If you’re involved in the online marketing of your website and you’ve not been hiding under a rock this year, you may have noticed that Google have been throwing zoo animals at the SEO world.
These normally cute looking animals have been released into the SEO wilds since February with Google aiming to reward good quality sites with quality content and do the opposite to sites that have been ‘over optimised’.
The kind of things on a website that will have an impact on rankings with these not so cute and cuddlies are:
- Do not have lots of duplicate content, each page needs to be different
- Make sure you have at least 250 words of content per page
- Make sure that content is relevant to the reader and not just yourselves
- Make sure you page content and title match the search queries being used for it
- Let your page read naturally, without over use of a particular keyword
- Keep your bounce rates down
- Make sure pages are actually being visited, if they’re not being looked at then get rid of them
- Push for return visits
- If you’re building links back to your website – make sure they’re genuine, quality ones from quality, relevant websites
- Get these same quality links to your content from social media sites
If you are working with an SEO agency then they should know about incoming updates before you do and they should be ready to give you recommendations within days. Make sure that you implement them quickly or your rankings will drop. You may find that you’ll have to spend time removing much of the previous optimisation work that you’ve done, don’t fight it the goal posts have moved to a different stadium (on a different continent!).
If you’re not working with an SEO agency then the best thing you can do is to make sure that you have good quality and relevant content (by this I mean words not pictures). Give your visitors plenty of advice and helpful information and make sure it is updated regularly – think news feed or blog. Do not go old school SEO and think keyword loading your content, URLs and titles is going to help you – we’re beyond that now, it will only damage your site.
Either way your content is going to play a key role in your online marketing, so keep abreast of upcoming changes and make sure you’re ready to great new zoo animals as they appear in the wild!
