When Google unleashed the infamous Penguin update, many bloggers were left wondering what it all meant. Are they being penalized for their SEO efforts? Are they or their SEO company in violation of Google’s guidelines? Does Google consider all SEO to be spam?
To calm things down a bit and put bloggers’ and Webmasters’ minds at ease Google addressed this last question right away.
Here are 7 Penguin Safe SEO methods that you can use, which are not only allowed but are actually encouraged:
- Crawlability – make sure your blog is crawlable and can be indexed accurately. This might be done by making sure that your XML sitemap is up to date, or the WordPress plugin that generates it is up to date. Also, make sure that the frequency at which you instruct Google to index each part of your site is accurately represented on your XML sitemap. For example, you probably aren’t going to change your Privacy Policy or your Terms of Use pages every week, so make sure that your site map reflects an indexing frequency that is realistic for those pages. For those examples, I suggest either “Once a year” or “Never”. Your front page and your Archives pages should be set to be reindexed by Googlebot at least every week, or every day, depending on how often you post.
- Keywords – weeding out industry jargon that might make the content of the site more difficult to understand and thus less valuable is something easy to do. The hard part is letting go of your insecurity that it makes you look less sophisticated to your audience, but this is a balance you will have to figure out. Do you want to look sophisticated, or do you want better ranking and more traffic? *Note, this does not include keyword stuffing, where an attempt is made to put a word the site wishes to get good results for into their copy over and over. That IS spam.
- Site Speed – one of the factors Google takes into account in its search algorithm is how fast a site loads, so making it as quick as possible is something they strongly suggest. One way to achieve this is to use the cache on your server. That way, your site doesn’t have to do a database lookup to load every single piece of content. For static pages or posts that you won’t be updating, you can choose from a number of WordPress plugins that will help cache those pages easily and speed up your site dramatically.
4. Optimizing ROI and A/B Testing – make sure that your website brings in as much revenue as possible by testing different versions to see which results in more conversions or sales. One way to achieve this is through a technique known as A/B Testing. It’s basically what it sounds like. You make two versions of an important page and see which gets better response from users: version A or version B. 5. Site architecture – the way your site is put together, concerning efficient and properly formed code, is not only acceptable but encouraged. Try using the Developer Tools built into the Chrome Browser or installing the Firefox plug-in called Firebug. These can help you delve deep into your WordPress template’s code and even automatically detect potential errors or standards violations.
Finally, be very careful when hiring any SEO company or individual consultant. Many that claim to only use White Hat SEO methods (those that fall within Google’s list of acceptable practices and guidelines) often will use Black Hat SEO methods because it’s the only way to deliver on the lofty promises of better SERP (Search Engine Results Page) positions and continue to charge exorbitant fees for their services.
Many bloggers get suckered in by promises made by SEO service providers, and then one day are hit by the harsh realization that their blog is ranking lower before they shelled out a bunch of cash for what they thought would be strictly White Hat SEO. The truth is that once you turn over the keys, or even if you just turn over the deposit, some SEOs will go out and begin using Black Hat SEO techniques such as improper inbound link building and comment spamming that you would never know about, even if every line of code on your site remains completely untouched.
Unfortunately, Google does not discriminate, and your good intentions of hiring someone to only use White Hat SEO methods on your blog are irrelevant… your blog will still suffer the consequences. In the old days, those consequences didn’t get much worse than being shoved deep down into a low ranking, but now it’s very easy to get blacklisted, and this isn’t easy to recover from. For this reason, I suggest doing your own SEO so you know that you comply with the Webmaster Guidelines.
Also, just try to keep in mind that the best thing you can do to improve your search engine ranking is to post high-quality, valuable content, frequently and consistently, in a way that provides the best possible experience for your users. That’s what Google wants most, because after all, your users were their users at one point.
