To say that Search Engine Optimization has changed recently is a total understatement.
The old methods that used to get websites to rank aren’t working like they used to. You have to build a great site and you also have to build QUALITY links to that site – which is a much more manual, laborious task than it once was. There are no shortcuts and if you want to rank, you have to have two things in great supply: commitment and patience. Commitment can be to your own efforts to be awesome and build great links, or it could be a commitment to your SEO who is helping you do that. And patience has never been more important. Five GREAT links are better than five hundred cheap, easy to acquire links, but they also don’t have much of an impact on your rankings… in the short-term. But five, ten, fifteen, twenty great links, built out over several months are going to start to make a real difference to your efforts. Try to see the long-term picture. Don’t give up after a couple of months because you haven’t gotten to page one. Google rewards the sites that constantly create fresh, new, original content and have a growing, thriving backlink profile.
JOHN ILIOPOULOS recently wrote a great post on BRANDED3. Here’s an excerpt worth sharing:
How to Survive Penguin and Move Forward?
A lot of SEO experts will offer a list of maybe ten things you can do to recover from the Penguin update.
They’ll talk about altering the density of keywords, adding Facebook ‘like’ and Google+ buttons to boost social signals, updating your sitemaps and removing non-relevant backlinks to create a healthier, more natural profile. I could deliver the same lecture here, but we all know that you can find those tips anywhere on the Internet.
Instead, here’s a single tip to help you not only recover from the Penguin update, but to survive through any future updates, of which there are sure to be many.
Here it is, quite straightforward and simple: Make better sites.
This is all you need to know, and it’s clear to anyone who has been online and awake over the last decade or so.
I agree with John and will add one more tip to his. Yes, make your site better. But just like any product, store, or brand, you have to promote it. Backlinks are the promotion of your site and they’re still important. They just have to be great backlinks on authoritative and relevant sites. Any link that you can get lots of easily (or cheap) “ain’t gonna do you no good!” But backlinks that take time and effort to acquire, that come in the form of an in-content link surrounded by even more original awesome content, that are man-made, those are the kinds of links you want pointing to your site. Onsite and offsite SEO are still important. You just have to be better at both. That means quality over quantity and it means you’ll need your fair share of commitment and patience.
Best of luck in your endeavors to be awesome and to build awesome backlinks. Thanks for reading.
David McBee
If you need assistance with quality link building, contact David for a personalized plan of action today.
