How have Google Updates affected your blog?
Are you aware of all the changes that Google makes in order to keep spammers at bay and to allow our beautiful craft blogs to be found instead? Do you know your Panda 3.5 from your Penguin? Are you worried about what's above the fold?Well if you talk to SEO experts (the people that make money from boosting a websites ranking in search results) they're still pulling their hair out trying to stay ahead of all the changes. What can they do next to ensure their clients are not being penalised for over optimising. I've written 10 tips at the end of this post that you can put into practise.
Don't Panic!
You are a blogger and you also want your site to rank highly - should you be out there researching and wasting your creative time finding out about how to get round the updates. In short, NO is the answer. There's a simple way around this, it's called writing good quality content!- You are a craft blogger
- You have a genuine LOVE of your topic
- You enjoy writing about your craft
If the above is true, then you really shouldn't worry too much about these kind of updates.
Google is simply trying desperately hard to weed out all the junky stuff on the web - those sites that are badly written and stuffed with gaudy advertising, so much so that you can't actually find where the content is and yet they fill the first page of results every time you search.
Analytics
Boring as it may be for you, you should always make time to check your analytics. If you don't measure and analyse your traffic you cannot effectively build on your successes or understand your failures.If you are worried about your search traffic having been affected by the recent Google updates, take a look at your analytics and check for any sudden and sustained dips in search traffic over the past year. Look at the report - Traffic Sources / Sources / Search / Organic
How to get seen by Google
In genereal my advice is as it has always been since I first started this blog in 2010- Write good, relevant content
- Write naturally for people not robots
- Use well constructed headings, sentences and paragraphs
- Use relevant keywords when and where appropriate (see my post on Google ranking here)
- Make your goal engagement with your community / readership
- Use great images to illustrate your posts
- Don't use spammy methods to get your blog posts seen (ie don't pay for links in, or stuff posts with unnatural keywords)
- Seek out quality inbound links through genuine networking (eg. guest posts on influential blogs!) Always quality over quantity!!!
- Actively delete ALL dodgy / dubious comments to keep your site free from links out to unreputable sources
- Tidy up out of date and broken links in posts and in your navigation, sidebars and footers.