Tips to Maintain a Good Ranking On Google
Google is the single largest source of traffic to websites today and has been for quite a while now. Social media has emerged as another source of traffic but still contributes a small percentage of all types of traffic to other websites. A lot of social media platforms have policies that limit the amount of outbound traffic for obvious financial considerations. This means that Google still remains the dominant player going forward. It is therefore very important to always ensure that you stay in the good books of the giant search engine’s revered search algorithm.
Engineers at Google are continually tweaking the search algorithm to improve search. These improvements are meant to help Google’s loyal customers find relevant content in the sea of information available on the web. Some of the changes are quite minor and may go unnoticed yet others are major changes that significantly shift the ground in the way sites are ranked. One such update was the panda update that introduced significant improvements in Google’s ability to reward relevant and valuable content and send the bad ones to virtual obscurity.
We all know how painful it feels when an algorithm update sends months and years of work creating original content to the grave. This can be avoided by observing the changes and reacting appropriately. Below are some tips that you can deploy in your strategy to stay on Google’s good books.
Focus on the User, Create Value, Not Quantity
Google is always trying to guide its user to the most relevant content that gives them the answers they are looking for. Therefore, it comes as a no brainer that creating lots of low-quality content today is an exercise in futility. You may enjoy a short period of success with bulky low-quality post. However, soon enough, Google will catch up with you by observing how users interact with such posts and send you down the drain. Good quality content is that which answers the user’s questions and hence keeps them reading to the end.
Bad content will see visitors navigating away as soon as they get bored trying to find what they were looking for. For example, a cupcake recipe should guide the user on how to cook cupcakes and not digress into a review of kitchen appliances.
Eliminate Duplicate Content.
Google’s Panda update hates duplicate content. This may have been a reaction to the use of content automation tools that churn out fake content. Make use of site audit tools to identify duplicate content and remove it. This also applies to plagiarized content from external sources.
Avoid Thin Content.
This is another major issue addressed by the panda update. Thin content refers to pages or posts that only contain a few lines of text that do not tell Google what your website is all about. These can also be rooted out using site audit tools.
Keyword Stuffing
A few years ago, people used to make sure targeted keywords appeared several times (sometimes unnecessarily) on posts in order to rank higher on google. This is no longer encouraged as new updates to the Google algorithms can detect when certain keywords are overdone on a post.
Conclusion
There are literally hundreds if not thousands of negative triggers that may affect your ranking with each algorithm update. The best thing is to always watch out for these changes and continuously audit your site to see how they affect your rank.
