You get only 2 seconds to convince your visitors about your relevance. If you fail, the visitor clicks the back button and leave your site for good. Here’s how you can stop it.
In a recent post, Search Engine Roundtable discussed how Google’s latest update Penguin 2.1 (aka Penguin 5) impacted the performance of many websites. Google has been pretty consistent about its approach to clean its search database with the release of several algorithmic updates including Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird in the recent times. Therefore, it’s essential for the webmasters and ecommerce websites to know how to go about promoting their online presence in the most Google-friendly way.
Here are some tips to help you get started on an ethical note.
Boost Your Content Quality
The original Panda updates released by Google wreaked havoc on low quality content and duplicated content. Low quality content could be anything that is not written for the users or content that has absolutely no value for the audience they are targeted for.
Since Google is getting serious about its search results as it holds significant role in creating a strong user base for the company itself, it has become extremely stringent with webmasters with the quality of their website content.
The simple ways of boosting the quality of your content is to provide value-based content to your target audience. There are lots of resources that have incredibly valuable information. The writer just needs to research well and put together different pieces of information to build a post from a different perspective.
Remove Low Quality Links
While Panda deals with the quality of website content, Penguin updates deal with the quality of links. Since SEO become a mainstream method of marketing for e-commerce website, many webmasters and SEO professionals have been deploying black-hat techniques to create links. Google never liked these practices since the links may appear manipulative to the end users and it may lead to Google losing its credibility among its users eventually.
Each time you build a link that points to a low quality site, you’re essentially telling Google to devalue the trust you have built yourself over the time.
Many websites have been hit hard by Google’s Penguin updates and lost their rankings and traffic as soon as the updates were rolled out last year.
Writing great content has often been cited as the prime and ethical source of earning links and this same has been endorsed by Google as the right method to build your networks and trust.
Use Semantics
Google has been harping on the importance of semantics for a while now. Gone are the days when keyword-driven content would rank prominently in Google’s SERPs. Google has now started emphasising on creating content that are semantically superlative.
This basically means you content should include a cluster of thematically relevant keywords apart from having great user experience in order to rank higher in the SERPs.
Using semantics will help correlate your content to many search terms that are not even present on your website. This is a ground-breaking development and can change the way we practice SEO today.
Build Relationships
Google is now beginning to trust websites that are being talked about and shared a lot among the internet users. In other words, the relevant and value of content is now being determined in terms of how much a page is being talked about on Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus.
Naturally, when a page is being talked about a lot on the social media, it has to offer value. However, social media is also about building loyalty and at times, loyal audience can share your content within their circles if they have established yourself as leadership and go-to person for value-based content.
Therefore, building relationship with your audience will help a great deal in gaining search engine attention.
Go Beyond SEO
Spending time outside your regular SEO activities has become a must for inbound marketers. Since everybody is essentially targeting the same audience, experts view that developing content that attracts new audience will hold the key to achieving your marketing gaols moving forward.
Interestingly, Google loves the process too. Matt Cutts in many of his interviews have suggested doing things that your audience likes whether or not they are about link building.
Digital Marketing is no longer the same as it used to be a couple of years ago. Google is coming up with new updates nearly every month and there’s just no approach that can sustains effectiveness in the long run. If you are looking to outsource your SEO campaign to a third-party vendor, make sure you choose an SEO company that thinks out of the box and is abreast of the evolving developments in the SEO industry.
