SEO: six common errors that kill SEO and how to make your site trustworthy to Google

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is morphing as the web continues to expand and be a larger part of our personal and business endeavors.  It’s no secret that Google and Bing are the new yellow pages. Anyone not coming to terms with that in their business plan is just working an old-school business model.  

Is SEO Dead?

With the recent shakedown of site performance from the algo updates (Panda and Penguin); sites losing their ranking and positions in the search engine results, you might think that SEO techniques are no longer working or not effective.

But, that is not the case. The algo updates are continuing at a furious pace to bring some authentic search results to all search engine users In other words, there is no more tricks and short cuts being tolerated to getting to the top of the heap on the search engine result pages. 

Here are seven reasons for low site performance in search engine visibility - in no specific order.

Keyword stuffing

Poor content writing

Automatic anchor text links

Unnatural links

Duplicate content

Content below fold

Hidden text

There are three emerging key perspectives in this “changing of the guard” of SEO: 1) site trustworthiness, 2) social signals, and 3) keywords as “natural” and “relevant”.

Site Trustworthiness

Have a meaningful content strategy. If you need to, hire writers and have them produce content that you can use in blogs and articles that is informational and educational about your products and services.

The days of benefiting from building links using free directory submissions are over. Kaput. Anywhere that accepts free inks is pretty much ignored by Google or in some cases it will actually hamper your pagerank.

Earn Google’s Trust

1. Don’t stuff your site with keywords.
2. Provide educational and informational content, that’s well written, on your site.
3. Make your site easy to navigate. Don’t make visitors go in circles.

Social Signals

Use social media to discover where your target market is online: Twitter, Facebook, Google+, blogs, industry locations and then hang out there. Make some friends and make them aware of the helpful, informational, educational content on your web site. Share their content and ask them to share yours too.

Keywords “natural” and “relevant”

Google has gotten more synonym-savvy over the last couple of years, there's no need to cram keyphrases everywhere you possibly can. For example, always using "blue suede shoes" as-is (the entire, original keyphrase together), you can also use just "blue" and just "suede" and just "shoes" within the copy. This is what I have been teaching my clients over the last few years.

Here is what Matt Cutts, Google SEO Champ, has to say about keywords, “People can overdo it to the point that we consider it keyword stuffing, and it hurts. I would just make sure you use key words and phrases in natural ways where regular people aren't going to find the content stiff or artificial. That tends to be what works best.”

I will be providing more strategic information over the coming weeks about the new “how to” on SEO as the algo updates continue.

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Steu Mann is an SEO Specialist. He has been successfully working with online technology since 1997. Follow him on Twitter at @EzWebManifest. If you enjoyed this article, you can subscribe to receive Free Web Site Tune Up Tips in the future.