Proctor Digital Brand Visibility Consultants
Branding, Visibility and Growth
With all of the content out there on the constantly changing technical strategies behind good, solid SEO management, it can be daunting for a DIY website manager with little technical SEO background to tackle. There are over 200 ranking factors that contribute to the health of search engine ranking for any given website..
Simply put, readability is important with any kind of content project. That just makes sense. Whether it’s a pamphlet or a novel, it should be readable. The language should be easily digestible. Online digestibility may mean different things than in a print news article or a novel.
Content is content is content. Right? Wrong! When it comes to SEO management, there’s good content and there’s bad content. You want to stay away from the latter if you want to see some high search engine results rankings.
What is evergreen content? Content that is not specific to a distinct time, but always relevant—or at least written to be relevant always. Some content, of course, can be written for a specific time, relevant for a set of events etched in time. Say, for instance, you write a blog post that discusses fashion trends. That blog post would be etched in time, limited to trends that led up to and included the time of its posting. All trends that proceeded from there would be ignored, which would make the article stale in just a few, short years.
It never fails to amaze white-hat SEOs out there when websites copy content from other, highly ranked sites, end up getting penalized by Google and then sound the alarm to any consultant they can to rescue their website from the desolation of Google banishment.
One rabbit hole website managers often go down is the end-all/be-all of getting their root domain to rank for multiple keywords. But the fact is that’s difficult to do, when Google wants to rank you for your best keyword.
Internal linking is the practice of publishing a hyperlink to another article or page on the same website (domain). It’s often seen as a great sign of a robust resource site as many of the articles published offer opportunity to further explore their topics with links to related content onsite.
SEO penalties come in all shapes and sizes. Webmasters sometimes flirt with the rules to try to race to Page 1 of Google Search. When they break them, they can suffer penalties from search engine algorithms. However, manual actions are penalties taken by the search engines themselves when they notice an eggregious infraction and those can be incredibly difficult to overcome and revers.
Manual actions are Google’s response to violations of Google Webmaster regulations on the part of a website. They typically involve demotions in terms of search ranking. These are not to be confused to organic rank demotion due to algorithm updates from Penguin, Panda, Hummingbird and others. Manual actions typically are Google penalties for bad behavior. There are quite a few different types of manual actions a website may receive. Ultimately, corrective action must be taken before penalities can be removed and it’s often a long and drawn out process, so the better strategy is to avoid the penaltiy in the first place.
Some of the most powerful SEO strategy one can implement is derived from the SEO strategies of their competitors. Yes, every website needs a well-rounded, comprehensive strategy in order to succeed in search ranking, but search ranking is a competitive sport, and in order to beat the next guy or gal, you’ve got to know what they’re doing.