Google releases major updates from time to time. Many businesses go under with each release. That’s NOT a good thing for any business since predictable patterns are critical to making projections and staying profitable (among other things). So what can you do to ensure that your business is immune or less vulnerable to these updates from Google? Here are some tips…
1. Understand What They Want To Achieve
In an ideal world, the most relevant web page to a search query will take the number one spot. However, in the real world, the page with the best content for a key phrase might be buried in the 10th page of search results. Google is trying everything within its power to make the best content take the top spot (At least, that’s what we’ve been made to believe).
Whether you believe in any conspiracy theories or NOT, the fact remains that search engines thrive or die on the strength of their search results. If searchers discover that the results returned do NOT march queries, they’ll look elsewhere. This will spell doom for any search engine because, as the searchers leave, the advertisers (who pay their bills) will follow.
Therefore, every search engine (Google especially) will do everything possible to ensure that they remain the default choice of searchers. Get this point right and you would have taken the first major step to shielding your business from those updates.
Important Note: Updates are basically changes in algorithm that attempt to weed out poor pages and bring the best to the top.
2. Develop Top Quality Content
Bearing in mind that Google’s ultimate goal is to reward top quality content with top rankings, it is very important that everything you publish is the very best quality you can come up with. That is, if you are interested in achieving long term success with SEO.
But the question now is: What is top quality content? Top quality content is such that you would bookmark if you saw it on another site. This should be your guiding principle because while today’s algorithms may pass mediocre content as great, it won’t be so for a long time. Google is getting smarter at detecting chaff. Furthermore, they are employing human reviewers (and tattle tales) to fish out sites that have poor content.
Important Note: Make sure your content is focused on giving your readers value.
3. Don’t Be Too Focused On Google
You are set up for heartaches if your entire marketing plan is totally focused on Google. A good SEO strategy doesn’t depend on any single entity (That includes Google). If every decision you make is focused on Google then you will definitely be hit by any changes in algorithm. This is because you are very likely to become too aggressive and thereby end up over-optimizing your site.
A good overall strategy is to employ tactics that have traffic value in and by themselves while reinforcing your search position. A good example of this is guest blogging…
Guest posts on top blogs will reinforce your search position as they will pass on link juice to your web properties. However, that’s just one of the benefits you stand to enjoy by doing it right. You expose your business to a new audience with each new post you submit on a new blog. That’s traffic.
Furthermore, people who read your guest posts will tweet, like or bookmark it (That is, assuming you have great content — You should). This builds your online reputation, helps differentiate your brand and helps your money site with social signals (that are now used to rank sites on the major search engines).
Important Note: While Google is a great place to get residual traffic, pretend you are NOT focusing on it as you develop your marketing strategy. Businesses that do this are more immune to the negative effects of Google updates.
4. Avoid Very Easy Techniques
There are many easy techniques that worked for people who want top rankings. But the problem with them was that they eventually got over-used and abused just because they were very easy to implement. Take article marketing, for example. People discovered that Google loved article directories and so they started spinning their articles and using automation to get more “love” from Google.
This once-very-effective strategy became the candidate of an update (The Panda Update). Article directories were hit and article marketing became a shadow of itself. Businesses that were built entirely on article marketing suffered greatly.
There are a number of “easy” techniques that are working today. But be careful if you are using them. The truth is that they will be over-used and abused. Your business stands a better chance of surviving new updates if you opt for strategies that are NOT too easy (And so exclude a lot of tire-kickers).
5. Get An SEO Firm That’s On The Cutting Edge
It would be an illusion for anyone to suggest to you that all you have to do is develop great content if you want to be immune from those updates. You have to do much more. You need to study (and keep studying) the trend with Google and make adjustments on the fly.
For example, having tightly focused anchor texts used to be the standard for link building NOT too long ago. However, things have changed: You need NOT more than 20% of your targeted keywords as anchor texts.
Companies with good SEO firms were either NOT affected or recovered pretty fast. This happened because many of them used tactics that worked for the moment but also shielded their customers from updates that were imminent. Here’s how some might have gone about it (using the anchor text example)…
They did extensive analyses and discovered that their client’s site required X number of exact match anchor texts to grab top position. However, they didn’t just focus on that anchor text (even though they ensured they got the right volume). They took steps that simulated a “natural” link profile. Therefore, when Google’s Penguin was released and took down sites that were deemed to have unnatural link profiles, their clients weren’t affected negatively.
This is something you can only get from SEO firms that are on the cutting edge. You can’t leave the core aspects of your business to do that. It, therefore, makes sense for you to hand over this critical aspect of your marketing to people who do this for a living and know how to respond fast so that your business doesn’t suffer.
