Your site is important – do not take risks that can incur the wrath of the Google God. Imagine you have spent years building your website – adding content, gaining reputation and getting a flow of traffic to your website. You have made a big investment in time, effort and often money! You do not want to risk your website on a dubious tactic. Google can take exception and penalise you – sometimes with a +30, or +1000 google penalty or just dump you completely. So do NOT take shortcuts.

Content, Content, Content

The content mantra is not only safe but it works for you. It is essential that your content is unique, and not repeated on your site. You can check that the content is unique at Copyscape.com. In addition, make your content exceptional. Over time other sites will willingly link to your excellent content – these will be natural links. Quite often, the inbound links will be coming from websites in the same niche – Google likes “on theme” links and will reward you with higher search engine rankings as these links are seen as recommendations.

What type of content attracts links? Naturally, informative articles will attract links but also consider what is referred to as “Link bait”- content that is controversial or thought-provoking or catches the attention (a simple example – a competition with a prize). Also provide content that has recommendations, tips, or advice.  Alternatively, choose topics that are in the News – Google loves to pick up reaction to major news stories.

Social Bookmarking

Digg, Del.icio.us, Furl, etc. are “authority” sites and Bookmarks (links) from these sites will do wonders for your rankings. So make sure you have added Social Bookmark buttons to each piece of content on your website. Visitors to your site who like your content will willingly “bookmark” your site – so ensure you make the process easy! The following resource will provide the Social BookMark code you need to place on each page. Over time these bookmarks will improve the authority of a page and consequently search engine rankings will improve for that page. You can see an example of the bookmarks below this article – so you know what we want you to do!!

Keyword Rich Content

As you increase the amount of content, not only are you creating more excellent content for linking potential,  but also the content will contain more keywords. Now you will have even more pages that Google can rank (remember Google ranks pages not websites), AND the keywords will re-inforce your authority about your niche (better rankings!). Search Engine Optimized articles will improve the chances of better rankings. For the more advanced using LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) principles will turn articles into top ranking content.

Search Engine Consultants, August 2008

More:
Traffic Advice
SEO Myths

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