What is the right way to think ?

Just think what Google want from us. They want only one thing – quality content for their users. That is. So for example, if you rank a site with low quality content, Google will find this after some time. So, if you for example rank a site with low quality content Google will find this after time. Google penalize sites with low quality content, and sites that have been using unethical tactics for fast ranking which they don’t deserve. If you create quality content, and if you use only white hat tactics, you won’t have any problems, no matter how many updates your site will see.

In this article, I’m going to explain you how to optimize your sites the right way.If you follow my instructions, you probably won’t have any problems.

Quality content – the most important On-Page Factor

Why is the quality of your content so important, and how will Google see that? Actually, Google is not a person. They can not read content, they can not understand is any article important, informative or interesting. They can only see things like the number of keywords, the keyword density etc, which is not enough. So they use other factors to see the quality of your site – Off-page factors.So, if you have a high quality site, Google will be able to detect that based on Off-Page factors, they use.In practice your On-page optimization affect your Off-page optimization.Let’s discuss how it works.

Here is what will happen if your site content is quality.

First

People will start to link to your site from different places, like forums, blogs and sites. If someone creates a directory of sites in your niche, guess who will be there – you; because you have quality content and all site owners will like you. If someone asks something in any forum and the answer may be found on your site, people may reply with a link to your site. Bloggers will love to link back to you.So your site will start getting links naturally.Google will see that.

Second

People will start sharing your content at different social media sites.That is why it is important for you to place as many “Like” buttons on your site as possible. Google will count them. They will also count the ratio between your number of likes and your total visitors. So, if your content is quality, you will get more likes. It’s not a big secret that the number of likes has become such an important factor after the Penguin Update.

Third

They also analyze the users behaviour.They can see how long people stay on your site, how many users visit your site, and how many of them visit it again. It is obvious that if you have quality content, you will have better results, which in turn will affect your ranking.

We will never be able to understand exactly how Google work, but we know what they want to find – the best sites. So the best way to get a high ranking is to write high quality content. If the algorithm changes after time, the affected sites will be those with low quality content. All sites and blogs that have quality content will be on Google.

Here is an example of one of my blogs, about surveys for money. It ranks at first several pages of Google for this competitive term – surveys for money. And believe me, it is almost without any back links. I just create quality content articles where I teach people how to make money from paid online surveys. I only offer free surveys there, so people love my blog, and Google love it too!

For me, the most important On-page factor is the quality of my content.

Now, let’s talk about other factors.

Must read: 8 Helpful Tips, How To Promote Your Blog

Keywords in title tag.

You probably know that putting your keywords in your title is one of the most important factors. Some people say your title has to contain your keywords at the beginning or at the end of it. For me, it is almost the same. You won’t see any big difference in your ranking.

Here is one thing that Google has changed after the Penguin. They just started to prefer naturally looking title tags, instead of manipulative ones.What do I mean by that?

See again my blog, and the first post here:

How To Find Legitimate Online Surveys for Money Sites

That way, I can rank for keywords like “surveys for money”, “legitimate surveys”, “surveys for money sites”, and more. This is a natural title.

Here is what I mean by manipulative :

Surveys for money – Legitimate surveys – Paid online surveys

After the Penguin, I can say Google would prefer the first one, because it is natural.

Keyword density

The next On-page factor we will discuss is keyword density. First of all, let me explain to you what keyword stuffing is. This is when you repeat your keywords many times. Believe me, there is no need to do that. Google has become much more smarter and you can get penalized for that.There is no need to have keyword density over 1%. Yes, you heard right! With keywords in the title and 1% keyword density, you can rank very well after the Penguin. Several years ago the perfect keyword density was about 3.5 – 4%. These days are gone. Believe it or not, Google do not care about your keyword density. They just try to understand what your site is about, not how many times they see your keywords in the text. If you want to, you can increase your density to over 1%, but the point is to spread your keywords naturally in the text. Create your content so it looks as natural as possible.

Total number of keywords

Several years ago people wrote articles between 300-400 words. These days we can see that Google slightly increased the required numbers. Now, many SEO experts suggest 400-600 words per article. If you create 700-1000 words, your page will rank even higher.

If you are interested to learn more about Google Penguin Update, read this article: 10 Tips to Beat Google Panda and Google Penguin Update

1. Avoid Backlinks Spamming

Getting back links is a preferred way of improving ranks but if done excessively it can also cause harm to your site ranking. Too many links and in unnatural ways could be damaging. Try maintaining incoming links from source sites on a daily basis.

2. Do Content Marketing using Social Media

Content marketing is a good way to help you bet the hype of these scary algorithmic updates.  Even though there is nothing permanent in the SEO but still content marketing is. It is not some rocket science; you simply have to give your visitors the best quality content and you would instantly register yourself in their good books. They will surely then bookmark, perform the call-to-action and will be responsive to follow you on social media.

3. Build Domain Authority

You can surely proceed further by effectively building your domain or brand. You must make high quality postings to build your brand name. In this way you can build your authority as a brand and your reputation as an intelligent author would emerge. However, this is not something that will happen overnight but a consistent effort would be required.

4. Enhance User Experience

This is generally a great way to boost your website’s reputation. Think critically while designing your site’s user interface. You must give your users reasons to stay online and acquire the wealth of valuable information. The user experience enhancement is something that would always pay regardless of the changes Google makes in its search algorithms.

5. Keep Track Of Backlinks

Negative SEO is an aspect which needs to be considered if you are an authority brand on the internet. But remember, negative SEO requires a whole lot more effort so relax if you are not a giant in your niche. In case you are an authority site and someone tries to counteract via negative SEO. Just remember that Google keeps a track on the linking production pattern. A better ratio of legitimate links as compared to negative SEO impact would still not let your site get affected.

6. Be Active On Social Media

Be active on the social media even more. It is estimated that links value of social media has increased over 25%. This is because search engines know that social media accounts are operated by genuine people mostly, so give more importance to them.

7. Anchor Text Variation is Must Now

Make sure that your anchor text flow is perfectly natural. Strategy of adopting the long tail is better as compared to short tail adaptation. Use of simple yet powerful generic words e.g. “Click Here” is preferable. Using anchor names same as the website’s name is also a good practice, however these names must be relevant to the source they are pointing to.

8. Importance of On-Page SEO

On-page SEO is still preferred by Google, so you should not opt for negating on-page SEO altogether. However, improper usage of on-page SEO can also be detrimental to site’s health, e.g. incorrectly using header tags in the content.

9. Getting rid of Panda and Penguin phobia

Just mind the fact that most of the information on countering panda and penguin you read on web is just speculations and assumptions. Stick to the basics, by providing your readers with best quality content and becoming an authority in your niche.

10. Avoid Article Marketing…. Google Don’t Love Them Anymore

You must remove links acquired from the article marketing sites. These are considered as unnatural links and are thus damaging.

But unfortunately it’s not true at all. There is a lot of brilliant websites, which were hurt by this algorithm change and complying with White Hat SEO. What’s more, for some queries, TOP 10 of Google’s SERPs is full of spammy websites or sites with very low quality.

So, what can we do, to avoid in the future drastic drop in traffic from organic search in Google and strenghten your website?

One of the most important things (except brilliant website of course) is having a lot of good quality links.

After some days of Google Penguin rule, and short investigation, we came to conclusion, that good quality links aren’t links only from pages with high Page Rank. It’s more complicated these days…

Your linking schema should looks natural and have a lot of types of links pointing to your site.

Below is a list of different types of links, grouped into 5 groups.

I) Follow/unfollow links

1. Follow (dofollow) links. Construction of the link cause, that some part of websites’ Page Rank is passed to your site
2. Unfollow links (Page Rank is not passed to linked pages)

If you only have dofollow links, it really looks unnatural. You should get some unfollow links to your site. They don’t pass Page Rank to your site, but they pass Trust Rank.

II) Links on different places on linking site

3. Links inside articles
4. Links below articles
5. Links in sidebar
6. Links in footer
7. Links in your bio below your article
8. Comments below post or article
9. Links in advertise/sponsor box
10. Links in conversation box/posts on forums
11. Links in menu (be careful with them – Google algorithm is watching them very rigorously)
12. 301 links from other sites (so called “redirect link”)

If all of your links are only from footer, it’s strange. Isn’t it?

III) Links from different types of websites or online tools and products

In Internet you can get links for your site from many different types of websites. Please make sure, that your linking schema isn’t dominated with only one of them…

13. Guest posts on blogs in your niche
14. Press releases
15. Posts on forums
16. Articles on articles directories
17. Articles on professional websites
18. Question-answers services (for example Yahoo answers)
19. Free accounts on blogging platforms like WordPress.com20. Your Affiliates who promote your products
21. Links inside ebooks
22. Links inside newsletters
23. Links inside emails
24. Blog carnivals sites
25. Social networks (like Facebook, LinkedIn)
26. Social promotion sites (Stumble upon, Reddit )
27. Sites with your favorites  – Pinterest
28. Sites with shared photos and videos (Flickr, Youtube)
29. Discussion groups http://groups.google.com
30. Networks for bloggers blogs.com
31. Links inside tweets
32. Links in RSS feeds
33. Your other, private sites

IV) Links with different construction of the link (different anchors, different titles, etc.)

At these days Google pay high attention to anchors. It’s very important, to have links with various anchors pointing not only to main page, but also to pages deeper in your website. Following points  are examples, what you can do with anchors on your links.

34. Your anchor is selected by you – “Passive income”
35. Your anchor is title of your website – “No passive income”
36. Your anchor is title of particular page – “Google Penguin attacked – 50 types of links to…”
37. Your main, very competitive anchor – for example, for this blog it may be “making money”
38. Words like: “here”, “link”, “click”, “push”, “see” are poor anchors from SEO perspective. But your site should have links with anchor like these!
39. Your anchor is address of your website (https://nopassiveincome.com)
40. Your anchor is address of particular page (https://nopassiveincome.com/google-penguin-attacked-50-types-of-links-to-strengthen-your-website )
41. Links with/without additional title (for selecting title for you link you may follow points 34-40)
42. Shortened links http://bit.ly/JHARA3 are also links, which you should have
43. And finally, graphical links. Maybe they are weaker than text links, but they also should appears in your “portfolio of links”

V) Offline links

If you have a lot of money or you are treating your business very seriously, you can place your links outside the Internet Of course deep linking is almost impossible, but address of your domain also is a link.

Some of “offline links” ideas are below:

44. Links in newspapers and/or paper magazines
45. Links showed on TV
46. Links “spoken” in radio
47. Links in outdoor advertisements (for example on billboards)
48. Links on your business card
49. Links on leaflets
50. Links promoted during conferences, presentations, professional trainings

And what do you think about it? Do you prefer some type of links, or not? Or maybe you know another type of link, which may help to kill Google Penguin?

Photo used in this post:by katmeresin