Does your website look like this after the last Google Penguin update?
I’ve only been in the SEO game for a bit over 10 months (which is around 23 years Internet time), and I’ve already experienced 3 updates to the Google algorithm.
With each new update, a river of manuals and courses are released immediately after the update, trying to convince you that only they know the secret behind the new Google algorithm, and that they, and only they can teach you how to “con” Google into giving you number one rankings.
I find it hilarious.
The truth is, for the most part (with a few exceptions) if you are afraid of losing rankings with each update. If you wake up every day and check if you rankings haven’t plummeted, if your websites haven’t crashed and burned…
You’re doing SEO wrong!
I realized this very quickly while doing my internship at SEO Design (The Website is in Swedish only, but contact me directly if you want to).
Almost everything that I thought I know about SEO was wrong. It was wrong because I didn’t have the correct mindset, you see, all I cared about was about the ranking. I wanted to rank number one for a certain keyword, and I would forget the website, start another one and try to rank it, rinse, repeat.
What inevitably happened was that none of my websites was any good, and all of their rankings were temporary. Leading me to extreme frustration at times, because by the time that I would rank a website, another one would disappear from the SERP’s.
If you mix poor overall quality and user experience, with poor optimization and lack of overall strategy that is what you get, a flimsy structure that can’t support its own weight.
Common sense SEO.
1) It’s not that hard really, like anything else in life, use common sense in your SEO strategies. If you are building links, diversify! Don’t put all your eggs in the same basket. Mix social media, blog commenting, article marketing to create link diversity!
2) This one should be obvious. If you are, for example, buying 5000 links for 5$, you have to wonder, how good quality they are ? I mean seriously first of all – You don’t NEED 5,000 spam links pointing to your website. All you accomplish with this is sending a red flag to Google. Even if somehow you don’t get penalized by using spam links now, sooner or later Google will catch up with what you are doing. And seriously, do you enjoy spam ? I think nobody likes it, so stop doing it – now.
3) Don’t give up so god damn easily. I’ve spoken with dozens of people who try SEO, push a couple of buttons in a software, try a website or two, and they give up because they didn’t get rich over night.
What’s up with that ? There is no magic button, pill, remedy or potion for anything in life. Everything takes hard work and SEO is no different.
4) If not for anything else, do it right because there will be future updates… Google will never stop evolving and trying to better their search algorithm. It’s why they are number one. So use common sense in your SEO endeavours and don’t give up.
The results are right around the corner.