The most important thing you need to remember is that social media signals can have a huge impact on organic search results. A strong presence, great content and an engaging strategy will result in more tweets, likes and comments, and those signals will tell search engines that the content you’re sharing is valuable. You could see a great boost to traffic and over time your page rank could be improved as well, and if you make sure to focus on providing quality content and offer easy ways to share it (by providing social media buttons, for example) you could soon reap the rewards.

You should always give followers usable, valuable information, but don’t always focus on your own stuff. You need to abide by the 80/20 rule whereby 80% of your tweets/posts are from a relevant industry news source whilst just 20% are your own, and if you make sure to interact with followers and show a bit of personality you could see an even bigger boost to your campaign.

Social media may be more of a fun way to interact but don’t view it as being less important as any other strategy—Google has even developed a handy social media report in their analytics package so you can keep track of how socially active your site is, showing just how important social media is in their eyes. So what are you waiting for? Start using social media to its full potential and you could see your SEO results soar, getting you closer to that coveted top spot for maximum impact.

If you think you don’t need to worry about your mobile SEO strategy, think again—Googlebot Mobile is here. This bot crawls the internet to look for sites that offer a great experience for smartphone users, boosting the ranking of those that provide smartphone-optimised content and smartphone-specific redirects, so it’s vital you’re able to meet the criteria. You’ll rank much higher in mobile searches if you cater to such users and you could even take it one step further—if your strategy detects the type of device being used and offers a different experience accordingly you could boost your profile even more, so it makes sense to see what can be done.

In a nutshell, you need to be providing content in a format that works on mobile devices, and if you can’t do that you’re going to be left behind. Users expect a great experience whenever they browse but, perhaps even more importantly, so does Google, so it’s vital you’re able to cater to all users if you want your SEO strategy to pay off. Coming up with a whole new format may seem like a hassle but with the number of smartphone users continually growing it’s a sector of the market you can’t ignore, so make sure to go mobile and you’ll soon be giving customers what they want.

Here at Real Web SEO, we do not recommend involving yourself in negative SEO tactics. It is much more important to focus on improving your own keyword rankings and making your website more appealing to users, rather than spending your time worrying about your competitors. Negative SEO tactics include over optimising anchor text, also known as keyword stuffing, which could cause Google to identify a website as spam. Other tactics include optimising undesirable and negative keywords, and falsifying business reviews, making websites look too good to be true. Google Penguin is cracking down on web spam, in hope to level out the playing field, so it’s likely that if someone is actively impacting your SEO negatively, it will have an effect on your ranking in Google searches.

So what can you do to prevent yourself from being a victim of SEO sabotage? It is essential that you use search engine optimisation tracking to see where trends are occurring, and identify any unknown back links. You can also seek the help of SEO experts who will know what to look out for, and how to check your keyword rankings. If there are any suspicious links, causing your site to be down ranked, you can appeal to Google, with proof of the links that you have no control over, and ask to be re-assessed.

There appears to be an on-going argument as to whether using Pinterest can improve a business’s SEO. When you ‘pin’ an image onto a pin board a link is created to the website in which you took the image from, meaning that when a user clicks on the image, it directs them to the website. This of course is great for referrals and getting your products seen by potential customers, however it is thought these backlinks are ‘no follow’ links meaning that they will not improve your SEO, as they have no influence over the way in which a search engine ranks your website. This being said, if you place a link to your website in the description part under the image, this is thought to be a ‘do follow’ link and should therefore have some influence. Whether the links have an impact or not, you can still make your profile and pinboards more SEO friendly by including relevant keywords in your descriptions, image files and board titles.

Despite the debates over SEO, there’s one thing for sure, Pinterest is great for increasing exposure and reaching a broader target market. You can easily upload images of your products, and even ask your customers if they’d like to upload pictures of themselves with the products they’ve bought from you. Integrating your account with your Facebook timeline will also increase exposure, along with tweeting links to your pin boards. It’s important to keep in mind that this is a platform for social interaction, so try to hold back from going overboard with self-promotion. Use the platform to your advantage by interacting with others, using the board as a research tool to find out a little more about your target market.

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The first thing you need to do is take a look at your link building endeavours. Ideally you should be building these links organically, and if you pay for link building campaigns you should consider giving them a miss. Doing anything else is a huge risk with the way Google’s going, but if you’re a big brand and rely on paid link building then make sure to adjust your strategy—shake things up a bit by changing your monthly link building budget so you’re not getting a consistent number of links each month, adjust your anchor text (it shouldn’t always be an exact match as it looks unnatural) and diversify the sites you buy links from so they don’t all have PR1, making things look as natural as possible.

But, perhaps one of the best things you can do is look at your content. You need to add value to your site, now more than ever before, and that means you should be focusing on this most vital of areas. You could add new landing pages, write how-to guides, get your blog back up and running, build microsites, incorporate press releases and post video reviews of your products—good content will encourage links and, above all, visitors, so do anything that can give the end user the best experience possible and you’ll soon notice the difference. Make sure you’re getting social to promote your content and encourage interaction, and spend time to make your site the best it can be if you really want your efforts to pay off.

Provide quality content. Content is king, and that’s as true online as it is anywhere else. You need to be providing quality, usable information that people can draw value from, because there’s no point having a flawless SEO strategy only for your content to let you down. Alternative SEO techniques may get you traffic but it’s quality content that gets sales, and it could help with your ranking too—with the Panda update seeking to penalise sites that don’t offer quality content it’s more important now than ever before, so always seek to provide value (and never use spinning software) and you can give your SEO efforts a boost.

Use keywords effectively without overusing them. It’s always important to get your keyword phrases in there somewhere but go too far and it’ll be termed as keyword stuffing, or spam in other words, and that means you’ll be penalised by Google. Try to go for an optimum amount of around 4-5 keyword occurrences per 300 word post to get maximum effect, and make sure to use keywords in your titles too. You’ll want to make sure you’re targeting the right phrases too, so make sure to spend time on keyword research if you want to get the best results.

Secure backlinks. Backlinks are key when it comes to SEO, because if someone relevant links back to you you’ll be deemed as having a higher profile and Google will happily rank you accordingly. Make sure to do it ethically and always go for quality over quantity—a few backlinks from high-profile sites will be worth far more than hundreds of links from sites with a low page rank, and always make sure to seek links from places that deal with similar topics to your own. A word of warning though—reciprocal linking won’t do you any favours these days, and try to forge “real” links rather than paying for them to get the best results.

It’s all about going back to basics and making sure your SEO strategy is solid from the ground up. Spending time creating quality content with effective keywords whilst forging ethical backlinks could make all the difference, so have a go at some DIY and you could soon achieve the desired results.

Penguin focuses on webspam, trying to weed out sites that use unscrupulous spamming methods to manipulate their rankings. It’s been designed to level out the SEO playing field, penalising sites which keyword stuff and those which use link building schemes rather than going for organic methods, with the ultimate aim to push genuine sites higher and see off their black hat competition.

Seems like a good idea, but actually it’s had a widely negative impact across the board—some genuine sites have been downranked whilst other not-quite-so genuine ones have been spotted closer to the top of results pages, a shift that only seems to be benefiting the unscrupulous, and as a result the update has even been nicknamed the Titanic for the number of strong websites that it’s sunk.

 
It doesn’t seem to have hit the right mark, so what can webmasters do? The answer, as ever, is tricky. Google is constantly changing the goalposts so a shift in method now could result in more drawbacks later down the line, so the key is to continue focusing on quality. Quality will always come through in the end (at least that’s the plan), so make sure to produce quality content that utilises keywords effectively without going OTT.
As a general rule you should be looking to include 4-5 occurrences of your chosen keyword phrase in a 250-300 word piece, and if you stick within that range you shouldn’t have a problem. Make sure to avoid the threat of Panda as well—never use spinning software and always keep quality and value at the top of the agenda—and if you do you can give both the Panda and Penguin a run for their money.

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After the introduction of the loveable creature that will crush un-natural links and eat away at spammy sites until they are off the list, many SEO experts were very aware of their own sites and websites they had created for clients. Sites have been monitored very closely since the introduction, to see if there are any major drops or boosts in site rankings. If your company has always carried out SEO in the most ethical and organic way possible, theoretically, you should have nothing to worry about.

One SEO company in particular has carried out some research around the introduction of Google Panda. SEO Consult researched the effects of the new algorithm, which was created to highlight bad, low quality websites and penalise them by moving them down the search engine results, or losing them completely. Luckily, SEO Consult found that the sites of their clients had not been affected. In essence, as mentioned before, those practicing white hat SEO techniques shouldn’t notice any difference, in fact, if Google has penalised sites that ranked above your own, this should clear the way for your to rise to glory.

There are still hundreds of SEO people trying to find a way around Panda to help boost sites performance, but no-doubt Google will provide solutions to eradicate bad SEO practice.

At Real Web SEO we continue to provide a quality ethical service promoting sites and empowering them with the help of SEO content, digital marketing and PR. Our experts keep abreast of news and provide creative ways of helping companies showcase their work online, and we’ll continue to do so, thanks to our successes and Google

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Unfortunately, due to a comment to Google’s SEO master, Matt Cutts, an acquaintance found his site ruined- by thousands of links. Dan Thies annoyed a few people by commenting how he was glad that Google had rid the internet of blog networks, probably not the best thing to air in public, because the aftermath was incredible.

When Google changed its policy about unnatural links, many sites became defunct, especially those with spam and bad links, so, as we’ve mentioned before, blog networks went down and even some big brand sites.

Google released this statement due to the questions about competitors and others, possibly ruining sites with bad links :

“Can competitors harm ranking? There’s nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you’re concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question. Google aggregates and organizes information published on the web; we don’t control the content of these pages.”

Someone decided to create 100s of unnatural links to Dans sites, which was picked up and penalised by Google. After this particular trauma, Google re-issued its statement:

“Can competitors harm ranking? There’s ALMOST nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you’re concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question. Google aggregates and organizes information published on the web; we don’t control the content of these pages.”

So was the test successful? Those who work in black-hat Link building think so, but how can you prevent this from happening to your own site.

Constantly check the type and quality of links coming into your site and the source, this is probably best practice. If you notice your site nosediving for unexplained reasons, check the links at the start, eliminating the bad ones can save your site.

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SEO optimization has literally become an art form and can be considered as a separate style of writing.

We came across a programme called InboundWriter which helps you optimize your text up to 99% for web publication, or simply use it to see how well your text will rank.

It seems like a fantastic tool and you can sign up for a free trial which allows you to optimize 8 documents a month for free. This is a simple way of doing everything in one area. Others will tend to do a bit of research on keywords and phrases through other sites then compile text, which may be time consuming and disjointed.

Thinking back to how wary we are about writing for the web and how much it has changed, it doesn’t just stop at  blogging or web content, there is a tricky art form in social media, such as Tweets and Comments. It’s a two pronged attack, trying to engage people, writing something that’s interesting and that will appear in search results, if certain terms or phrases are searched for.

It may seem difficult, but if you are organised and keep a level head, the process can be quite simple and incredibly rewarding.

The next time you go to pen a blog, whether its personal or for a company, take some time to research keywords and think about your content carefully.

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