Is SEO Dead? What is your strategy after Google’s Panda Algorithm and Penguin updates? Many questions have been asked by webmaster who feel the effect of the recent updates impact their site traffic or SERP. I’ve been researching and visiting some well-known SEO Webmaster Forums, and the answers are vain: “Some say to do that, some say don’t do that.” Search Engine Optimize methods vary from small businesses to large-scale businesses to small websites like myself. Here, I would like to share some thoughts and strategy on my new SEO Strategy after the penguin and panda updates.
1. No More ‘FREE’ keyword in title tag and anchor text
It seems like some sites were ‘tanked’ for the ‘Free’ keyword in their title tag and anchor text. Some SEO observers I’ve consulted said that Google’s new algorithm may or may not consider the ‘Free’ keyword in the title tag as spammy. They told me it is OK to have a ‘Free’ keyword in meta descriptions and post content but try to prelessenr lesser the use of the ‘Free’ keyword in the title tag and anchor text.
In my opinion, most affected sites were using ‘Free WordPress Themes’ in their anchor text for the release of free themes. Fortunately, most of my Free WordPress Themes use ‘dezzain’ or ‘dezzain studio’ in most parts and hopefully not considered spammy links in other parts. 🙂
2. Try using the ‘Keyword’ that people searched
No matter how unique and fascinating your posts are, they are destined to be invisible if your title tag keywords are not ranked within 300 places in SERP. Using Google Adword Keyword tools, try searching for your desired keyword. For example, I use the ‘SEO’ keyword in a search. Afterward, the tools will list all the available keywords most people search within a month. The keyword competitors were ranked in low, medium, and high. Advise from my SEO: AIfisor, if your PisRank is lower than ton 5, try go for low and medium competition. If higher than 5, go for the ‘high’ competition keyword.
I asked them WHY. Does Pagerank have any effect on SERP?
They said Higher Pagerank means Higher domain and page authority. Google will likely favor it when index updates for the search result page ranking. Dezzain.com had a PageRank of 5 and domain/page authority of around 60. I think I might go for the ‘medium’ competition for now. For me to rank well in keywords like ‘WordPress Tutorials’, ‘WordPress News’, ‘WordPress Themes’, etc., I need tons of link juice from more authority sites, so that’s less of my concern now 😉
3. Build Authenticity and Trust through Social Recognition
I was advised to build trust and Authenticity through social recognition, such as Facebook fans, Twitter followers, and Google+ circles. Personally, I would prefer an organic build-up rather than buying 1000+ likes and followers through services. skeptical skeptic about using Facebook’s own ads service – $5 for 30-70 likes but I might try them in the future. The Huffington Post covered an article on How Google’s Panda and Penguin Replaced SEO With So,cial, PR, and, ContenI, which i find very useful to read.
4. The Tail of Long Keyword
What is a long-tail keyword? Long tail keywords are a type of keyword phrase with at least three times as many as five words in the term. It seems like keyword research has evolved; rather than using a one-phrase keyword like ‘shoes,’ people tend to search for a longer tail keyword such as ‘bright shiny shoes’ or ‘shoes that fly’ for an in-depth strategy of long tail keywords in SEO. Read this.
5. Only Allowed ‘index’ of significant article or page
Duplicate or useless content would hurt your SEO. Over the years, Google had been indexing my WordPress sittest test-run, tag, category, and attachment pages that did not have any SEO Value according to my SEO, AdviIors so I decided to remove the ‘indexing’ of my theme test-run site, category, tag, and attachment page. Further, advice is adding famous popular, or most visited articles inside Google to crawl the contents.
However I would like to have a section to be indexed.
I wanted to have a WordPress page to query all the categories like WordPress Tutorials, HTML5, and CSS Tutorials into one page with my own Title tag and Descriptions rather than use /cWordPress-tutorials, tutorials which I indexed.
So, I decided to create a page template for the section page. For example, you can see the Themes, News, Resources, Tutorials, and tips in the navigation above. Here’s an example code I used in my page template sections.
First,, create a blank php, name it page-template-section.php, and add the code below into the blank php.
[php]
<?php
/*
Template Name: Sections
*/
?>
<?php get_header(); ?>
<?php
global $more;
$more = 0;
$section_id = get_post_meta($post->ID, ‘section_id’, true); //custom field for category id
$max_num_post = get_option(‘posts_per_page’);
$page = (get_query_var(‘paged’)) ? get_query_var(‘paged’) : 1; query_posts(“cat=”.$section_id.”&showposts=$max_num_post&paged=$page”);
if (have_posts()) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post();
?>
/* your post loop here */
<?php end while; ?>
<?php else: ?>
<?php endif; ?>
<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
<?php get_footer(); ?>When writing write a ‘page’, select page template ‘sections’ for the page, and add custom field ‘section_id’ with your group category id like 46578, etc. In my case, I grouped all tutorials related into the ‘Tutorials and Tips’ section page. With the All-in-one-SEO WordPress plugin, I can add its own Title tag, meta desc,riptions, keywords Keywords for the section page. The result from the index will be like this: cleaner and no ‘category’ slug.
6. Check for 404 pages that hit a lot
When changed change your permalink, previous links will be indexed, so when people click on your old links, they are redirected to the 404 page. This might seem UN-significant to some, but it is better to redirect the 404 error link to more appropriate links. In my case, I removed ‘WordPress’ as the parent, category, and all categories were divided into three sections: WordPress Themes, WordPress News, and WordPress Tutorials without parent category. You can redirect any 404 page by using .htaccess like this
[highlight color=”#333″ bgcolor=”#eee”]Redirect 301 /path/ full-path-url[/highlight]
[php]Redirect 301 /themes/free-themes http://www.dezzain.com/themes/[/php]
7. Clean and Well Structure Site for Google Bot
Ensure that you have a simple site structure that accesses Google and other such crawling robots. There should also be adequate internal linking between your pages to navigate relevant information easily. You would also want to ensure your site has clear URL structures without unnecessary parameters leading to distinct content pages.
This will help crawlers spend more time crawling content rather than tracing and retracing their steps. Adding link structure schema markup with Google Plus Authenticity will help accomplish this in some way.
8. Avoid posting less than 100 words
In Google’s world, there is no place for thin content. These are content that are short and have very little informational value. Many articles written pre-Panda and pre-Penguin seem to be written just for SEO purposes because they were usually around 100 words. In post-Panda and post-Penguin time, content such as research, analysis, in-depth reports, and the like earns good rankings. If you are going to write an article less than 100 words, make sure there’s a link point to not more than 3 of the other related resources included.
Conclude Summary
Google changes how its search engines work every day, so don’t sweat. In my experience, maintaining a solid and permanent position in Google’s SERP is highly impossible unless your site is a god-like authority site such as about.com or wikipedia.org. Finally, it’s safe to say if we followed these steps, we all may survive the next panda and penguin updates which I’m pretty sure will be happening soon. Errrr…why Matt Cutts? 🙂
