Is your website search friendly??
Can you Build a Penguin-Safe, Search Engine Friendly Website? The answer is YES!
The recent Penguin update has show the direction of search and what the future holds for web marketers. A lot of people are scared of using exact match anchor texts or building links to their inner pages. But you don’t have to be scared – at least, not when you do the right thing.
It’s true that the Penguin update has drowned a lot of sites and rendered some folks homeless, but we need to also look at the good side. Google and other search engines are doing their best to make the web much better, more convenient and resourceful for guys like us, the white haters. They’re in business too, so if you play your card well, they would do the same and reward you accordingly.
When you look at the other side in the algorithm calendar, you will discover how to build a better website and optimize properly. You should employ personality and creativity when building a site – and there are credible SEO services to meet these latest ranking requirements.
And the interesting part is that the old is the new new: content is king. To be safe and build search engine friendly website follow these basic steps:
Know Who You’re Targeting
Image Credit: focus
Everyone will not benefit from your website. You’ve to map out the target audience your contents will be directed to. Without knowing who the person at the receiving end is, you’ll produce the wrong contents for them. An SEO company should help the prospect and customer to research who they’re marketing to. That’s their primary duty – market research. Who is your audience?
Do you know their social status, the demographics and what piques them? Without a proper grasp of who they’re, you’ll build the wrong website. Creating a search engine friendly website rests at the base of a sound market research and metrics.
There is no place for assumptions – if you assume that your audience knows what you’re saying, it could be the greatest obstacle to business growth. Get to know these people; who have blood running through their veins. They want to experience you. Not only as an internet marketer, but also as a person who has feelings and could go extra miles to help others.
Spoon-feed Search Spiders
Image Credit: thewikiman
Search engine spiders are like toddlers. Toddlers need support from parents before they can enjoy the nice meal on the table. When building a website or if you already have one, the goal is to serve quality and helpful contents to your readers.
Google spider for instance, doesn’t have eyes and cannot tell if your site is well designed or not. Web Spiders that crawl websites for fresh and unique contents have been programmed to function in a certain way. The secret to building a friendly website and producing excellent contents is to ignore search engines and focus on the people.
Of course, you may still use keywords to give insights, but that’s not the focus.
When you engage the readers with interesting and helpful contents, they would stick around, ask intelligent questions, make buying decisions and share your contents with fans and business acquaintances. If your content must please Google, it must first please the end user (prospects, readers, customers, clients and so forth).
So, the best way to spoon-feed Google isn’t by stuffing keywords or using hype, it’s about using the right language in a unique way to gladden the hearts of readers. If you consistently practice this, your website will grow exponentially.
Focus ON End Users
It’s all about them, not you. When you create a website for your business, the focus mustn’t be on your achievements and the numerous qualifications you’ve got. It’s about the end user.
Those who have problems, needs and aspirations – they’re counting on you to provide lasting solutions and if you can do that continually, congratulations. You can easily create a powerful platform for organic traffic.
A search engine friendly website talks about people and their problems. “What’s in it for them” should inspire you – see you at the top!
Hi,
Brian i have read your content which is related to penguin safe and friendly website, my question is that there are many coupon codes site and as you know that on each website there are thousand of coupon code with there separate links and how they can add content more than 350 word each on single coupon it is impossible, so how they can save it from penguin ?
Thank
Kamran
Kamran,
Unfortunately, coupon sites are viewed similarly to comparison shopping engines by Google, which is, they don’t offer any value to users (strictly talking in terms of content). Not only that it doesn’t make sense to create content for a coupon that is going to be live for a 7/30/45 days, but doing that at a large scale is almost impossible. One thing that you should try to do is to capitalize on existing traffic to the site to create some user generated content – think of product reviews – but that will be a challenge. Additionally try to think of something that adds value to for the users – i.e. statistics of how frequent a company is releasing coupons, the average saving offered by a retailer, and so on.
I hope this helps
first try to identify if you really have been hit by Penguin. If you will know for sure, remove the cause, file a re consideration request and add more content.
nice tips, I have learned these things after penguin update… but can you tell me how can I recover my blogs from penguin update?
I completely agree that “content is king”. I’ve had enough with those sites that just mash up some content there, maybe spinned articles that make no sense. Everybody wanted the easy way out.
I mean why can’t we just be serious and try to offer something valuable on your site? It doesn’t have to be Nobel Prize worthy, but still, just a simple opinion, suggestion, advice etc.
Either way, i enjoyed reading your post, i think it was useful for my research.
Aggregators, how I love them :) And now they have a new name: content curators. Don’t get it wrong, the ones reviewed by humans are great, but the automated ones are just aggregators under disguise.
Penguin update really hurt a lot of website owners.
However, that might mean (hopefully) that the web will become a better place soon with lots of quality sites with unique information focused on people, not search engines. There are still a lot of junk websites out there that don’t provide any value to their readers, so this Penguin update will help to get rid of them or turn them into better sites. Thanks for sharing!
Elena, if only Google could fulfill it’s promises… I still see a lot of spam after Panda and Penguin. Just Google “payday loans” and top 10 are only ugly spam or hacked sites. This was not happening before with this query. But eventually this will be cleaned up too.
For getting customers for a product website we have to do our work by producing good content and good seo should be done.
There is one important elements i alsway use to keep in mind before beginning: That is about Do Follow Links
Make sure all of the places where you are soliciting links offer DoFollow links. Check the source of the page, and do a CTRL F searching for “nofollow”. If you do not find the nofollow code as part of the links, the link will pass authority and PR. A small number of your links can, and should be, on nofollow sites as you want your profiles to appear natural.
Ben, a natural profile will have nofollowed links too. Also it will have anchor texts such as the brand name and even click here anchors.
Great post, content is it! all the way. Keep people coming back for more, give them what they want and then the rest should follow. Even if you do not get thousands you will still get people who are serious about your site and are more likely to buy your products. 200 loyal customers is far better than 2000 luke warm readers.
Cheers
Andi
indeed, 200 qualified visitors are much better than 2000 visitors who landed for irrelevant queries.
Hey nice post, but i have a question, if a site is affected by penguin then will be approved by google adsence or not?
I think you will.
“The secret to building a friendly website and producing excellent contents is to ignore search engines and focus on the people.”
This is one tip I will surely keep in mind. Search engines are not the ones that are paying us for our blogging activities. It is actually the people visiting our sites that drive revenue into our bank accounts. We don’t need to satisfy search engines, we only need to use them to satisfy our readers. Think of it that way and your blog will be a lot better.
That’s a good point though. But we also need to consider feeding the search engines. With out having organic traffic to our blogs, no use! It’s the bitter truth.
SE’s are the best way to get more traffic, authority, links to our blog(s). BTW great post Brian.
Rahul, I agree and know that search engines are a great source of traffic, but it would be a mistake to put all the eggs in the same basket. The best is, if you can, to get traffic from referrals, direct, emails and don’t rely to much on “don’t be evil”s
Sorry about the late replies, I was not notified of comments…John, if we could only get off the Google bandwagon it would be great. And I think smart business owners have to think about diversifying their traffic sources and, indeed, write for humans.