An Easy Optimization Introduction
The first thing that you need to be sure of in order to help repair your rankings & sort your SEO out is whether or not your site has been hit by Penguin or Panda. You will be able to tell if Penguin is responsible for your penalty if you can see a drop in Google search traffic near the 24th April 2012.
Google Penguin also demotes the keywords most used in your back-link anchor text. The free back-link analysis tool at majesticseo.com will show you the search terms being used in your back-links.
Back-Links
Before Google launching the Penguin algorithm, you could use up to 70% exact match keyword density and rank well, overnight this dropped to 5 percent. A Penguin SEO friendly linking profile will have mostly URL related links, Brand related links and lots of different ‘junk’ links instead of keyword rich links.
Use your company name or website name for Brand links. Your URL links ought to be an array of different permutations of your web address.
Different IP addresses will give your linking strategy more importance than ever. Building inbound links on themed sites that have similar content topics to you will help more than ever before.
Link from trusted sites with good Google page rank. The trust score of the website carrying your link is important. Look for pages that have already got back-links pointing to them because Penguin likes pages with existing quality back-links.
For more information search for SEO tutorials in Google and you can learn in more detail what you need to do to rank well in SERP’s.
Google and Automated Link Networks
Automate link networks only produce low quality spam links and sooner or later your site will be penalized for links coming from within these networks.
On-Page Requirements
The optimum on-page keyword density for each page should be around 2 – 3%. Add an external link within your page content to an authority .gov or .edu site because Google likes to see external authority links.
Content Quality
High quality, well-written and 100% unique content is the only content that you can publish on your site, especially if you want your search engine optimization efforts to have a positive effect.. Google consider it good practice to link from within your site content using phrases in the text to other information pages on your site or to external ‘authority’ domains.
This is an important part of your web design process as the quality of your content and the structure of your website design will determine the end result.
Using Graphics
Your pages ought to have pictures and videos where possible. Images help to separate the content, and a good video will raise the time people spend on your page. Using alt text behind each image is an opportunity to include a variation of a keyword rich description.
Reputable content needs to be spelt correctly and also be grammatically correct. For this reason, always use a spell checker on your content before you publish it and re-read whatever you write to minimize errors.
Your content must be as long as it needs to be in order to cover what you need to say. However, pages with less content tend not to rank in search as well. Over 500 words of content has been proven to be beneficial for optimisation.
If real people like your content and engage with it, spending time on your site, then the search engines will reward you with better rankings.
Writing content just to manipulate search engines is very 2007! Word association or 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
Best Use of Metatags
Be careful to check the meta data on all pages of your site. Duplicate meta-tags will cause you to be penalized in the search results. The meta description tag is usually used in search engine results below your page heading.
For this reason you ought to write it to get a better click through, not for keyword spamming.
How Visitors Engage with Your Content
Slow loading pages never show up in Google’s results so make sure that your site has a fast load speed, otherwise you will not get the rankings you deserve.
The bounce rate for your site is an indication of how many visitors engage with your site content rather than hitting the back button when they arrive.
You want your bounce rate to be less than 55%.Your traffic should ideally stay to read your site content. Those that leave instantly contribute to your site ‘bounce rate’ which ought to be less than 55% to rank well in Google.
Page Views
Google measures the caliber of your website by looking at the average volume of pages viewed by visitors. The more pages each of your visitors looks at, the better your content is perceived to be.
The average time spent on your pages is an indicator of content quality. Visitors should stay on your site reading your site content for as long as possible.