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Posted by Sanket Patel
February 25, 2014
Smart SEO’s are always aware of the fluctuations in the search engine industry. They know that their rankings could drop notable at any given time. However, it couldn’t be only because of a penalty. It could also be a result of the strong online marketing strategy of your competitors who have got the bigger slice of your targeted audience.
Even we have done that to outsmart our competitors. Are we waiting for that day when the same thing would happen? Or do we have a backup plan so that we are not outwitted by the competitors? The search marketing industry is one of the most unpredictable ones, where no one has the idea what the next day has in store for you. So, rather than waiting for the doom’s day, it is strongly recommended to be well prepared.
Here, we will first see the best practices to keep your rankings. As it is said an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure, the following points will ensure that your site doesn’t have to face the humiliation caused by Google. Taking risks with your website is certainly not going to help you in getting ranked on Google. It is thus recommended to make the required changes now.
Audit the Link profile to Ensure Quality Control
Just imagine you have recently been penalized. What are the measures that would be taken up by you? Here are some of the things that you could remove but hasn’t occurred to you.
• Look into webmaster for all the inbound links using exact match anchor text. Are any of these site-wide links? If there are, it is highly recommended to replace them with single links. You could also nofollow them or remove if they are found to be suspicious.
• You are definitely at the risk on getting penalized if any of you anchor texts take up to 20 percent of your inbound links. You should be changing your anchor text, remove those link or dilute the old ones with all future link building efforts.
• If you have been buying links or building private link networks it is time you stopped doing it at once. It only builds a false credibility for you. Even all the future value of your links will be lost. The more you buy those links, the higher that risk will get. This link building practice has to disappear entirely.
Time for modern On-Site SEO
The following points will make clear on how modern on-site SEO could be carried out.
• The pages should offer unique value to all the visitors. It should be exceptional, something that no other page on the whole web could provide.
• A modern page on the web has unparalleled user experience. It is pleasing to the eyes, loads quickly; it is compatible on any device and is easy to understand delivering the message in the right way.
• The page is optimized for the search engine bots. The working of these bots should not be limited by the overuse of robots.txt and meta robots. Temporarily down pages should return a 503 status, not 404 or 301. There should be plenty of internal links and each page should be reached from at least one link.
• It is vital to use the keywords in the title of the page and put an almost similar text in the H1 tag of the page as well. The keywords shouldn’t be overused in the main body. The keywords should only be used in the internal links where they make sense.
• Provide plenty of social media buttons on the page for the users to share or like the content on the page.
• The site should be accessible on any device with the help of responsive design.
• It is highly recommended to use metadata, authorship, rich snippets along with schema.org to make your results stand out.
Have an error free website
Just by following the given tips a few errors could be avoided and enhance the SEO effect for your website
• There should be no product descriptions on ecommerce site or the descriptions from the manufactures should show up as duplicate content
• 404 pages should be avoided for optimal SEO results
• All the redirects should be avoided except for 301
• Long title tags that are more than 70 characters long will not be displayed in the search results properly
• Google does pull out random text on its own from you website, however it is far better to have a good description of the page in the meta description.
• Avoid bad internal linking on your site.
• Robots.txt at appropriate places is a must
• Sitemap is mandatory
Revisit your Content
The following standards should be met up for an effective content
• The title should be worth sharing and provoke the audience to have a look at the content
• The content should deliver what has been promised in the title
• The content provides data, a spin or a unique value that isn’t available on any other place in the Internet.
• It is highly recommended to scale the value of your content and look out for suggestions and improvements. Test whether the consumers are getting value from your content.
Get serious about link building
Henceforth, don’t even think about building links on just any site that you come across. Wait until you could build links on the top sites from your industry.
• The links should be worthy even if they are no follow
• The links should be worth it just for brand impressions and referral.
• The sites where you have built links will enhance your credibility and mentioning where you have featured along with mentioning these authoritative sites will improve the conversion rate.
• The link building has to meet not one, not two but all the 3 criteria given here. If not, I don’t believe that the link building efforts would pay off.
Understand the importance of co-citations and co-occurrence
The following two phenomena’s have been noticed for a while.
Co-citation: This happens when a site links both your and an authoritative or relevant site. In other words, if authoritative sites are getting links from a domain, that domain is taken more seriously by Google.
Co-occurrences: This is when a particular site talks about you brand name or a domain name without a link. It also talks about it in the context of the related topic.
While it is vital to know about co-citation and co-occurrences, a full advantage of these could be taken is by attracting natural links and discussions about your own brand online.
Wrapup
You probably must be using all these techniques or maybe not. However, this is a serious wake up call for all those who have been doing SEO for their website and should be having a decent rank for their website or have dropped drastically. These are the life infusing elements for all your SEO efforts.
