6 Step Survival Guide to 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 than 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
Socials are becoming more and more popular in regards to the search engines. With the introduction of Google+ social networks are now ranking in search engines. Facebook and Twitter is becoming a vital tool and Google+ is right behind snapping at their heels. With social networking for business you need to ensure that you do not just set a profile up and then leave it doing nothing. Instead you need to work out why people should “like” you or “follow” you and what is it they are getting out of having you on their socials. It is advised that for at least 20 minutes per day content should be shared and you should engage with followers and friends on here.
Site Structure and Navigation
There are numerous viewpoints on what a good site design is and these views have changed dramatically over time. The general principles of a good web design haven’t changed all that much in regards to website structure. As a client you would chose to either build a brand new site or improve and re-design an existing one. In doing so you should always ensure that navigation is simple, the general rule is all pages should be accessed in three or fewer clicks and visitors shouldn’t have to click through loads in order to find what they are looking for. Avoid duplicated content throughout pages and provide the users with internal links to pages to make it even easier.
Do not put your eggs all in one basket!
When trying to generate traffic to the site although there could be one main source where all your traffic comes from however it is important that you do not get yourself in a sticky situation and that your protect yourself by diversifying traffic sources. It can be worrying if your main traffic comes from search engines and nowhere else because what if they change the algorithm and you drop off the rankings? You should try and gain traffic from other sources like emails, social networks and through blogging.
Keep a tab on SEO
In regards to knowing what is going on within the search engine world then it can be sometimes hard to stay ahead of them. This year we saw Google introduce their Panda update which reduced low-value content farm sites and it affected around 12% of all search queries. This was a big change but there are loads of little changes that get made throughout the year too! By keeping ahead you can tweak your website and how to manage your presence online before new algorithms, changes and updates occur. Trying to anticipate when they will change and how they will change is tricky but there are a number of tools online which can help you.
If you want to survive in the battle against the search engines and rank number one for your keywords and phrases then make sure you equip yourself with our six step survival guide.