Worldwide, 88m searches are carried out on Google each month. The search engine has 46bn web pages currently indexed, so how does Google choose where to place your website?
At the beginning of 2011 Google released their Panda algorithm update; this was a new way Google searched a website to decide where to place it in their search listings.
It was designed to penalise websites with weak content and reward those sites with quality content; thus changing the way sites were ranked. Since then, as with everything, there have been multiple updates and tweaks to its original design.
Imagine if you were a car manufacturer and you hadn’t changed your designs or created anything new for 5 years or you decided that low quality, faulty cars that were a carbon copy of your competitors were all you would produce.
Quite simply you would be out of business.
But for some business websites this is reality. Their content is either ancient or blatantly copied without any citations. Google does not want to promote these sites and has rightly targeted them.
Confused?
The main point is that as long as your site has good quality, original and fresh web content being produced for it, you have little to worry about (here at GoldSand Digital we know that better than anyone…).
So, how can you combat the Google police and make sure you stay up in the rankings?
Here are some ideas that SEO.com published in their infographic:
- Produce unique and engaging content
- Purge low quality content pages, so if you have spam pages or one full of copied text
- Avoid duplication of content, regurgitating something from another site is all well and good but it needs to be in your own words with a unique spin on it
- Become and authoritative figure, know what you are talking about and offer advice on your topic of expertise
- Promote your content over social media, this is vital to generate a buzz around your product or service
- Improve your bounce rate, getting people to stay on your site for as long as possible is key, how do you accomplish that? (GSD hint: valuable articles, blogs and videos…)
- Avoid flooding your text with key words, use language that sounds natural and edit pages that break this rule
- Vary your anchor text with different keywords and alternate between them, this prevents saturation and keeps the reader engaged
- Last but by no means least focus on high quality backlinks, especially if you only have low quality ones
These points are tips on how to get you on your way to being ranked on page one of Google. Grab the entire infographic here.
Where does it all begin? Well, it all begins with great content and here at GoldSand Digital this is what we specialise in. Whether it’s a blogging or article writing campaign or managing your entire digital content strategy, we can generate engaging and current content to increase organic traffic to your website.
Talk with the content and SEO teams at GoldSand Digital today. Call on 020 7269 9885 or email info@goldsanddigital.com.