin update, many sites are finding it difficult to rank high in search engine results. The Penguin update was intended to weed out sites using spammy, black-hat or questionable search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to achieve a high search engine rank. These black-hat techniques violate Google’s policy and Google holds sites accountable for shady SEO practices. In fact, Google’s unofficial motto is “Don’t be evil.”

Here are just a few tips for keeping your site in check:

SEO

  • Don’t keyword stuff, which means putting in keywords where they don’t belong just to game the rankings.
  • Do use keyword phrases and natural language.

Content

  • Don’t use automatically generated or scraped (copied) content to keep your site “fresh.”
  • Do create fresh and informative content. Quality over quantity is very important here.
  • Don’t have duplicate content or even very similar content across the pages of your site.
  • Do make sure your content has its individual page and is easy to find.

Links

  • Don’t buy links or engage in illicit link swapping practices.
  • Do build links through guest blogging, relevant blog comments and superb content that naturally attracts visitors (quality over quantity is also very important here).
  • Don’t create anchor text links based on stiff-sounding, obvious SEO search phrases.
  • Do create anchor text links that are relevant to your content and the content of the target link.

Spam

  • Don’t comment a sales-pitch on a blog or place your URL in the comment field.
  • Do add your URL to your topic-related comment if the form has a field for your URL.

Internet marketing practices are constantly evolving. Google makes approximately 500 algorithm updates per year. In an update on October 9, 2012, Google took site layout to task for too many advertisements above the fold.

While Internet marketing can be simple, it can also be daunting and time-consuming. If your business is just starting out or is growing at a steady pace, you may need an experienced Austin web design firm to lead the way. Call us at 512.206.4220 for your marketing needs.