As a professional SEO Consulting company, BaldyDog Search Strategies, staff is always looking at developments in SEO. Anyone who has been online for any amount of time is aware of Google. As a business website owner, you need to be aware of all these changes as well.
The most recent Changes to the Google algorithm at the time of this writing was known as the Google Penguin update, mean there are a lot of changes that anyone who is concerned with their SEO and their over all Search rankings should embrace.
Gone are the days of simple link building.
In the not too distant past, it would have been simple enough to rank for moderately competitive keywords. With a little bit of on-page tweaking and link building with the desired keyword as the link text, was the basic methodology.
For years now, we have been educating our clients on becoming authorities in their respective markets by using blogs and Social Media to not only increase their social signals, but to monitor their brands.
Now, post Penguin, these efforts will be playing an even bigger role.
Sites with little new content and massive amounts of backlinks are finding themselves being over taken by sites that have lots of content and minimal amounts of backlinks or at least a backlink inventory that looks much less optimized.
Authority Building
- Linkbuilding is still very important, but it needs to be done with many more branded links, lots of variety and fewer keyword rich text links.
- In some cases, if you have seen a drop in your rankings, you may want to go and do some “link pruning” or getting established links either removed or edited. For instance instead of getting a link on a site for “SEO Company”, we would either want to remove the link entirely depending upon the site, or change it to something like “SEO Company Baldydog Search Strategies” or just “Baldydog.com” as the link text.
- Branded links will need to come from content that is about the desired keywords. So to rank for “SEO Company” I would need to have multiple blog posts on related sites about being an “SEO Company”. The links to our site would be in these articles, but not with the keyword rich link text.
- Content creation (blogging) is really going to play a major role in all successful SEO campaigns.
- Websites need to increase their social signals, by being involved on social media sites.
- Your Facebook Fanpage needs to be interactive, and used regularly, and conversations need to occur.
- Tweets about your brand/site should be encouraged. The more people are mentioning your brand the better.
- Websites need to be fully integrated with social media sites.
Is post Penguin SEO going to be a necessity?
Yes, SEO after the Penguin update is still going to be a necessity. And now more than ever, it is essential that SEO best practices are implemented.
Onpage-SEO is now even more important. Site factors that need to be taken into account include many on-page factors to include using your target keyword properly, but not so much that it looks spammy.
Some on-page factors to consider include but are not limited to:
- load time of your site
- alt and title tags of images.
- Image file names
- Social media integration
- text to code ratios.
- ip host info
- rss feeds
- on-site blog
- navigation issues
- duplicate content issues – use of canonicalization tags
- pages not found(lack of custom 401 pages)
- use of permanent redirects
- use of keywords on pages
- limited use of keywords on pages
- limiting over optimization
To wrap up this post Penguin blog post, I am going to say that now more than ever, content curation is going to be even more essential to reach and keep the coveted #1 spot in Google. Content creation on your site, on your social media profiles, on other sites as guest posting, as content in the form of mentions or reviews of your brand…you get the idea.
About the author
Adam is the Social Media Director at Baldy Dog Search Strategies, and is also the lead on all local SEO at BaldyDog.