The New Commandments Of SEO (After Google Penguin)

The following is a guest post from one of Anticareer’s readers…

Google Penguin, like Panda before it, has made something of a splash in the world of SEO (there’s a pun there somewhere…) and has left a lot of webmasters and bloggers wondering what the best way to bring attention to their sites is now that Google have seemingly changed all the rules again – if indeed there still is one.

Well fear not concerned blogger – for I am here to tell you that there are indeed still some hard and fast rules to SEO, we just need to adjust them a little in light of these recent developments. With that in mind, here are the new ‘commandments’ of SEO. Follow these and you shouldn’t go far wrong.

Build Quality Links Over High Quantities of Links

Having a hundred thousand links isn’t going to cut it and if these are from the wrong sources then it will in fact just get your site penalized by Google. What’s much better is that you have a smaller number of inbound links from far more relevant and high authority sources. This looks more natural and less like spamming and it ensures that your site looks like a high quality one. Now would be a good time to try and delete any links coming in from low quality or spammy sites.

Guest Posts Are the New Link Exchanges

With this being the case getting hundreds of links by emailing random websites and asking to swap is no longer very effective and the same can also be said for article submissions to a degree. As such swapping guest posts is now a more valuable strategy than ever and one you should certainly look into if you haven’t already.

Write High Quality Content Consistently

This quantity over quality rule should also apply equally to your content and one of the things that Cutts specifically said that Penguin would aim to cut down on was bad quality and spun content that doesn’t make any sense. Make sure that you don’t have any of that on your site and that yours is all original and the kind of thing that people would want to read.

Avoid Making Enemies

With bad links now being such a serious crime, it’s easier than ever for a competitor to attack your website by getting someone to get hundreds of bad quality links pointing to your site. That’s called ‘negative SEO’ and it’s a bigger problem now than ever before. For this reason you should avoid making enemies and try to network with competitors rather than just knocking them off the top spot like some sort of bounty hunter.

Use Rich Snippets

It seems that when Google closes a window they open a door, and have in this instance provided webmasters and bloggers who have been paying attention with a new and highly effective way to increase their visibility on the SERPS – by using authorship schemas in order to link your Google Plus page to your articles and have your profile picture come up next to your links. Google rich snippets can also be useful in other ways too – for instance by getting reviews/prices etc. to show with your listing rather than just a random snippet of text.

Avoid Over Optimization in General

Spammy link building and spun content have taken the biggest hit when it comes to recent updates, but this is not the only form of ‘over optimization’ out there. Other culprits include keyword stuffing, and that means in file names too. Basically practice SEO in moderation but focus on putting the reader and the content first.

Build a Brand

Having a brand that you can build into something recognizable over time is a very good strategy and one that Google has been recommending themselves. Most recently this has applied to exact name domains which are losing power compared to URLs that use real brands (and recognizable ones in particular).

Use Social Networking

Mark Zuckerberg was right – the internet is becoming more social and Google clearly knows this. Social cues are great indicators of authority and this is something that will be factoring more and more into Google’s algorithms. That and it’s also just a good way to get yourself out there, market and network.

Make Link Bait

Link bait means that you make content that is so good that people want to share it thus doing your promotion and your link building for you. This was one of the top tips that Cutts himself shared saying simply ‘make it cool’.

Don’t Rely Solely on SEO

At the same time these last two points help you to become slightly less dependent on SEO – use it yes, but don’t have it as your sole way of driving traffic to your pages. If Google Penguin has shown us one thing it’s that we can’t rely on the ‘rules’ of SEO to remain constant and we can see our rankings drop quickly with little warning. In other words then you need a backup contingency plan, and you need other ways to bring in the traffic should your rankings dip unexpectedly.

Robin Gupta is a SEO expert and had good knowledge of online business. He writes experts blogs on online business and SEO.

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