Image Source – Mashable

During a Redesign

Let’s be honest, the main purpose of most website redesigns is to optimize their performance. A true redesign is built from the ground up. There is absolutely no better time to ensure that your website is configured to attract maximum interest from readers than when it’s being reimagined. You can build SEO and speed optimizations right into your new design. You’ll have a better looking, faster and more productive website when you’re finished.

When Adding Content for All Pages

Adding fresh content that will appear on all the pages of your website is also a great time to optimize your content. First of all, make sure that the content you are adding is optimized. It’s going to be appearing on every page of your site. If it’s well optimized, every page will benefit.

This is also a good time to tweak individual pages. You’ll be visiting every page on your website to make sure your new content is properly integrated. As you click through your content, keep an eye out for ways to optimize each page.

When Circumstances Change

There are any number of reasons why the circumstances of your situation may change. Sometimes they’re personal reasons. Other times their professional. It might be an opportune time to make some adjustments to your website, especially if the circumstances necessitate a change or update to your website.

When it’s been a While

If you’re reading this and thinking “I haven’t optimized my site in months”, that would mean now is a good time to get to work. If your website and your business are running smoothly, you may not think you need to optimize your site. After all, it doing well and so are you.

Remember that a website that is doing well is a website that is often updated. Make a point to go back and revisit your optimization strategy on a regular basis. Even if it’s just a routine checkup to make sure things are functioning properly. Your website will thank you.

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Brian Taylor

Brian Taylor is the VP, Business Development at Forix web design in Portland, OR. Forix offers affordable and ethical SEO services in Portland and web design and development services helping small businesses with their Internet marketing needs.

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It is such a horrid feeling to know that a site you have worked hard on for a very long time is labelled as Spam, and been pushed out of the biggest search engine on the face of the planet.

Image By Stuart Miles

Tips to help after the sting of the slap:

Don’t become a Spam site – The worst thing you can ever do is get your site labelled as Spam in the first place, try to avoid this entirely by not stuffing your pages full of keywords in

strange places, try to make the content look as natural as possible! All you need to do is provide good quality content and have 23 keywords in each article if nessacary.

Post fresh content – Google LOVES brand new and origional content, you will always put a smile on the bots face if you feed him fresh food! If you don’t update often he won’t return at all, think of it as a hungry dog, if you do not feed the dog he will run away in the other direction!

Build your site – If you are creating a brand new site try not to open it fully to the search engines until you have at least 10 pages of content, the reason is there is obiously no point in opening a website with just one page, it’s boring, it’s plain, you did not start a website to create just one piece of information, did you?

Narrow down your content – Try to narrow your niche down and not create a massive wide variety of topics, if you can narrow it down for example the health niche to “Exercise”. You are then telling Google exactly what your site and subject matter is about. If you are wanting to create authority website on health then by all means go ahead, just make sure you are VERY clear in every single piece of content what it is about.

Contact forms – Always make sure your website has that personal touch and has a bit of “you” in it. Put up a contact form for questions or for people to contact you, Google likes it when you make the effort to be a socialite! Just be careful of those darn spammers, if you are using wordpress use a quiz plugin so they cannot spam.

If you stick to these simple little rules nothing can go wrong, well at least on-page anyway.

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Sophie Eagan

Sophia and I love Internet Advertising, I have been in the industry for around 10 years. I hope you enjoy my articles and informative posts.

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Post Penguin Link Building

In the web landscape, it is no secret that Google is a giant, rolling out updates every other day to its algorithm to establish absolute relevancy of results and an improved user experience. This is acutely focused at making the search engine respond to queries in the desired manner, rendering results with information a user is specifically looking for.

Despite the fact that a Penguin is an adorable creature, when Google Penguin came, it proved to be the worst nightmare for SEO experts and website owners since rankings of countless websites fell like soldiers losing in a battlefield.

The release of Google Penguin was announced on 24^th April, 2012 and to the great disappointment of many, caught them by surprise. Sources cited that the underlying reason for releasing this update was the identification of websites who were violating Google’s Webmaster Guidelines by incorporating black hat SEO techniques like cloaking, link schemes, keyword stuffing, duplicate content and others.

Mercilessly retaliating against the spammy websites, link building is one aspect that attracted a lot of limelight in the post Penguin era.  For website owners who have been working for years on link-building, the algorithm update came as a shock as they saw all their efforts going down the drain. The update implied that link building has gotten more technical than ever before and only the more skilled ones will now be able to survive.

A fallacious believe around which the Search Engine Optimization strategies were structured till now was that links are just a viable means to bring more traffic to the website but do not have the potential to actually hurt your website rankings. Nothing can be farther from the truth as the secret is out. The way links are incorporated in a website can now have an influential role to play in the post Penguin age.

The update has been exceptionally successful in knocking down spam sites, but if you are one of those who have made use of black hat SEO techniques to land among the top search engine results, Google is going to hit you hard. To avoid it, it is time to whiten the hat and rebuild your SEO strategy. After all, it is never too late to repent.

While a lot has been said and done when it comes to post Penguin link building, some fool-proof tips to not only secure improvements in your rankings, but also to survive the Penguin update successfully are outlined below.

1.     Get Social to Spell Success

We are living in the social media age and if you are wondering how social media and link building are associated, read on.

Whenever you post fresh content on your blog or website, make sure you share it on all of your social media pages. This should be done like a reflex. A lot of websites failed badly despite regular posts on their blogs. Why? Because they were not sharing them over Facebook, Google + or Twitter. What is the point of boasting about so-so number of fans and followers if you are not showing them your content?

This helps you create a win-win situation where all you have to do is to make social media spread your content virally, well beyond the premises of your fan base and voila! you get likes, +1’s and retweets. What is there to lose? Zilch!

2.     Inner-Page Linking

A mistake a lot of SEO experts and website owners make is that they always link to their homepage. While it cannot be denied that homepage is the most important page of any website, Google is going to raise an eyebrow if it finds all of the backlinks pointing to your homepage. Internal linking is very important because that is where the real content is believed to be. It does not make any sense to Googlebot that none of the links are pointing to the content on the inner pages of the website where blog posts, videos and guides are available.

Take time to improve your website’s internal structure and make sure that the right keywords are directing the users to the right web pages. The following is an example of a website SEOMOZ that uses different mediums to provide links to its internal web pages.

3.     Diversify Your Anchor Texts

It is time you get a break from the traditional SEO practices because another element Google Penguin plans to address is on-site and off-site over-optimization. Just imagine how annoying Google can get when it feels that you are forcing it to rank you for a specific keyword such as ‘cheap cars for sale.’ Google will find it highly suspicious that all of your link partners are using the exact key phrase to link to you, which not only happens to be pasted over your title bar but homepage as well.

If people choose to link to you naturally, they are most likely to be using different anchor texts to do so. This way you will achieve linking organically, which will eventually get the wheels going in the right direction. Don’t forget, diversity is the key.

4.     Quality over Quantity

Google is going to penalize you if it finds that you have a large number of backlinks from sites that are untrustworthy. It is imperative to understand that one quality link from a blog is better than 30 from unreliable sources. Go for quality because even if it is going to be a small number, it is going to work for you. Of course, you do not want to go to sleep every night wondering if you are next on Penguin’s hit list.

5.     Charm with Link-Worthy Content

Last but not the least; you have to stay focused at producing content that others find link-worthy. Stuff that fails to engage readers is not going to get you anywhere. This is because bad user experience is synonymous to low Google rankings. Give your readers something that encourages them to stay with you or even come back again. Content is, and will always be, king.

With the tips above, we hope that you will be able to take your website’s link building in the post Penguin period a step ahead. With the rules of the game changed, link building is no rocket science, but when done appropriately, it can and will work wonders for you.

An article was prepared by SEM Company Promodo.

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Roman Viliavin

Roman Viliavin, vice CEO at Promodo. Unconventional Thinker and candidate master of chess. Roman has been working in the field of search engine optimization since 2005 and is the moving spirit of the company. Participant and speaker of all major events in SEO business. Roman has successfully completed dozens of projects and gladly shares his experience with SEO community via articles and various online and offline publications. Follow Promodo on Twitter and on Facebook.

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What are Google Rich Snippets?

Google Rich Snippets are nothing but the additional lines of information that appear next to the Google search results. They are designed to provide quick information to users regarding what’s on the page and why it’s relevant to their query. These snippets encompass star ratings for the web page and other detailed information related to the query. Generally, you can find Google Rich Snippets in websites of restaurants, music, people, events, videos, recipes, products and businesses. Having a 5-star rating in your Google Rich Snippet encourages Internet users to click on your listing. This is the reason why Google Rich Snippets are considered to be the perfect addition to your online marketing strategies.

Now that we have seen the advantages of using Google Rich Snippets, let us move to the next step of creating and customizing Google Rich Snippets with Schema.org Microdata.

Defining Metaboxes: A metabox helps you to add content or scripts to any part of the website.First of all, to qualify for Google Rich Snippets, you have to define metaboxes. You don’t have to provide all the properties included in the specification, even though each content type has a minimum requirement. There are numerous custom metaboxes available and is indeed a great way to make custom fields friendlier to users.

Marking up your pages with Microdata: The specialty of Google Rich Snippets is its structured, semantic markup that enables Google to understand the content of the web page. So, it’s your duty to markup your content properly to describe the particular type of content on your website. When it comes to marking up your content, there are three types of formats – microformats, Microdata and RDFa. Google has always recommended the Microdata format for rich snippets as it allows search engines to understand your content a lot better and delivers more meaningful search listings for the user’s query. In fact, Microdata has no effect on your search engine rankings but it provides a richer and more useful browsing experience for users.

Use Schema.org vocabulary: All the major search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Yandex have launched Schema.org. Schema.org is a not a language but a Microdata vocabulary, that helps you to create common vocabulary for structured data markup on web pages. As it uses the same vocabulary across all participating search engines, there are fewer chances for confusion over twofold meanings or unsupported jargons. The most vital thing you have to keep in mind is that you can use Schema.org to markup only the visible part of your web pages and not any of the hidden page elements.

Many sites are already experiencing great SEO benefits with rich snippets. With the guidelines provided above, you now know how to customize Google Rich Snippets with Schema.org vocabulary. Using Schema.org and Microdata have positive impacts on your website, as they help improve the user experience and invite more clicks.

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Brian Taylor

Brian Taylor is the VP, Business Development at Forix web design in Portland, OR. Forix offers affordable and ethical SEO services in Portland and web design and development services helping small businesses with their Internet marketing needs.

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Low-Quality Content

The typical web user is searching for relevance and meaning in a sea of generic content online. So many webmasters try to “phone it in” with mass produced web spam, and it’s no surprise that they often fail to achieve the desired results. Your SEO success starts with the basics, which is original and unique content that actually delivers value to the end user. Put some serious effort into your content first and foremost.

Keyword Stuffing

A major mistake made by bloggers and marketers every day is the practice of stuffing irrelevant keywords into articles in an attempt to dominate Long Tail queries. Google’s wise to this practice, and they have ways of figuring out if your keyword-stuffed content actually delivers the goods. Avoid keyword stuffing at all costs, and only include the major keywords that assist your pages in being indexed properly by the search engines.

Building Spammy Links

While a solid 25% to 30% of SEO revolves around content creation, the rest of the formula is largely inbound links that show Google and Bing how valuable a site is to readers. Link exchanges are dead, and they’ll do you more harm than good these days. The same goes for forum spam and mass referrals from sites with low PageRank. Build organic links the right way through viral social media promotion and guest blogging on reputable sites.

Doorway Pages

If you’re not familiar with the term, then suffice it to say that Doorway Pages are indeed a major faux paus. Otherwise known as gateway pages, jump pages or portal pages, they’re designed to trick search engines into thinking that they have value while delivering very little to an actual user. Many rely on Javascript redirection to get unsuspecting users to click through to a desired landing page. In short, avoid this chicanery.

Content Cloaking

If you’re a decent human being, it’s likely that you don’t know what Content Cloaking even is. Still, it’s important to understand how it works. In a nutshell, it’s all about using server-side script to identify search engine spiders based on their user agent and IP address. When a potential Googlebot rather than a regular user is detected, a different version of a page is served up. If you’re running a website of any note, you’ll eventually get caught using this tactic and be consequently punished in the SERPs.

Taking Shortcuts in General

In spite of the best efforts of Google and Bing, it’s still possible to temporarily trick the search engine algorithms and slide some weak content through their filters. In all your SEO efforts, stop and think about what you’re doing before proceeding. If it’s fundamentally disingenuous, don’t do it. Trying to cheat won’t get you anywhere in the long run, and it’s also a huge waste of time. Last but not least, mind the fundamentals like canonical URLs, 301 redirects, sitemaps and basic meta tag implementation.

Running a Tight SEO Ship

When you foolishly choose to deploy the tricks described above, the consequences can be ultimately catastrophic. Each one is a surefire way to incur algorithmic penalties courtesy of Google’s Penguin and Panda, and can even lead to manual penalties if not kept in check. Put in the time to produce high-quality, well-optimized content and the search engine gods will reward you. Otherwise, don’t be shocked by the inevitably low SERPs rankings that result.

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Matt Beswick

Matt Beswick is UK based SEO Consultant and founder of Pet365. Find him on Twitter - @mattbeswick.

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