Last year the penguin update had a major impact of SEO practices. There were many examples of clients losing their rankings overnight and as a result SEO companies losing their clients. Over optimisation, poor link quality and low quality content have all been targeted by the recent algorithm updates as Google continues its assault on clearing up and improving the search results. Old black hat practices no longer have the same affect and in the long term will damage a site permanently. SEO practices have had to evolve so here we look at some tips that will form a longer term strategy to deliver sustained results.

Content marketing

Business owners now realise that quality content will be the key to achieving longer term results in the search engines. Any SEO strategy should be content lead and the search engines now look at many metrics such as visits, social signals and links to measure pages relevance for a particular search.

Link quality

Links are still a major tactic in helping rank a website in the search engines. The penguin update targeted low quality links and link farms so many old link building tactics such as directory submissions, article submissions, social book marks and link wheels no longer have the same impact and are now considered low quality links. The time where an SEO company would build 1000’s of such links with the same anchor text which would then be enough to be able to rank a site high in the search engines is now gone. Websites that now adopt such practices will be penalised and will only damage their website in the longer term. There were some well known SEO companies that were hit by the Penguin update.

The most legitimate means of acquiring quality links is currently through blogger outreach and guest posting. Blogger outreach is the process of reaching out to blog owners and pitching content ideas. The guest post is the tangible return of having the article published on their site with a link pointing to the website. The process can be lengthy and the higher the trust and authority of the blog, the harder it can be to get a post published. In terms of acquiring quality links, blogger outreach can be a great process for sourcing high quality blogs.

Anchor text variation

The penguin update has seen a growing trend to the use of generic anchor text such as “click here” and so on. Authority links pointing to high authority sites such as Wikipedia are also new practices that have been adopted in the wake of the penguin update. The penguin update enforced that if very link was targeting your exact match anchor text then this would be seen as spam, over optimisations and trying to manipulate the search results. A balance between different anchor texts including brand name, authority links and generic links based around quality content are now practices that are widely agreed as acceptable.

There is no doubt that search engines such as Google will continue to update its algorithm as it continues to keep a level playing field in terms of acceptable SEO practices.

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