Rebuild Your Google Rankings
If your website has disappeared from Google’s SERPs, it is essential for you to first establish whether your website has been hit by the Penguin or Panda algorithm updates.
Analyse your monthly traffic volumes and where you see a drop will indicate the release date of the algorithm which caused the damage.
For example, if your Google search engine traffic fell significantly on the 24th April 2012 then the launch of Google’s Penguin algorithm is the cause of your penalty. This shows that it is your backlink structure that is causing the issue. Either your links are over optimized or you have links from low quality or link farm neighbourhoods.
Google Penguin also demotes the keywords most used in your back-link anchor text. There is a free back-link checking tool at
majesticseo.com which will show you the search terms currently being used in your back-links.
Linking Profile
Anchor text density requirements dropped overnight and today you need the maximum for any keyword to be 5% or lower. A Google Penguin friendly linking profile will have mostly URL related links, Brand related links and lots of different ‘junk’ links instead of keyword rich links.
Your website name or business name is a Brand link. Your URL links ought to be a combination of different permutations of your web address.
Links from the same IP addresses are not as powerful as from different IP’s so focus on creating new quality links from various servers. It is more important than ever that your back-links originate from relevant sites instead of random content sites.
Look for sites with a good trust score and don’t build links on low trust score domains. Where possible try to find pages that will link to you that have already got ‘authority’ back-links pointing to them.
Using Link Networks
There is no such thing as a high quality automated link network, so you should avoid using them because sooner or later, Google will locate the automated low quality networks, and you will be penalized for the links you have in the network.
On-Page SEO for Panda
To be able to comply with Google’s on-page keyword density requirements, aim for 2%. Including text links in your content pointing to authority sites (.gov, .edu) is a good practice and will improve the performance of your site in SERP’s.
Your Content
Don’t copy or duplicate any content, only write unique, high quality content & text for your pages. (If you are unclaer as to what constitutes high quality content, read the post on Deeho that explains the subject in detail). Everything on your site really should be unique to you personally, well written and of the very best quality. Text links from within your content using text keywords is good SEO practice.
You can link either to other pages within your own site or link externally to trusted ‘authority’ resources.
Images and Graphics
A good video will drastically increase the time that visitors spend consuming your site content. You should also use images to make your site content more visually appealing and to break large areas of text into smaller more readable sections. Using bespoke alternate text behind each image is an chance to include a variation of a keyword rich description.
Spelling, punctuation and grammar errors are easy for Google to find and are a sign that the site is not managed well enough. Be sure you use a dictionary with spell checker before you publish new content. Writing over 500 words on a page has been shown to give you a ranking advantage. You should always write as much content as you need to so that you can cover the topic, but 500 words is a good benchmark to target.
Manipulating Google, Bing and Yahoo with spammy on-page text is no longer an exercise you should get involved with. You’ll need your visitors to have interaction with your content, so write it for them first and search engines second. You can write ‘natural’ sounding content using different words with the same meaning because Google uses latent semantic indexing (LSI) to associate related terms within your content.
How to Use Metatags
You need to 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. The objective of your meta description tag is to get potential visitors to click through from search results to your site. Write teaser description tags to improve your websites user experience.
Engagement
Google penalizes slow loading pages. Check that your website is quick enough using YSlow in Firefox. The volume of visitors that don’t like what they find on your site and hit the back button is called the bounce rate. It needs to be 55% or less for top Google rankings.
Everything you need to know to be able to implement all of these elements yourself can be found in this 3 step SEO tutorial, or you can ask our optimization expert a question.
Time on Site
The more site pages that each visitor looks at, the better your website content is considered to be, so you will rise in the rankings. Your Google rankings are affected by how long people spend on your web site. The longer your average site visit, the better your Google quality score is considered to be.Longer visits to your site pages are considered to indicate quality content. Google is looking for quality content, so keep visitors as long as possible.