A few SEO tips to avoid getting the penalty
Google has never been against SEO. In fact they recommend SEO so that the right websites are presented to the right audience. I had recently shared a news story where Matt Cutts had recommended doing SEO for your website so that search engine bots can see your website and present it in the search results. However, recently, SEO news sources have spread the information that over SEO is about to backfire as Google is soon going to track down overly SEOd websites. According to the news sources, over optimization may lead to drop in keyword rankings (the over optimization penalty is not revealed by Google yet though).
The point is, SEO is indispensable at the same time, and you need to have safe practices and a safe limit. It’s now time to re-strategize your SEO campaigns to stay away from the over optimization penalty. Based on the research of SIM labs and applying out expertise, here are some SEO safe practices which you can use:
Gone are the days when anchor text links added huge value to your website. Most of the SEO campaigns of today would be focused on generating as many links as possible to a page from 1 -3 target keywords. According to the current search algorithms, natural anchor texts such as “read more” or “visit website” has greater value than using target keywords as anchors. Even if you are using keywords as anchor texts, don’t get 100s of links using the same anchor texts. Vary the anchor texts so that the promotion would look organic and natural
Building 1000s of backlinks within a short span of time to a specific page? No matter how organic and natural your promotion is, if you generate huge volume of backlinks to only one specific page, this may qualify for over optimization too. Instead, build links to the inner pages of the website as well. Mix the urls used within the promotion. The best approach for this is to prepare a linking plan for a month by targeting at least 10 pages of your website
Spend 50% of your time in sharing interesting stuff within the social media. Twitter, facebook, stumbleupon, digg – keep on posting interesting to read information. Remember that social media signals are still considered to be the most important ranking factor. I had written an article on the importance of social media signals earlier, which you can read here.
Duration of the SEO campaigns is the most important factor that needs to be considered now. The strategy of 2012 would be to do a very slow natural promotion. Whatever SEO strategy you choose, spread it over a period of at least one month.
These SEO tips are based on assumptions on “what qualifies as over optimization?” where there is no official news about this yet from Google. Based on logical thinking and information gathered from reliable SEO news sources these would be taken into consideration by Google bots very soon.
As an SEO company, we would are in the process of building an SEO package considering all the above mentioned factors. The package would be launched at our SEO packages section by next week.
So to wrap it up, if you are doing SEO for your website yourselves, make sure:
Never build too many links using a single anchor text
Never get backlinks to a single page within a short span of time
Spend more time in social media marketing by sharing real and interesting to read stuff so that it goes viral
Spread the promotion campaign with promotion done very slowly over at least one month.
