One Google penalty is all it takes to wipe out all the progress a small business has made in regard to SEO. Avoiding a penalty should therefore be a priority in your SEO strategy. Here’s how you can lower your risk of a penalty:
Stay away from black hat SEO tactics
If you’ve ever read about boosting your page rank and SEO overnight, then you’ve likely already come across black hat tactics. Here are a few examples of them:
- Hidden text: inserting keywords in an invisible color
- Link farms: exchanging links with other websites solely for SEO
- Duplicate content: Repeating your content and keywords for SEO
The irony is that black hat tactics don’t work and will only guarantee you a penalty from Google.
Keep an eye on your backlinks
Acquiring backlinks is crucial for your SEO. But Google will think something is fishy if your backlinks are suspicious. Only a small portion of them should come from guest blogging and you should never pay for links.
Invest in content creation
Content creation is the only reliable way to enhance your SEO. By producing relevant, useful content for users, you’ll increase your website traffic and page shares.
According to a recent Search Engine Land article, you can also make your content more SEO-friendly by focusing on support sites:
“Despite this increased focus on “Google-friendly” content, I still see a lot of sites neglecting some fairly easy SEO enhancements on potentially valuable content that already exists on their site: support and community content.”
If you have the time and resources to improve your SEO, you will benefit from focusing on content creation.
Practice social media marketing honestly
Social shares can play a role in Google’s search algorithm. As long as your content strategy is in order, you can enhance your SEO by being more active on social media. Just don’t create fake accounts or pay for followers. It’s easy for Google to tell who’s cheating on social media and this will devalue your social signals.
To talk more about how you can avoid a Google penalty, contact us today.
