Introduction to Google and SEO
Has your website been hit by Google Panda or Google Penguin? You can analyse your monthly traffic volumes using Google analytics which will identify any significant drops in traffic.
Once you know the month you should be able to drill down to find a day when your traffic fell. Once you have a date, cross reference against the Moz updates list to identify the update responsible and from there you can identify the reason for the drop.
If you see a drop in traffic on or around that date, then your linking profile is the cause.
Penguin hits the over-optimized keywords hardest, so the most used search terms will be the ones showing the largest ranking drops. The free back-link analysis tool at majesticseo.com will show you the search terms being used in your back-links.
Back-Link Structure
If your site is going to comply with Google’s Penguin ranking algorithm, you need to reduce individual keyword text density to 5% or lower. The bulk of your link anchor text really should be made up of Brand, URL or ‘junk’ link text rather than target keywords.
Use your company name or website name for Brand links. Use a variety of different styles of your URL for your website address links.
Different IP addresses will give your links more importance than ever. Look for sites with a closely related theme to yours because the inbound links from them will be more powerful.
Aim to build links from other sites that have a good ‘trust’ score. Google’s linking algorithm likes to see that your back-link pages have back-links themselves.
Link Networks
We have yet to see a high quality automated link network. Avoid link networks at all costs as eventually Google will discover them and penalize the sites making use of them.
On-Page SEO for Panda
The maximum on-page keyword density you ought to go for to keep Google Panda happy is 2 to 3%. Adding a link to a .gov or .edu site from your content will enhance your domains ‘quality score’.
Site Content
Completely unique content is critical. Always write good quality content that doesn’t appear anywhere else online. Contextual links are links from within your page content using keywords to link to related pages of your site. They can also link out to 3rd party sites, especially ‘authority’ sites.
Images and Graphics
Where possible you should include suitable photo’s and videos. A video will help to boost the time visitors spend on your site and images help to break up large blocks of content, improving readability.
Every image on your pages ought to have relevant alt text that describes the picture using a variation of a suitable keyword where necessary.
Google can gauge the ‘reading age’ for your content and so can establish if it was created by a kid or a professor. Because of this, spell check all your content and ensure it is grammatically correct.
When you are writing new content you should write at least 500 words for each page because this volume of content has been shown to be advantageous for good search engine results positioning.
Concentrate on your readers when writing new content. You want your web site visitors to engage with your content and to spend time reading it instead of hitting the back button. If people like your content then the search engines will too.
Word association or latent semantic indexing (LSI) is the process that Google uses to associate keywords within your content together. This allows you to write more naturally without having to use exact match phrases
Meta Description Tags
You must add bespoke meta data tags to every page of your site. If pages have the same meta-tags on many pages then you will be penalized in SERP’s.
Meta description tags appear under your page title in the search engine results. A interesting description tag will increase the amount of clicks you receive which will improve your user engagement score in Google.
Your Site Content
YSlow in Firefox is the best free tool for checking your website load speed which needs to be fast otherwise you won’t rank well in SERP’s.
The proportion of visitors that don’t like what they find on your site and hit the back button is called the bounce rate. Your bounce rate needs to be 55% or less for top Google rankings.
Follow the DeehoSEO 3 step SEO tutorials to optimize your site effectively, or ask one of the UK’s leading SEO professionals a question about your website optimisation.
Visitor Page Views
Google measures the caliber of your web site by checking the average amount of pages viewed by visitors. The more pages each of your visitors looks at, the better your content is rated to be.
Keeping your visitors on your site for as long as you can will help your search engine rankings. Longer site visits indicate top quality, relevant content.