Are you scoring own goals with SEO penalties?

With so many self-professed SEO experts out there promising you the sun, moon and stars for improving your website ranking, it is important to know that search engines are on to bad practice. Many people are finding that Google SEO penalties are moving their websites backwards instead of forwards. The skilled SEO operators are well aware of this and if you are employing one to do your SEO then you needn’t worry as you’ll be seeing the results you want. If you aren’t sure then you should be asking some questions or taking the time to undertake a little research to do your own checking. Good practice is essential as search engines become wiser and savvy when it comes to ranking and position of websites.

One effective method an optimiser uses to assist good ranking is link building. There are bad practices associated with this and you don’t want to be using them unless you want to incur penalties. A company that gets in touch with you and offers a cheap way to get your website to the top of search engines is a dinosaur and should be assigned to the annals of history. Effective link building is all about targeting and time. Slowly, slowly catchy monkey as the saying goes. Buy links that are relevant to your product and content, exchange links with other sites that make sense because they complement what you are offering and ensure that all of your links are open and visible – don’t try to get clever and hide things as Google is fast becoming like big brother and is watching everything. A smart tip is to ensure that any bought links are noted as sponsor links, with “no follow” rules in place and that they are being added in a timely manner like a few a month perhaps rather than on a daily or weekly basis. This is the most effective way to use linking to help increase position in the search engine rankings. Just ensure that you aren’t heavy handed with keywords in the links.

If you receive invitations from foreign language websites to link with them, don’t be flattered that they found your website and want to link. Treat any invitation in the same way you would a same language site – if it’s a logical link, great but if not, ignore them.

With the popularity of blogs, a lot of focus has shifted to using these as the new way to climb the rankings. Try not to be so naïve! Google has recently devalued a lot of the web’s most popular blog networks so do yourself a favour and forget about using them as an effective linking source. If you have a blog, use it as intended, that being a means to help build a relationship with your customers. If it is good, it will be found. Peppering the content with sidebars and footers full of links isn’t the way to go about it. Focus on using in-content backlinks sparingly per article and you’ll propel yourself forward in the most satisfactory manner.

Content remains king as far as search engines are concerned. The old method of getting in as many keywords as possible on to a page, to the point where the content ceases to read intelligently is defunct. Today it is all about genuine content and using keywords appropriately so that content flows and makes intelligible sense. Search engines are now so smart that they can differentiate good content from bad. Duplication of content, scraping content from one source to use in another or hiding content by using the same type as the website background are all familiar tricks to robots and search engine crawlers and if you are using this methodology, you will be caught out and penalised. The use of doorway pages too isn’t a way round things. What your visitors see is what Google and other search engines need to see and don’t over egg the pudding by using too many H1 or heading tags. And practice the wise old adage of checking up. Broken links and down time on a website won’t be doing you any favours whatsoever so look at your displayed content and test it regularly.

The only true and safe way to ensure that your SEO methods are working positively for you is to use the services of an expert optimiser. That means one who is fully au fait with all the current methods that are acceptable, is well up on trends and who knows what Google’s next step is going to be before it comes into practice.

The Article is written by http://www.creative-seo.co.uk providing SEO UK. Visit http://www.creative-seo.co.uk for more information on http://www.creative-seo.co.uk Products and Services!

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