Every January there is a flood of resolutions both personal and professional. So let’s take a quick moment and look at four items that, if given time and attention to this year, can improve your search and online visibility.
- Monitor your backlink profile – For those website owners who received a slap from Google after the Penguin update this is a no brainer. For those website owners who didn’t see a penalty but weren’t paying attention to their backlink profile this should be a wake-up call. Google is serious (I’m sure they have been all along) when it comes to cleaning up their index and targeting bad links is one way they will do so. Take the time to review your backlinks monthly, there are numerous free online tools to do so, and if bad links are found take the steps to remove them. This can be done the old fashioned way (contacting the website owners the link is located on and ask for removal) or if you prefer Google & Bing now offer link removal tools, just make sure you know exactly what you are doing before using them.
- Don’t copy and paste! – Ok, maybe that’s a bit too generic of a term to use since what I’m really talking about is duplicate content. Yes there are still website owners/managers who simply take content from someone else’s website and place it on theirs or create 50 pages to target different cities and find and replace only the city name within the content on each page. Folks this is partially what the Panda update was about and what Google has been after for years now. Stop Duplicate Content!
- Get Social – Tired of hearing this? Well if the message has not sunk in, maybe you should consider another source for marketing your business than the internet. Social Media is here to stay and just having a Facebook page is not good enough. You must engage and that doesn’t mean posting your thoughts everyday, it also means listening to others and interacting with them. Get Involved!
- Don’t Stop Believing – Maybe that should actually be just Don’t Stop. SEO, Social Media, paid search, any form of marketing actually never stops. You must work at it everyday and especially online. Everyday people are searching and talking about products and services why wouldn’t you want to take advantage of all of those opportunities that arise during those searches and conversations?
So just like that diet you are going to undertake, it takes time and effort but great results will greet you at the end of the journey!
Comments are closed.