The rolling out of Google Penguin 2.0…

Finally, the most improved algorithms- Google Penguin 2.0 is live. After its launch on the 22nd May of 2013, Matt Cutts promised a whole new experience with the new innovation. When it comes to page ranking by Google, webmasters who have always relied on black hat methods, might be having a long day as they won’t be able to do a great deal with black hat methods anymore. The update is more powerful than it’s predecessor. It’s known to have the best technology that will ensure proper scanning of backlinks in order to keep off spam links.

 

What is it all about?

As you all know Google keeps updating their stems in order to ensure that webmasters gain page rank is a genuine way. Unlike the keyword usage thing they used long ago, Google will use new techniques to rank websites on their search results. Google is using penguin 2.0 to approach a more thorough scanning of backlinks and the methods used for page ranking. Google is working on ensuring that only the sites that give their customers what they promised get the places in their SERP. In simple terms, your customer should get the content they came to check out in your site. Therefore, if you were giving tips on how to cut belly fat, the content there should give real and viable methods to cut belly fat.

 

What are the consequences of Penguin 2.0?

There are some major websites that have been slapped by Google for using bad SEO strategies. Generally here are some of the things that will happen as a result of Penguin 2.0.
Adult content backlinks are useless
After a thorough scrutiny of your website links, Google will slap you when it finds any links originating from an adult site. Porn links are going to be treated as spam and this may affect your rankings.
Hackers will be exposed
After Google updates their hack site, it will be easier for them to identify hack sites. With the help of the webmaster tools, it will be easier for Google to report any hackers.
The death of guest blogging
Since Google realized that most guest posts seem legit but are full of links, it will be useless after penguin 2.0 to write a post in order for you to get the backlink. Whenever possible, it’s good to use an original bio for each of your websites or blogs.
Multiple language websites
The website that use more than one language will be affected by the changes that come with Google penguin 2.0.
Cliff hanging will be a thing of the past
For hardworking people who have nice websites; they don’t have anything to worry about. Nevertheless, for those who are using bad SEO techniques, they will suffer with penguin 2.0 as it doesn’t allow any site to stay in the middle-not bad not good.
Sites which command respect in their respective niches will enjoy more in terms of rankings in the said niche. Therefore, if you are one of the owners of certain niche websites, make sure you work hard and smart enough enough to top in your niche.

 

 

How do you improve your website in Google’s eyes?
If you are wondering, here is how through establishing strong quality backlinks.

 

How to Build Yourself High Quality Links?

When boosting your site’s SEO presence, one of the most critical techniques to master is creating and generating high quality links to your site. Links drive traffic to the site and they also provide a network for which your blog can associate itself with topics that are linked to the web content. Search engines love sites that have lots of strong links so including them onto your site is certainly a worthwhile tactic.  So what can you do to ensure that your website is loaded with high quality backlinks?

 

1. Use your blog to attract links

More often than not, sites that contain regular content are often well linked and well ranked on search engines. Starting a blog on your site can be a great way to generate and attract links towards your sites. By publishing regular content on your site, it will be able to allow you to link to other related sources throughout the web associated with your chosen topic area. Normally, these links should be aimed towards high ranking sites which readers are likely to visit after reading your own posts. As your audience grows, it will help increase the number of links that are associated to your blog and regularly attract high traffic levels to your site. This will make the blog section attract links easily and help make the rest of your site more visible to traffic and search engines.

 

2. Looks for links that come from sites that attract high traffic

One of the main points of creating links is to boost the number of online traffic your site receives. It’s why it’s important to research the sites where links are going to be made to see whether it would be beneficial for the site. After all, links to sites that only gets one or two visitors a day is counter-productive. It’s up to you to find sites that are ideally listed no later than on page 4 of Google for a key phrase to guarantee that the link will help drive the site forward and find more visitors once the connection has been made. Ideally, you should also direct your link searches to authority sites that are related to your topic as it will help strengthen the quality of each individual link and attract browsers who are likely to come back to the site time and time again. If you believe that the link itself is god and that the other site is a good source, you can even go one step further and ask for a link going to your page to help turn your site into one of the leading online authorities for that particular subject.

 

3. Find guest slots on blogs and directories

By far the easiest way to spread knowledge and create to your own blog is by guest posting on other sites that follow the same niche as yours. The internet has an unlimited audience and by placing your content on another site, it will automatically expose your blog to a whole new breadth of people. They may not be aware of the blog that you belong to but by having guest posts on different sites, it means that indirect links can be created to your blog just by people sharing a guest post with friends or family. Meanwhile, directories are a great place to gain links quickly as they are dedicated places in which users can find links to sites that meet specific criteria. If directories are well ranked themselves, then you can gain a lot of traffic to your page by getting a link on the site. It’s often best to target well-ranked local directories as they are often aimed towards a specific audience and can guarantee constant traffic to your page if you can find the right site.

 

4. Be wary about paying for links

Some SEO competitors will suggest that you should pay to receive links as it can be a quick way to get your site quickly noticed by search engines. Whilst paying for links can be a useful trick for a site that has only just been launched, you need to check and be vigilant about where the links are connected to. More often than not, bulk links that are bought are to sites that are not well ranked and completely irrelevant to the content that is on your site. It is best that you check the links that are included on a possible pay package and then check with the guidelines of particular search engines to see if paid links are allowed otherwise your site may be penalised for having possible black hat SEO techniques on the page.

 

5. Always check that your links are working

It’s might initially seem like a good sign that your pages are well linked to other content but you always need to keep an eye out to make sure that the links are still working. If the links have stopped working, users on your site will find out the link is dead and will look elsewhere or information hurting your ranking on the SERP. If a link is dead, you need to fix is immediate to limit any potential damage. By repairing the dead links, it will also ensure that the back links associated between your site and the linked site which will keep the traffic flowing through the site at the normal rate. However, search engines will need to be notified through tools such as Google Webmaster so that the rankings remain unaffected by the fixes.

 

Summary

By deploying these tactics, you will soon be able to build a strong network of links that can help raise the profile of a site without having to resort to anything that is too complex or advanced. Furthermore, it gives you a solid foundation to work from and then use other SEO techniques to help land a good ranking on Google or Yahoo.

 

You are ready with your plans for your SEO campaign and have little or no idea where to start. Well here, we are providing you with basic SEO tips and trick for beginners to make your website more visible to others on a search engine.
•           SEO basics
•           Improving your website’s structure
•           Contents Optimization

 

Your Beginners Guide: For Starters

The first and basic step is to find accurate and proper keywords for your site content. Accurate and good keywords help your site to become more visible and identifiable in searches. Be very specific and accurate while choosing your keywords. Instead of choosing a simple generic keywords, choose keywords or phrases that are more focused and targeted towards your content and your business goals. If you have an online book shop, instead of choosing books try to select more targeted words like bestsellers for sale, you should be specific and unique. Your keywords must be very user friendly and have a large following among users. You can as a starter get some help on choosing your keywords from Google Adword keyword searching tool.
After you have finished choosing and making a list of your keywords to start with your SEO plan, now you have to create an accurate and unique title for your website, which will accurately explain search engines about your website and its contents. Your title will appear on search engines when someone searches your website in such search engines or makes a search with similar requirements.
The description Meta tag is another tool that you must make use of on your SEO. A description Meta tag of a page provides a summary of the page to the search engines. The importances of description Meta tags are that the search engines might use these as snippets for your websites pages. Words for snippets are bold when they appear on the search engine results giving information to the user whether the content of the website pages are what he/she might be looking for making it easier for them to choose the right webpage.
On a search engine your Meta tags will appear like a summary about your site. Your page title will also appear alongside.
For example:

Fashion accessory – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia                                            > Webpage Title Tag (60 characters)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashion_accessory‎                                                                 > Webpage URL
A fashion accessory is an item which is used to contribute, in a secondary             > Meta tag descriptions (160 characters)
manner, to the wearer’s outfit. The term came into use in the 19th century.

 

Best practices to follow for SEO basics are:
•           Choose accurate and proper keywords
•           Accurately describe content of pages
•           Create an accurate and unique title tag
•           Summarize your pages content accurately
•           Use unique description Meta tags

 

 

Improving your Websites Structure

The use of simple and easy to understand URL’s will easily convey the content information to the users. Lengthy URL’s can be very confusing and unfriendly to a user so it’s better to stick with simple and short URL’s. Keep your URL simple and non confusing with use of too much jumbled alphabets and letters.
For example:
https://www.abcd.com/topic (Simple URL)
vs.
https://www.abcd.com/topic/7/456372/ins (Complex URL)
Having a simple URL free of too many letters and alphabets gives your site better chances of increased traffic.

 

Making your website easier to navigate for the visitors makes it easier for them to find what they are looking for in your website. It also helps search engines to understand the content of your site and direct visitors to your site. Make a well organized and structured navigation menu on your site. Always create a sitemap on your site with displaying your sites structure and listing of the contents of your site. A visitor can always go to this page to easily find what they are looking for. Search engines too visit these pages to understand your site better to divert traffic to your site when looked up by users.
It is useful to have internal links on your site. It will help users to understand your content and your site better by linking them to contents and pages not found or present on navigation menu. Another make sure that your contact information is clear, accurate and easily accessible by the user. Always keep an internal link to your contact information page on the bottom of every page so that it is easily noticed and accessible to users. The worst case scenario would be that a user interested in your services or products does not find any or clear contact information.

 

Best practices to follow for improving your website structure:
•           Use simple and easy to understand URL
•           Have a well organized and structured navigation menu.
•           Use of internal links
•           Create a page for your contact information.
•           Creating a natural flowing hierarchy
•           Make use of texts for navigation
•           Always put an HTML site map on your site

 

 

Contents Optimization

The content of your site must be qualitative and full of information. The information and content of your site is a number one factor for increasing traffic to your site. A user will direct traffic to your site when and if s/he finds the content satisfying and full of information through personal recommendations, blogs or through social media. After you have decided on your content for your site ask someone to proofread it to see if the content is reader friendly and full of information. You can ask your family members, friends or colleagues for help in this matter. Make sure that you get two or three people to read the content as user preferences may vary. Having a fresh, updated and information packed content is almost half of your SEO campaign.
Always keep your content keyword rich to make it easier for the search engines to direct users to your site. It is also very important to know the differences between users to make keyword selecting for your content. A skillful and avid user will use different keyword in his searches than a new and inexperienced user. So, anticipating these differences between users and creating a mixed keyword rich content is a positive tool for your site.
Limit the use of images on your content as links. Images though prove useful and give your content a better look and understandability but use of too much images just makes a clutter on your site and sometimes confuses the user.
The use of anchor texts on your sites content is also a better idea. Anchor texts are texts that have a link attached to it and will direct a user to another page of the site or sometimes to another page to make the content easier to understand. Keep the use of anchor texts to the required minimum, overuse of anchor texts will make your site over optimized and get you penalized by Google for overuse.

 

Best practices for optimizing the content of your website:
•           Content must be easy to read and not confusing
•           Proofread the content with the help of another individual
•           Always be organized about the content of your site
•           Always have fresh contents
•           Create content targeted for users easy understanding
•           For anchor texts, use descriptive texts
•           Make it easier for the user to spot anchor texts
•           Keep the use of anchor texts to required minimum
•           Use minimal images as links
•           When using images as links supply texts along with it

 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Explained…
Search engine optimization (SEO) is important for people owning and running online business because it makes their website more accessible and easy to understand for both users and search engine robots. Even though search engines have become complex and sophisticated over time, nonetheless, they are still unable to find and understand the content of the page as humans do. SEO assists in telling search engine robots what the page is about and how they can be useful to its readers.
SEO is also much simpler than you think! Google gives more priority to sites that are relevant and authoritative and make it more visible. The relevance is measured by analyzing the content, words what you and your visitors read, while authority of the site is determine by the number and quality of other pages that links to the page on your site. Links, according to Google, are like votes.
So, how will you make your website more visible in search results? It’s simple: Write great content, build more quality links for SEO success. Google promotes authority pages in its rankings. As a website owner, or a publisher, it’s your responsibility to build authority pages. Basically, you write quality content and build quality links back to your site.
Quality content use important keywords – search terms people often use while searching for topic, product, or services – spread out in several sections of the page (URLs, titles, headings, sub-titles, first and last sentence, alt tags, and so on). This is also known as “on-page SEO”. Likewise, as a website owner, you also want to get links from well-established and high authority sites in your niche or industry.
So, more quality content you create – offering fresh, unique, and useful information that adds value for the readers – and more high authority links you bring back to it, more likely you will get votes from Google and successfully manage to push your pages on its first page.

 

Here’s a simple formula to get better search engine rankings:

  1. Write quality content – useful content that adds value and includes major keywords – making it easy for people to search for information, products, and services of your company
  2. Build high quality links back to these content demonstrating how important they are
  3. Keep repeating step 1 and 2, over and over and see search engine rankings rise
As we have established, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a basic task every website owner perform making sure their site and pages are quickly found in major search engines – Google, Yahoo, and Bing – for keyword phrase your visitors (potential buyers) are using to search for your products and services. But ask the same question: “What is SEO?” and most SEO companies will exaggerate and turn into a science that you will never understand and leave you dazed and confused. Even after couple of hours, you won’t know what SEO is.

 

Getting Links to your Site is Important, How Do You Get Them?

Getting links back to your pages are crucial, particularly getting at the top of search engine results. But don’t ever confuse quality with quantity. One of two dozen of quality links from relevant sources – similar blogs, forums, and business – to your page will have much more impact on SEO rankings than, let’s say, building 1000s of low-quality links to it. Google has become smarter these days and can identify sites with low-quality backlinks. If you don’t correct this on time, Google will not only punish you with low search engine rankings, but also completely block or stop your site because they consider you as “spammers”.
So, again, search engine optimization is a process to increase the site’s rankings by creating high quality content and building links back to it. You can either do SEO yourself, or hire a professional SEO company to do this for you. Whichever method you imply, make sure you’re getting value out of your investment – money, time, and efforts – by getting high-quality links from other sites.

 

In Summary

Here’s a summary for ‘What is SEO?’: Build a site, create quality content – unique, fresh, and useful – that people are searching for, and then share them with others – relevant blogs, forums, article directories, social networks – to see your website traffic explode!