Google Penguin Updates and Your Next Steps

In recent times, the Google Penguin updates have really hit search engine marketing quite hard. There were some websites that were hit hard, others were not affected whatsoever. In fact, it became quite easy for competitors to use the new update to take down their competitors quite easily. If you have websites, it is how you deal with the update that will affect you positively or negatively. Webmasters that responded to this update properly were okay in the end. Now lets look at some techniques for handling the Google Penguin updates, specifically three that work really well.

Google builds site link profiles for every website; it is important for you to understand this. Some of the information that Google keeps track of is the age of your website as well as the location for your link. Google also knows when the page was edited last, if there is any reciprocity, how many links are on the page which is very important. Your site link profile is going to also have information on if the links are for images or through text and the location of those links. When it comes to Penguin, Google will also focus on whether or not you have paid for any of your backlinks. All of this is important because you need to know what Google knows about you. This is about knowing some of the intelligence information they have on you. The information you are about to read is valuable research that you should implement right away. If you didn't notice, a minimum of at least four words are searched for everyday on the search engines. So make sure that at least three words are always used (never less) when building your website material. Exact match searches are actually the minority, comprising less than 40% of all searches today. More than likely you would have never seen this unless you had done PPC research to find it out. It's a safe assumption that the use of exact match is not always the best choice. If you are not afraid of using long tail keywords, they can actually be profitable for you. Anytime you are just starting out with something new, it is often easy to feel like you are just treading water. There are people who started in business on the web back in the 1990s and eventually incorporated Dean Holland into their operations, and they will confirm that all of that is totally normal. But that is why people with the financial means choose the outsourcing route. Even if you cannot afford outsourcing at the moment, you can plan for it or start on a limited basis. But we would caution you to learn about it, first, and even gain some experience with implementing it. We make that cautionary statement only because it will pay to be smart before you even start looking for hired help.

You should also try to figure out how people behave when they are looking at SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages). This can go well just as easily as it can go bad, so you need to take it seriously. When looking over SERPs, one thing is constant--people like the results with numbers in them. What they do is simply click on just about anything that contains those characters. This is not entirely new because in copywriting, it's known that using numbers in headlines and other places causes a higher degree of activity. This is easy enough to manipulate in your favor but it decreases your link targeting.

It's important to apply the idea of triage to your website so that you can make sure you apply all of the changes that are required since the Penguin update. To do this you first need to address those issues that are causing you the most damage. Don't forget to take a closer look at those things that affect the processes you've got running. It's important to fix whatever problems there are with your foundation before you move on to anything else. This has a lot to do with the fact that they have an effect on everything else.