Step by Step Guide To Improving Without Getting Penalized Your Google Rankings

Step by Step Guide To Improving Without Getting Penalized Your Google Rankings. The Step-by-Step Guide To Improving Your Google Rankings Without Getting Penalized.  Everyone wants to achieve better search rankings. That’s because organic search traffic is a proven driver of business growth.

The only trouble is, SEO keeps changing and no-one wants a penalty because of doing the wrong thing. Google has been rolling out updates, ranging from Panda to Penguin to Google EMDs (exact match domain names) and, just recently, the (PBN) Private Blog Network deindexing updates. If you’re concerned about getting targeted traffic without incurring penalties, then this article is for you. It’s important to know that the most recent Google updates are based on Google’s mission statement: Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

To rank well, your content needs to align with that mission. That’s why I’m going back to basics, with SEO, to help you understand the new SEO rules, learn how to optimize for both humans and robots and to master on-page and off-page optimization. This in-depth guide will walk you through the steps that you need to take in order to optimize and improve your Google rankings, so that you can generate more organic traffic to your website without getting penalized.

 Step by Step Guide To Improving Without Getting Penalized. Here’s a breakdown of the topics will cover the following bellow:



  1. Assess your current search ranking
  2. Track the right metrics
  3.  Diagnose and analyze penalties
  4.  Do keyword research
  5.  Go after your keywords with great content
  6.  Build links the right way Download this worksheet that you can use to improve your Google rankings.

 Step #1:


Assess Your Current Search Ranking Before you can improve your site’s search ranking, its fundamental to know your current position in the Google search results. This is crucial, even if your site is new. There are several tools and resources that can give you this information. You can use different toools for seo score testing to check your site’s keyword rank:

If you have been targeting specific keywords, use seo score tools to assess your rank. Type in your keyword (I used “content marketing” in this example) and your website url:


rank checker



The results page will show where your site ranks for the term, as well as the first page on your site that comes up in search results for the topic.


result





Check your site speed: Next, it’s important to check site speed, as this is a major Google ranking factor. If your site is slow, you have little chance of a high search position and it will affect your chances of making sales, too. According to Web Performance Today, Walmart experienced a sharp decline in conversions when its page load times increased from 1 to 4 seconds.
web speed


That’s why it’s important to run your own site speed test. There are dozens of tools that can help you do this. Some of my favorites are: · Google PageSpeed Insights · WebPageTest · YSlow browser extension · Pingdom Website Speed Test · Zoompf Here’s how to test your site speed with Pingdom. Go to tools.pingdom.com and type in your URL. Press the “Test Now” button and wait for the results to load.




Ideally, you want your site’s performance level to be as high as possible. Quick Sprout registers a performance grade of 71. As long as your site registers over 50, that’s a good start. If you get a performance grade of less than 50, your site is really slow and you need to work on improving it.




Check the page load time, too. Quicksprout is a little high, at more than 3 seconds. Aim for under 2 seconds for a really fast site and under 1 second for mobile devices. According to different research cited by eConsultancy, 47% of Americans expect sites to load in under 2 seconds.

Check site health: After looking at keyword rank and site speed, assess the health of your site before you start to optimize. Have you experienced a sudden drop in organic traffic after months or years of consistency? Are you wondering whether Google has de indexed (or banned) your site?

If you want to know for sure, use Pixel Groove’s Google penalty checker tool. Input your URL and click “Check!” 




 If everything looks fine, you’ll soon get a message. If it doesn’t, the tips in this article will help you to recover your Google ranking.


small insurance companies
Join small insurance companies

Another aspect of site health is domain age. While Smander said in this video that “the difference between a six month old domain and a one year old domain name is not huge at all,” that doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant. SerpIQ analyzed over 160,000 SERPs (search engine results pages) and 1.6 million URLs and concluded that domain age contributed to #1 rankings for the majority of the domain names in their study:




This also means that you need to patient. As your domain ages and the links pointing to your site age, your rankings should increase.


 Step #2:


Track the Right Metrics Next, it’s time to track some vital metrics for your site, to find out what other factors you need to improve. Here are the most important metrics to assess. Organic traffic: It’s important to know how many visitors find your site via Google. It’s a great way to assess its effectiveness. A chart published on Business 2 Community shows that 52% of Hubspot’s leads, in 2012, came from search engines. Hubspot’s chart also shows the importance of SEO in lead conversion.




To find out how many visitors reach your site, log into your Google Analytics account and check out the acquisition channels report. This helpful Google Analytics video tutorial will guide you. Organic traffic conversions:

As well as analyzing your search traffic, it’s worth paying attention to the keywords that generate traffic for your site. One way to find these is with a tool called Serp Fruit. It’s still in beta, but I’ve been using it to identify the keywords that convert organically for my site. One reason I recommend it is because it’s simple to use. How to find converting keywords with Serp Fruit.

To get started, connect your Google Analytics Account to Serp Fruit via the button on the home page. 


Join Google Analytics
Google Analytics


Once it’s connected, log into your Serp Fruit dashboard, select the domain that you want to track and click “Go.” 





Serp Fruit will show you the keywords that have sent organic traffic to your site within the last 12 months. It includes a keyword performance chart like as this:





Below that, you’ll find everything that you need to know about organic visitors, including the main search engines sending traffic to you, the number of visits and the number of unique keywords that are converting. 




 You can also see referring keywords: 




 This tool makes it easy to get the data that you need from Google Analytics and to understand the broad picture relating to keywords on your site. But, you still need more. 



Keyword ranking for commercial keywords: According to Brian Dean, the #1 keyword research mistake is not spending enough time on commercial keywords. That’s because commercial keywords are the ones that make money.

To improve your rankings and make money, you need to understand the difference between commercial and informational keywords. If all of your keywords are informational, you will still generate organic traffic, but converting those visitors to buyers may be difficult. The reason is because visitors who search for informational keywords like: · how to clear acne with home products · how to install wordpress · make money online for free · free ebook download · top 10 free article spinners are not in a buying mood.

They want you to speak their language – the language of free. In contrast, people who use keywords like: · best acne products · top 10 web hosting providers · web designers in NY are probably searching for a solution that they can buy. If you’re in the ecommerce industry, you will hopefully already know that commercial keywords tend to convert well. Keywords that have the words below as a prefix (before) or suffix (after) to the rest of the keyword phrase tend to do well: · Buy · Review · Purchase · Discount · Coupon · Deal · Shipping · Order Earlier, I walked you through the process of determining the keywords that are sending you organic traffic. Here’s another example. Can you spot the difference between informational and commercial keywords? 



Set up an SEO dashboard to track these metrics:

I recommend that you set up an SEO dashboard, so that you can track all of the important metrics at any time. Here’s one example, from bringshare.com: 




In addition to setting up dashboards in Google Analytics, you can get even richer keyword data by connecting Google Webmaster Tools to Google Analytics.


Step#3:

Diagnose and Analyze Penalties 



Now that you understand your search ranking and have set up tracking for the most important metrics, it’s time to examine your site in detail, to see if there are any penalties in effect.

 This is fundamental, because there is no point in promoting or building links to an unhealthy site. How link building has changed: Up until 2012, spammy links improved search engine rankings for thousands of people. This Moz case study shows how one site used link schemes to build inbound links. 




 But, recent Google updates will make sure that link schemes don’t work anymore. Use them and you will incur a penalty rather than reaping a reward. That’s why it’s essential to think about how you generate links to your site. As Matt Cutts says, links shouldn’t just LOOK natural, they should BE natural. 




 To achieve that, you need to identify and eliminate unhealthy links. Here’s how you do that. Analyze links: First, analyze inbound links to your site. There are several link analysis tools you can use to do this, including: · Majestic (formerly Majestic SEO) · Ahrefs · Open Site Explorer · Open Link Profiler · WebMeUp Let me walk you through a link analysis, using Open Link Profiler. Go to the homepage and type in your URL. Let’s use: 


 Now click “Analyze backlinks.” 

The results show the most important elements to look for when analyzing your backlinks, including: · 
 Unique Active Backlinks – This shows the number of links that directly or indirectly affect your Google ranking. “Unique” means that the links are from different IP addresses… that’s one way to identify a natural link. These links have been indexed by Google in the last 90 days. · 
Nofollow links – Problogger has 8.3% nofollow links, which equals 1,684 backlinks from the total of 20,293. Google introduced the rel= “nofollow” tag in 2005 to stop spammy blog comments from artificially manipulating rankings. After the Google Penguin update was rolled out, it became essential to diversify your link profile. And as Matt Cutts mentioned, you need a mix of dofollow links (links that pass ranking value to search engines) and nofollow links (links that don’t pass ranking value). · 
 Industry – If you read the content of Problogger, you might think that its industry is “blogging” or “internet marketing.” But, when you look at this analysis, it turns out to be “media.” Knowing your industry can help you identify relevant links that will improve your backlink profile. · Link Influence Score – This shows how links from the website influence the search engine rankings of linked pages. The higher the LIS the better. As a very popular and influential site, Problogger’s score is a whopping 99%! Check your own site and see what your LIS is. · Anchor text – Click on the link in the left menu to access data for anchor text (anchor text is the text that becomes your link and points to your page) linking into your site. Google’s Penguin update was rolled out to prevent site owners from manipulating search results with exact match anchor text. If you want to stay under the penalty radar, diversify your anchor text. 




 It is also important to know which links are healthy for your site, so that you can remove unhealthy links. Google Penguin 2.0 made it much easier to identify low quality links. Those are links that: · come from PR-n/a or PR0 websites · are mostly sitewide links · are from referring domain names with little traffic · come from sites on the same IP class address · comes from web pages with a lot of external links There are many free tools to help you identify unhealthy links. Two that I’ve tried include Monitor Backlinks and Linkquidator. Here’s how to check for unhealthy links with Monitor Backlinks. 





 Simply type in your site URL and click “search,” to find unnatural links. Moz has a detailed tutorial on which links can harm your site and what to do about it. Remember that you also have to export the list of unhealthy links once you find them. That way, you can refer to them later. 




 When you discover spammy links pointing to your page, don’t be in a rush to remove the page itself. It’s the links that you need to remove. That’s the next step in cleaning up your link profile and there are two ways to do it.

 1. Request manual link removal – visit the website where the unhealthy/unnatural links are coming from and contact the site owner. Ask the site owner to either remove your link (the better option) or add a nofollow tag to it. 




 If you have outsourced link building in the past, you can also contact the person who placed the links for you and get that person to get the links removed. Here’s an excerpt from a post at Search Engine World to show how this would work: 



 In this case, don’t ask the site owner to remove your links, because they will assume you’re a spammer and ignore you. Instead, follow this tutorial from Search Engine Journal to learn the best way to contact webmasters about link removal. 
2. Use Google’s disavow links tool – If you are unsuccessful in getting unhealthy links removed, your only option is Google’s own disavow links tool. While manual link removal is best, this is a good second choice. 

 The disavow links tool is part of Google Webmaster Tools. Click the link above to go directly to the tool. You will see a list of all of your sites. Go to the site for which you want to disavow links. This is what you will see: 





 When you check for unnatural links, you have the option to export the links that you find. If you have done this, upload the file, and click “done.” Like you, Google cannot actually remove the links, as they don’t have access to the referring sites. However, doing this authorizes Google to stop passing link juice (value) from those links to your site. 





 3. Diversify anchor text distribution – Anchor text can play a key role in improving or utterly destroying your search ranking. As I mentioned earlier, if you want a natural link profile, you have to diversify anchor text. Anchor text distribution looks at how you spread keywords when building links. The chart below has some recommendations: 





 When distributing your anchor text, think about including these types: · Exact match – Does the anchor text match the keyword that you’re targeting exactly? e.g. hybrid bikes · Phrase – Does your anchor text have the keyword phrase in it? e.g. You can place like as this " We are glad to provide insurance quotes online for public through Small Insurance Companies. " how to find the best wireless headsets · URL – This is straightforward link building with your complete URL, e.g. http://smallinsurancecompanies.com ·

Brand Name – This is where you use your brand name as the anchor text, thus making it natural, e.g. techradar digital camcorders ·

Keyword branded – This is where you combine your anchor text with the target keyword for your site, e.g. getting started with content marketing Let’s assume your website sells blue denim jeans.
If your domain name is smallinsurancecompanies.com, how do you distribute your anchor text? If you want to link three times from a particular site, it’s ideal to use this link profile: · 

Anchor text 1: smallinsurancecompanies.com site – target page: homepage ·

Anchor text 2: denim jeans reviews online – 

target page: a page where you reviewed the item ·

Anchor text 3: http://smallinsurancecompanies.com/ reviews -Target page.

Your store 4: Avoid over-optimization – When you overuse anchor texts, it can result in over-optimization and can get you penalized. Geoff Kenyon suggests the percentage below:



 To avoid over-optimization, follow these two guidelines:

 1. Avoid excessively keyword-rich anchor text – If you want to link to your internal pages on a topic, like “link building strategies,” don’t use that same keyword phrase as your anchor text. Instead, vary it and use something like “learn more about link building” or a combination of a generic plus the exact keyword.

 2. Avoid irrelevant links – What’s the point of linking to your dog training site, using “best golf trainer” as your anchor? It doesn’t make sense and could result in a Google penalty. If you need a detailed guide on over-optimization, see How to Avoid Over Optimization For your Site.


 

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