If you are a small business owner or if you have an innovative product idea that is ready for the market, the most effective way of acquiring customers and drawing attention to what you have to offer is by utilizing the internet. Creating a website is one of the most effective ways of advertising your product, but opening a website alone does not guarantee foot traffic. There are different methods a business owner can use to increase website traffic, but the most successful way is by using Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO consists of various formulas and keywords that ensure a website appears on the top of someone’s search results.

In order to attract visitors to their websites, many business owners are turning to SEO service Companies to increase customers without having to go through the trouble of dealing with SEOs on their own. These companies not only offer website design options, but they also ensure your website appears higher in search engine results – thus attracting more foot traffic to your site. The following are ten things businesses look for in a SEO company in order to make their business more successful.

Fees

SEO companies charge various amounts of fees for their services, but some companies’ pricing is more competitive than others’ pricing. The amount of money a business owner is willing to pay for SEO services depends on his or her needs and what the company offers. For example, many small business owners look for SEO service providers who offer a nominal, one-time fee and who charge an affordable amount to maintain the SEO service as long as the website is up and running.

Small business owners typically prefer SEO providers who do not charge a monthly fee that exceeds thousands of dollars; SEO charges should be equivalent to the services provided. In other words, do not pay for services that are not applicable, and do not pay for a company who does not deliver.

Location

When beginning the search for the right SEO company for the company, business owners should search SEO providers with respect to their own geographic location. If the SEO company is local, business owners can speak with their provider in person rather than having to rely on internet or telephone communication.

Furthermore, SEO firms that are in close proximity with local business owners are more apt to handle small businesses and the type of SEO required to boost internet traffic for their respective sites. While business owners are not required to limit their SEO company to a local firm, many choose their SEO based on its location due to their product knowledge and community reputation.

Reputation

Even if your chosen SEO provider’s website does not appear in the top ten search results, it is not necessarily because the company is incompetent or insufficient. Savvy business owners know to check Ripoff Report or the Better Business Bureau to make sure the company they’ve chosen is not merely running a scam. Furthermore, business owners will research SEO companies’ reviews.

A thorough investigation into testimonials will help determine just how successful an SEO company is at bringing in internet traffic.

Increase in Ranking

One of the more obvious aspects business owners look for in an SEO company is their ability to increase their websites’ ranking in search engine results. Business owners will look to testimonials and reviews for these rankings, but they will also check with the firm itself as well as conduct their own research. Knowing what sites an SEO company is responsible for enables small business owners to perform their own searches and see whether or not those sites show up high on an internet search.

If those sites do not show up, or if the sites show up on Bing! But not Google, business owners must take these factors into consideration before choosing that SEO company to provide services for their websites.

Link Building

Business owners who are interested in SEO services are aware of the fact that links play a large role in the algorithm that determines which sites are displayed prominently and which sites are not when one conducts a search on an internet search engine.

Business owners are more likely to choose an SEO company that ensures link freshness, links with trustworthy sites, and anchor texts and keywords that trigger search engines. Before choosing an SEO provider, savvy business owners will be sure to inquire about the company’s link building services.

Retargeting

Another SEO service business owners are interested in is retargeting. Retargeting is a cookie-based technology that strategically places ads for your business on other sites visited by customers who have viewed your website. SEO companies who provide this service must ensure their retargeting services are ethical and effective, as spam is a consequence many business owners would prefer to avoid. This option is sought after most by established businesses.

PPC Management

PPC Management, or the management of Pay-Per-Click advertisements is an SEO service many new business owners are interested in. SEO services that provide PPC charge a small fee every time an advertisement is clicked on by a potential customer, and the fee ranges depending on the placement of the ad (whether on a linked website or a search engine). It is important to compare competitors’ prices, as this service is largely dependent upon what business owner is trying to accomplish.

Ongoing Services

Experienced business owners know that SEO companies who promise instant results without any ongoing maintenance sound too good to be true – because they are too good to be true. Business owners look for SEO providers that offer consultations and continued support as the business grows. If your SEO company does not provide more than a one-time service, it might be time to find a new provider.

Reputation Management

Many business owners are aware of the horror stories. One bad review leads to a dozen bad reviews, and if you have a spiteful competitor who is willing to cross ethical lines in order to tarnish your reputation, you will lose business.

Reputation management keeps the negativity in check and ensures your website and company will establish and then maintain raving reviews and a high ranking in comparison with other sites and in search engine results. SEO companies provide reputation management services that vary depending on the desires of the business owner, so be sure to ask about specific services provided.

Content Marketing

In order for any online business to be profitable, business owners must maintain excellent content marketing. Without content marketing, search engines will not pick up your website, and consumers will breeze past it as if it were not there at all. Content marketing encompasses aspects of online businesses such as leads, brand awareness, customer service, and customer retention.

Many business owners are too busy to run their business and take care of their online content marketing. Efficient content marketing is the foundation upon which most successful online businesses are built.

Today, most consumers make their purchases through an online format. For business owners who want to make the most of their companies, hiring an SEO company to increase internet traffic will increase sales and improve their companies’ reputation.

Many small business owners have built a website, and a large percentage of them have a blog on their website. However, a lot of business owners want to know how often they should be posting to their blog.

There are several reasons why business owners might want to know the answer to this question. One reason to keep a blog fresh is because the major search engines reward fresh content.

Another reason why a business owner might want to know how often to update their blog is because they want to keep new and existing customers satisfied. Fortunately, the answer to this question can be quite vague.

Posting one time per week

A lot of businesses are posting to their blog once every week. Every week, they create a new blog post and add it to their website blog. Small businesses have been doing this for quite some time, and for most of them, it appears to be working quite well.

Why post once per week?

There are several reasons why once per week seems to be the magic solution. One of the main reasons why this works very well is because it’s beneficial for maintaining customer relationships. It’s useful to view a blog as a courtesy call, and this call is sent to all of your profitable, important customers.

When a business owner releases a new blog post, he or she makes sure that the customer is thinking about their business. By posting a new blog post every week, business owners are actually strengthening their relationship with their customers.

Aside from strengthening existing relationships, a weekly blog post will also create a rhythm for the relationship that exists between customers and business owners. In many cases, it almost becomes a ritual. Customers will start to look forward to the weekly blog post, so they will check back at least once per week.

By creating a weekly blog post, the website owner is able to provide useful updates and information to his or her readers. Although this article is primarily for business owners, any website owner can benefit from a weekly posting schedule.

Get a feel for content

By posting at least once every week, website owners create a useful skill. When business owners force themselves to post every week, they’re building a valuable skill, and this skill enables them to constantly think about how they can provide more value to their customers. The new skill gives business owners a competitive advantage.

What weekly blog posts do

There are many benefits of doing weekly blog posts. Such a post can be used to set specific buying criteria. Website and business owners can use a weekly blog post to establish true credibility and authority. They can use weekly posts to explain why customer service is so important.

For search engines

Website and business owners want to keep the search engines happy. A lot of blogs receive the bulk of their traffic from the major search engines, so it only makes sense to want to keep the search engines happy.

It’s nearly impossible to find any conclusive studies that show a specific posting frequency significantly impacts search engine rankings. However, that doesn’t mean it’s acceptable to start posting once per month. Search engines love fresh content, which is why they encourage website owners to update their blog frequently.

However, many people find it interesting that search engines look more closely at writing style than posting frequency. It couldn’t hurt to add new blog posts frequently. From an SEO perspective, there are several benefits to frequently updating a blog. Google absolutely loves fresh content.

By posting at least once per week, website and business owners can keep the search engine spiders coming back frequently. If the search engine spiders are frequently visiting your blog, then they will quickly index your new content.

It’s pretty obvious that content is what drives search engine traffic, so by posting to their blog regularly, website and business owners can increase their search engine traffic. Currently, many people have an infrequent posting schedule.

They might add one post to their blog and wait several weeks before adding more content. Even if you only post one new blog post per week, it’s best to maintain a consistent schedule because it will keep the search engines happy.

It’s great for sharing

There is something that webmasters can learn from the NBA. Basketball has a handful of top scorers, and there is a specific reason why these individuals score more often than most other players.

Put simply, it’s the players who take the most shots who score more than the rest of the players. This is also true for baseball players. Statistics show that the top-scoring baseball players also have the highest number of strikeouts.

Every new blog post gives webmasters the ability to score more points, but in the case of websites, points would be considered traffic. By posting a new blog post every week, website and business owners create more opportunities for their content to be shared, which increases online visibility.

What about every other week?

Many webmasters would like to post once every other week. Although they can post as often as they want, it’s almost pointless to post less than once per week.

A small group of individuals say they do just fine posting once per month, and while it might be working for them, posting once per week seems to be much more effective. If you imagine the main blogs that you visit, then you will probably realize that these blogs are updated every week. There are several other reasons why it’s important to avoid posting less than once per week.

Frequent blogging helps grow business

When you blog often, you’re effectively growing your business. Many studies show that frequent blogging has a significant impact on business growth. Frequent blogging attracts more leads and traffic, and there is plenty of data to back this up.

On average, updating a blog once per week provides double the amount of traffic than blogging less frequently. Studies also show that companies that blog more than 15 times every month can have as much as five times more traffic than companies that don’t.

Small business owners have the most to gain from blogging regularly. By posting at least eight times a month, companies can significantly increase their sales.

What is most important

Some people cannot post more than once every two weeks. What is really important is creating a posting schedule and sticking to it. Consistency is extremely important. At the end of the day, there is no magical posting frequency.

Since every situation is unique, the answer to this question is different for everyone. However, it’s best to post at least once per week. This is the frequency that seems to produce the best results for webmasters and business owners.

If it’s possible for you to post more often than once per week, then you should strive to do so, but it’s crucial to maintain a consistent level of quality. It makes no sense to post once per week if all of the posts provide almost no value.

After some of the latest Google updates, webmasters are taking a closer look at their backlink profile. In some cases, a full link audit is performed, but some webmasters aren’t looking that deep into their link profile.

A new tool has been released by Google, and webmasters can use it to tell Google to ignore certain links that point to their website. These links could be the result of a negative SEO campaign, or they could be a bunch of links from low-quality websites. Unfortunately, the Disavow tool is surrounded by a lot of misinformation.

The Danger

Webmasters need to understand the dangers of using the disavow tool. Although it was created and offered to webmasters with good intentions, it has the potential to destroy a website’s search engine rankings.

Many webmasters have used the disavow tool while knowing very little about links and SEO, and as a result, they’ve caused their website to lose massive visibility in Google. If a webmaster doesn’t know what links are bad or good, then it’s best to avoid using the disavow tool.

However, when used with adequate knowledge of links and SEO, the disavow tool has the potential to remove algorithmic penalties and safeguard search engine rankings.

A Look At the Disavow Tool

Before even thinking about using the disavow tool, it’s crucial that webmasters understand what the tool is, and they must also understand how it works. Fortunately, it’s very easy to understand why the tool should be used. Put simply, it can be used to clean up a website’s link profile.

When filled out and submitted correctly, the tool can tell Google to ignore undesirable links. For example, webmasters can use the tool to tell Google to ignore links from shady websites. Since we all know that backlinks impact search engine rankings, it only makes sense to monitor your website’s link profile.

With all of the latest Google updates, it has become painfully clear just how much damage can be caused by too many low-quality backlinks. However, webmasters need to understand that the disavow tool is not a magic bullet, and it must be used with extreme caution. Google has said that the disavow tool should be used as a last resort.

Why Webmasters Should Use the Disavow Tool

There are several reasons why webmasters might want to use the tool. One of the major reasons to use the tool is for preventive maintenance.

Many of the recent Google updates have penalized websites that have inorganic links. Put simply, these are links that are not considered to be natural, and they’re usually low-quality links. For example, these links can consist of blog comment spam, blog network links, links from low-quality article directories, footer link spam and paid links.

There is no doubt that inorganic links can harm a website’s search engine rankings, which is why they need to be disavowed. The disavow tool can be used for preventive maintenance because it can be used to tell Google to ignore inorganic links. By using the tool, webmasters can prevent their website from getting hit with a manual or algorithmic penalty.

Recovering From Penalties

Another major reason why webmasters might need to use the disavow tool is to recover from a penalty. Over time, thousands of websites have been hit with an algorithmic or manual penalty, which has devastating effects of search engine rankings.

The disavow tool can be used to tell Google to ignore links that are causing a penalty. In most cases, the disavow tool is most effective when used to disavow links that are causing an algorithmic penalty.

Google has said that the disavow tool should only need to be used by a small percentage of webmasters, and they also said that the tool should only be used by experienced webmasters because the average website owner could use the disavow tool and unintentionally cause serious harm to their website’s rankings.

How Many Links Does Google Report

For quite some time, Google has given webmasters a way to see how many links they have. Unfortunately, this method for checking links is very unreliable. In the past, it had even less accuracy than it has now.

One of the best backlink reporting tools that webmasters have is webmaster tools, which is a Google product. There is no doubt that Google has been trying to make their reporting more accurate, and the link reporting has certainly gotten better.

However, it’s still very inaccurate, and it will leave most webmasters scratching their head. Currently, webmaster tools can show a portion of backlinks that are pointing to a particular website. It’s true that Google has improved their services, and currently, webmaster tools shows significantly more incoming links than it used to show.

The problem is that it just doesn’t show the full picture. Google has even said that they only show a portion of the backlinks that they’ve found, and to this day, this fact remains true. Even with the existing link reporting tools, it’s nearly impossible to find every single backlink.

Can Disavowing Unseen Links Hurt My Site?

The main problem with the disavow tool is that Google doesn’t report all of the backlinks they’ve found. Webmasters want to know if disavowing unseen links will hurt their website.

It’s crucial to understand that Google doesn’t show all of the backlinks they’ve found, but that doesn’t mean that the hidden links are not affecting a website’s search engine rankings.

Put simply, Google usually knows about far more links than they care to share with webmasters, so although webmasters might think they know of links that Google doesn’t know about, it’s a real possibility that disavowing these links could harm a website’s search engine rankings.

Back To the Basics

We’ve established that disavowing links that Google doesn’t show has the potential to harm your website’s rankings, but it’s important to go back to the basics.

Webmasters need to understand that the disavow tool should only be used to remove toxic links, so if you’re using the tool for the purpose that it was intended for, you shouldn’t have to worry about whether or not disavowing unseen links is going to affect your search engine rankings.

The primary purpose of the tool is to remove links that could be harming your website’s rankings, so it doesn’t really matter if Google is reporting the toxic links or not. At the end of the day, webmasters shouldn’t fear the disavow tool.

When used correctly, it can be an extremely useful tool, and many SEO agencies have used the tool successfully to get penalties lifted from client websites.

Unfortunately, a lot of webmasters have made the mistake of hiring an unknowledgeable SEO company, which resulted in a campaign filled with hundreds of toxic links. The disavow tool is perfect for removing toxic links. Inexperienced webmasters should not attempt to use the tool if they don’t know what they’re doing.

There are many case studies that show the disavow tools being used to lift an algorithmic penalty, which was caused by an abundance of toxic incoming links, so there is no doubt that the tool works, but webmasters need to make sure that they know what they’re doing, or they need to hire knowledgeable professionals.

The general opinion of guest blogging has dropped in recent years due to the distressing trend of spam guest blogs. Many blogs that publish guest posts regularly find themselves assailed by webmasters attempting to pay for dofollow backlinks, a practice which is strongly discouraged by the search engine king of SEO, Google. Accepting such a guest post can put your blog at risk of a penalty from on high. Thankfully, there are a few rules you can follow to protect yourself against these sorts of spammers.

First, a note: guest blogging is swiftly becoming a poor SEO strategy. For several years, it was a valid strategy to gain powerful dofollow backlinks from authority sites. Now, with the rise of spam in the guest blog world, Google is likely to remove most of the benefit that comes from these links, even so far as levying penalties against the worst offenders. However, this does not mean that guest blogging is a bad thing. It simply means that you need to be careful about the links in your guest blogs. Guest blogging is still a valuable tool for networking, exposure, branding and community formation. With that in mind, feel free to accept guest posts, just be cautious about their content.

Rule #1: Scrutinize the Author

When an author offers to write a guest post for your blog, the first thing you should do is search their name and look up two things. First, look into their own personal blog or blogs. What sort of content do they publish? If their content looks in any way low quality, you can bet that the content they provide for your blog will be of similar quality. If their content is high quality — that is, something you would want to see on your own blog — then you can open up consideration.

The second thing you want to check is if they have guest posted on other blogs. What is the quality of their other guest posts? It’s always possible that they try to outsource their writing, and the quality of that writing may vary. Guest posts may get the short end of the stick in these cases, so watch out.

Any author you accept to write on your blog must have a track record for high quality content, particularly content relevant to your industry and niche. You should also make sure they don’t use spammy tactics for linking. Your goal is to only publish content from authors who provide quality and depth in their writing.

Rule #2: Scrutinize the Links

You need to have a consistent link policy for guest posts. Some sites are known for stripping any and all links from the content they publish. Other sites will allow one or two links, and others will allow as many as the author can reasonably include without coming across as spam. The exact number of links should vary according to the quality and depth of the content provided; deep, well-researched content is likely to have more research citations, after all.

The basic policy should look something like this:

• • A minimum of two or three links. No maximum beyond the discretion of the writer
• • A maximum of two links to the author’s sites, including social media handles and personal blogs
• • As the publisher, you should reserve the right to remove any link that you deem suspicious or potentially detrimental, either to the content or to your site. Make use of this rule to remove any link that leads to a site that does not provide value to your readers. Use the same quality indicators you use for links in your own posts

Rule #3: Scrutinize the Content

What is the quality level of the content this guest author has provided? That’s the most important question you should ask once you’ve determined that you’ll accept anything at all from the author. No matter how good their reputation may be, you need to make sure each individual post is something you want on your blog. Ask yourself a few questions about the content on offer.

• • Is this content something I want to have published on my blog?
• • Is this content written about a subject that’s been done to death online already?
• • Does this content offer something new and thought-provoking to an ongoing discussion?
• • Is this content copied or spun from another source? (Use tools such as Copyscape to check)

You want unique, powerful content for your blog, even if the primary purpose of that piece is to provide a gateway back to the original author.

Rule #4: Own the Content

This rule is important for two reasons. The first reason is that you need to reserve the rights to any content published on your blog. Google penalizes copied content. Even posting content you own on two individual pages is enough to get that page penalized. If a guest author offers a piece of content without the guarantee that you own the content, they are free to post it on their site as well. Instantly, Google sees copied content and penalizes both sites.

Note that this doesn’t mean the content is attributed to you. Unless you paid for the content to be ghostwritten, the original author should still receive credit. Half of the point of guest blogging is to spread the name and brand of the original author, after all. You don’t need to take credit for their work; simple make sure they won’t repost the content elsewhere.

The second reason is to make sure that you’re the one in control of the content. This ties into another general guideline, which is to never give out author accounts on your blog. Even reputable blog authors may stoop to underhanded tactics when they are given control on a site, with the right incentives.

Sure, it’s a bit of a headache to go in and format a post to publish yourself. On the other hand, it guarantees that the author won’t come back in a few months down the line and add unwanted links to a piece, edit it in a way you don’t want, or delete it entirely. If an author is requesting an account on your blog, at best they don’t know what they’re doing. At worst, they’re trying to get an interior access so they can perform some kind of attack.

Rule #5: Encourage Community

Guest posts shouldn’t be content airdropped from a passing website. They should be thought-provoking, powerful pieces of content that foster a discussion and a community. This means they need to encourage community on your own site. It also means they need to encourage an interaction between your site and that of the author. Sending traffic back and forth for discussions is a great way to build a community.

Guest blogging is a powerful tool for building community, even if its power in SEO is fading. Google is not going to penalize your site for guest blogging, as long as you stay within the linkspam guidelines. Keep an eye on the content you publish, make sure it’s as useful as you can, and you’ll receive the full benefit of an interested audience.

So you’ve been handed a manual action penalty by Google, have you? What have you done, you naughty webmaster? The good news is that you know about it – you may not have even been made aware of the penalty before the 2013 rollout of the manual action viewer within Google Webmaster Tools, so you’re already ahead of a site that was penalized before the rollout. Now, what do you do with this information?

On Google’s Manual Actions page, you will find a brief description of the problem that resulted in your site’s penalization. It is of immense importance that you visit this page and discover the reason for your penalty, as each different type of penalty has its own method of resolution.

Here’s how to view Google’s Manual Action page:

• Click on ‘Search Traffic’ on the Webmaster Tools Dashboard

• Click on Manual Actions

• Note any actions that may be listed

According to Google, your next action is to ‘fix it’ and request a review – but what does ‘fixing it’ entail? That’s what this article is all about.

In general, if you’ve participated in any questionable endeavors to increase your website’s ranking via PageRank, cut it out. We’re not here to judge, but Google takes a certain stance on such actions, and many penalties are the result of such actions. Everyone makes mistakes, but cleaning up after them isn’t always easy.

Some actions impact your whole site, while others only involve a few specific links, and there are different ways of dealing with every sort of action that’s taken. Let’s take a look at each type of manual action penalty, and the methods you can employ to remove your site from Google’s penalty box while working to restore its previous glory (or, at least, it’s previous Google ranking).

Unnatural Links to Your Site – Impacts Links

In this case, your site has been noticed by Google as having a recurring role in a pattern of ‘unnatural, artificial, deceptive, or manipulative’ links that point to, you guessed it, your website. Sometimes this is not the fault of the website itself and, thus, there is no action you can take. Google realizes this and, as such, your site’s ranking is not affected by this particular action.

That said, if you do happen to know of any artificial links to your site, it is certainly in the best interest of your site to do whatever you can to have them taken down. If you don’t explicitly know of any artificial links to your site, search for them and, when you find them, do whatever you can do to have them taken down.

Whether you’ve been able to locate any ‘unnatural’ links removed from your site, look harder. Google has taken this manual action against your site for its own reasons, and it is in your best interest to take action. Google your site’s URL, and if you find any links that don’t seem quite right, do whatever you can to take them down.

The easy method of having these links removed is requesting that the linking site’s webmaster remove them entirely. Unfortunately, this is not always an option, and the question of whether or not you should endeavor to take more drastic routes (e.g. changing the URL of the destination to which the questionable URL linked) depends upon the specific site being linked, and the overall rank of your site. For example, if the link is nested deep within your website’s structure, changing the filename of one page might do the trick; however, if the link is directed towards your root page, and you still have a respectable PageRank, you may not wish to take such an ‘evasive’ approach.

Unnatural Links to Your Site

This is a more serious version of the ‘Unnatural Links to Your Site – Impacts Link’ action, so here are some additional steps you can take in this case.

• Download the list of links to your site from Google’s Webmaster Tools. You can do this via the following route – Links to Your Site > Who links the most > Download more sample links (or) Download more latest links.
• Familiarize yourself with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, and compare the links that you’ve downloaded to the Google’s guidelines.
• If any links do not meet Google’s guidelines, try to contact the webmaster of the site hosting questioning links to your own, and ask them to remove/prevent the pages hosting those links from PageRank (you might suggest the “rel=’nofollow’ attribute.
• Finally, use the ‘Disavow Links’ tool, within your array of Google’s Webmaster Tools, to ‘disavow’ links that you were not able to have removed.
• Request a reconsideration of your site from Google and wait (patiently) for a response within your Webmaster Tools account

Unnatural Links from Your Site

In this case, you will again wish to revisit Google’s Webmaster guidelines. Remember, knowledge is power! Next, look for links on your site that Google might think you’ve paid for, or that might have violated Google’s Webmaster Guidelines in any other way (excessive link exchanges, for example).

If you found any, either remove them entirely, or use the “rel=”nofollow” attribute to redirect them away from Google’s PageRank algorithms, and request a reconsideration from Google.

Hacked Site

Well, this is no good. No webmaster on Earth wants to wake up to find this action on their Webmaster Tools account. But what on Earth should you do, if you do?

This one goes beyond the scope of this article, unfortunately, but help is out there! As Google says, ‘Unfortunately, it’s likely your site was hacked.’ And they say that right here</a>.

Visit the site linked above (here’s that link again, because if your site has been compromised, we strongly encourage you to visit it: http://www.google.com/webmasters/hacked/). Take all of the necessary actions and precautions.

The short version of Google’s instructions involves taking your website down until the method of attack and the extent of the damage can be reviewed (use Webmaster Tools to help with this process), identify the specific vulnerability that allowed the attack to occur, patch the vulnerability and deal with any recognizable damage, then request a review from Google.

Thin Content with Little or No Added Value

There are a number of reasons this action could have been taken, but they all typically involve associations with low quality, shallow websites. Google has basically deemed your site to be of limited value and low quality, so we do hope that you didn’t spend too much time working on it.

Your first course of action, in this case, is to follow some recommended actions, such as:

• Review Google’s Webmaster Guidelines concerning…

• o Automatically generated content
  o Affiliated programs
  o Scraped content
  o Doorway pages

• Use a service such as CopyScape to identify any content within your site that duplicates content found on any (or any number of) other sites 3. Check your site for doorway pages (pages that have been created for the specific purpose of ‘spamming’ search engines, utilizing certain content to accrue clicks and relay them to a different page)

• Google’s official suggestion, at this juncture, is to ‘think about whether your site provides significant added value for your users.’ This suggestion suggests that Google is interpreting your site as nothing more than an advertisement for another site. If it is, consider other means of promotion. If it is not, find ways to prove it to Google (by, for example, adding unique and valuable content via content brokers such as Textbroker.com).

• Implement Google’s suggestions and request an official review.

Pure Spam

You will only see this, or any of the next few actions, if your website is doing ‘spammy’ type actions of which you’re likely aware. While we can offer our best advice in this matter, Google is rather adept at staying on top of this sort of thing.

If you see the ‘Pure Spam’ action attributed to your site, you’ll want to remove any aggressive spam techniques that may be currently in use on your website. These techniques include scraping content from other sites (thievery), cloaking (black ops), and generated gibberish (trying to fool PageRank). If you wish for your previous PageRank to ever return to normal, it is in your best interest to remove these features from your website.

User-Generated Spam

This one involves users and form sanitization, basically. If you’re flagged with user-generated spam, it’s time to look at any portion of your website in which users can generate content. Forums, profiles, and blog comments are all possible suspects.

Check these areas out. Look for posts, or even profiles, that seem to be advertisements, or even those that include out-of-context content and/or links. Anything that’s user-generated, and doesn’t look like it quite belongs on your site, should be firmly dealt with.

Once you’ve sterilized your user’s content (and hopefully sought methods of keeping it sterile for the immediate future), request a review from Google.

Cloaking and/or Sneaky Redirects

This is a dark area in which we hope that you are not purposely treading. When you are flagged with this action, it means that your site could be showing different pages to viewers than it is showing to Google, or even directing users to different site than those that are shown to Google.

We’re going to assume that you don’t know anything about this, so take the following actions:

• In your Webmaster Tools, use the ‘Fetch as Google’ tool to compare the content that is fetched by Google to the content that is seen by a human user (this would be you) whilst visiting your website.
• If the content differs in any way, immediately remove the portion of your website that is serving different sorts of content to Google than it is to regular viewers (again, you, using the ‘Fetch as Google’ tool).
• If the content differs in any way, immediately remove the portion of your website that is serving different sorts of content to Google than it is to regular viewers (again, you, using the ‘Fetch as Google’ tool).
• Once you’re absolutely, positively sure that your site follows Google’s webmaster guidelines, request a reconsideration from Google. /LIST

Hidden Text and/or Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing is largely considered to be an unethical search engine optimization (SEO) technique, and Google is among those companies who believe it to be unacceptable.

If Google has accused you of keyword stuffing, here’s what to do:

• Using Google’s Webmaster Tools, use the Fetch as Google tool to check your website for content that may be visible to Google’s webcrawler but not to the human user.
• Check the text.

• o Make sure that all of the text on your website is the color that you want it to be, and not the color of your site’s background.
  o Look out for any text that’s hidden in any way, or unavailable due to certain types of CSS styling.
  o Look for text that’s repetitive, or text that doesn’t include any observable, valuable content.

• Find any hidden text? Unhide it. Make it discoverable by both search engines, and human users. If your content is to blame, make sure that it offers a sequentially observable value to regular, human users of your website.
• Re-check your entire site for strings of repetitive text, and remove any redundant data.
• Once your site has been sanitized using the above guidelines, request a reconsideration of your site from Google.

As we wrote earlier, we’re not here to judge, we’re here to help. Google does its best to keep its search results from displaying spammy content that offers little value to users who are searching for meaningful content. The best advice that we can give? Use that to your advantage – the more value you add to your content, and the less tricks you use to draw viewers to your site, the more likely it is that your site will earn a good value within PageRank, and the less likely it is that you’ll be penalized with a manual action.

Google+ is known to be one of the fastest growing social media platforms in the world that many companies, both small and large, are jumping at the chance to join in on. Its world began in 2011 as a test case. They started out with only 150 invitations to join and in a span of two years, they now has more than 400 million members.

What is Google+ All About?

Google+ is a social networking and identity site owned and operated by Google, Inc. It was described as a social layer that enhances many of its online properties. It is more than a networking site but also a tool that focuses on SEO as it meets social needs. It is the second largest social networking site in the world after Facebook. It is used by over 400 million people who interact socially via Google+ enhanced properties like Gmail, YouTube, and the +1 button.

Google+ combined some of the better aspects of both Facebook and Twitter. Users are able to post content, pictures and status updates which will show up on other users’ news feeds – like Facebook. At the same time, Google+ users can follow anyone without having to first send that person a friend request – similar to Twitter.

After an initial period spent learning more about how Google+ works, it was found that it is a really great source of links that can be used for SEO purposes, which is why many larger companies are currently using Google+. It is quite interesting to see Google opting to allow links that pass through page rank higher, unlike other social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter that allow links that are not search engine friendly, making it hard for Google spiders to follow. This gives this website an edge amongst other sites and is more likely to continue growing in popularity.

But the question is do most large companies use Google+ strictly for SEO?

For the past few years, many experts have heavily debated on Google+ and its role in benefiting companies via social media. Even though some people opposed its likelihood in meeting a company’s SEO needs. According to research conducted by GlobalWebIndex, Google+ is the second largest and popular social media platform with majority of big companies using it.

Big companies using Google+

• • BBC News: Well known by viewers all over the world. They are using Google+ to reach out to their viewers
• • Intel: An American semiconductor chip maker and using Google+ to help further its cause
• • Macys: An American shopping icon, using coupons to attracts customers on Google+
• • Marvel Comics: One of the biggest businesses on Google+
• • Toyota: A global auto manufacturer, doing well on Google+

Why are most large companies using Google +?

With Larry page (Google+ Co-Founder) confirming its popularity recently, it can only be assumed that its value in generating SEO friendly links has become and can continue becoming more important.

Benefits of Google+ To Companies Include:

1. 1. Search Engine Friendly

This media focuses more on SEO than on other aspects. This means that a company gets great SEO opportunities by using it. They can do this by sharing pages in their website on a Google+ page and the business will be ranked higher in the search engine results. This gives them a competitive edge against their counterparts.

1. 2.SEO Ranking

A major reason why many big companies are using Google+ is because its content counts toward overall SEO ranking. This is because Google indexes its contents the same way it does for web pages. This means that when one posts on Google+, the content is searchable and it ends up being ranked higher in the search engine results. The content also stays there for a longer time compared to when content is posted on other social platforms like Facebook or Twitter. Once content is viewed by many visitors, it gets more links and ends up being ranked higher, thus increasing a company’s performance.

1. 3. Easier To Reach Influencers

One of the things making Google+ popular amongst big companies is how new it is. This allows a person to take time to figure out what they want to post. There are numerous influencers in Google and with not too large an audience to reach out to yet; companies are able to start building an effective relationship with these influencers.

1. 4. Share More Efficiently

If a company’s clients are using Google+, they can be able to target the company’s content more easily and efficiently compared to other social networks. With the use of Google+ circles , one can be able to categorize followers similar to a mailing list. This enables a company to post content to the entire audience or to specific circles that one chooses.

1. 5. Google Hash Tags

Hash tags have helped big companies in ranking their websites high. They make sure to include hash tags as part of their content strategy. A company can post content on their Google+ account by throwing in a few hash tags to help in supporting their post. This acts as a great way to optimize the post for organic search by using the optimized words as hash tags. Hash tags are important in that, when content is posted on Google+, a company is not only able to reach Google+ followers but also those outside that network in an effective and targeted way.

1. 6. Ability To Post On YouTube

This is another big reason why many big companies are using Google+ for SEO purposes. YouTube comments are now integrated with Google+. When a company uses YouTube, it will be able to reach out to more potential customers and will eventually be ranked higher in the search engines.

1. 7. Flexibility In Link Placement For SEO

• (a)Google+ Posts

Posting is one of the most used features by users. Links that are found here are valuable for SEO. This is the place where the most dynamic links can be found and content posted here gets maximum optimization.

• (b)About Me Section

This is in every user’s profile and can include SEO beneficial links. These static links ends up being of more value than those in Google+ posts. The Majority of big companies such as Amazon, Best Buy, Overstock and Walmart have these pages set up and use it specifically for SEO, which is why they are dominating the SERPs.

So, do most large companies use Google+ strictly for SEO? The answer is obviously yes! This is because Google is well known for having the most relevant search results on the internet, making Google+ a top option for SEO related purposes.

Due to Google+ proven effectiveness, it is possible to see more search minded brands encouraging their customer to engage with their products through Google+ as a way of directing valuable links to their website. After seeing how many people are on this platform, one can now understand why big companies are using it. More and more companies are expected to launch their Google+ pages as well for their SEO purposes. If Google continues to integrate Google+ into its products, companies using the platform will continue benefiting, more people will turn to Google, and in the near future it is possible they will surpass Facebook.

Ah, link building. It’s the quintessential trademark of SEO, especially recently, and while links are still important, how you obtain them has changed quite dramatically in the last year. Before, it was perfectly acceptable to create inbound links by including them as “authoritative sources” in guest blog posts, on other sites, or as part of blog comments. Now, however, natural and organic link earning is the name of the game.

So where does link earning turn into a link scheme? The line between the two is very fine, but staying on the right side of that line is crucial to your online reputation and success as a website and business owner. Below is a description and examples of link earning and link schemes, as well as best practices to help avoid falling on the wrong side of the line.

An Inbound Marketing Primer

First, you should be clear on the importance of inbound links, what inbound marketing is and does, and why you should care. Inbound links are links to pages on your site that are located in areas of the web that are not on your website. So, for instance, if someone blogs about the insurance industry and thinks your website article about protecting your home from a fire was outstanding, they’ll include a link to your article when they write about home insurance. This is an example of an inbound link and acts as inbound marketing for your website. In other words, you don’t have to do any active marketing to get the traffic, it simply flows into your site from other areas of the web.

These high quality links that you’ve earned by offering high value content on your website are exactly what you want. The links are included on sites by the site owner, not by you, and link back to your site or an article/page on your site as being an authoritative source. When people follow that link, you get traffic, and if you offer something they need or want, you’ll likely get business, as well.

Inbound marketing is extremely important to your business, but earning links is the key. Now that you know what link earning is, what inbound marketing is, and why it’s important, you should learn about the difference between link earning and link schemes and how to stay on the right side of that fine line.

Link Earning

Earning links is like earning money – if you do a good job and you provide something of value, you’ll earn links by default. The best ways to improve your chances of earning inbound links from others are below.

• • Provide informative content.
• • Offer content that is helpful and assists your readers in solving a problem.
• • Include content on your site that is written authoritatively and confidently.
• • Link to authoritative sources in your content to validate that what you are saying is true.
• • Do not write “sales pitch” content; content marketing and link earning is about establishing authority and providing information, not hard selling.

You should add content to your site that is geared towards what you sell, but not written like a sales presentation. If you own a law firm, for instance, you could write an article about what to do in a certain legal situation. Obviously you and those at your firm can help with that, but the content is not directly geared towards selling.

How does this type of content help you earn links? Because just like you should add authoritative links to your web copy and content, other people need to do the same thing. If your site is well written, has high quality content, and provides valuable information, others will find it and link to it as they create their content. This is the natural, organic method of earning inbound links to your website. It’s content marketing and link earning combined into one simple admonition: create and publish the best quality content you can – and lots of it.

Link Schemes

The evil twin of link earning is link scheming. Link schemes are essentially a less than honest way of trying to increase the number of inbound links that exist for your site. If link earning is the farmer who plants a seed, waters it, cultivates it, and grows a harvest, then link scheming is taking already grown plants, putting them in the ground on a field, and saying you grew them. Both people have plants, but only one of them truly earned the harvest.

Essentially, link schemes are “marketing” plans that include adding links to a home page or other on-site page in as many places on the web as possible. If you’ve ever gone to a blog to see a few honest comments, and then one strange comment with a link in it, the comment with a link in it was likely part of a link scheme.

Link schemes appear in many different places and link scheming is done in many ways, but below are the most common link scheming tactics you’re likely to see.

• • Adding links to a blog comment without contributing anything to the conversation.
• • Guest posting on other blogs and including links to your own site as an authoritative link.
• • Posting on YouTube videos, Facebook posts, etc. and linking to your site when it has nothing to do with the subject matter at hand.

If you have a link to your website in your signature and you are honestly contributing to a conversation on a blog that you’ve been a part of for awhile and have a genuine interest in, that’s completely different and is not link scheming. But many people will go from blog to blog posting a link to their site when they have no prior history with the blog or its community, the post adds nothing of value to the conversation, and they have no interest in the subject matter other than to obtain links for their site.

As with any unethical or less than honest practice, many people still get away with these forms of link “building”. But the search engine algorithms are a lot smarter than they once were, they know to look for these schemes, and they’re getting quite proficient at finding them. Case in point: be cautious, and earn your links naturally.

How to Avoid Link Scheming

Many people worry that they will inadvertently contribute to a link scheme without meaning to. However, “accidentally” link scheming is quite difficult to do. Most people know when they go and post a random link to their site on a YouTube video (particularly if it has nothing to do with the video) what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. But if you’re truly concerned, here are some best practices to follow.

• • Don’t include a link to your site in a blog (or other) comment if it doesn’t have to do with the subject matter.
• • Including a link to your site in your signature is fine, but only use that signature in online communities with which you are already affiliated and have a relationship.
• • Unless it’s requested, don’t link to your site on other people’s social media pages.
• • Do link to other areas of your site within articles and posts you create; this is called interlinking and is very helpful to SEO.
• • Focus on improving the content of your site instead of promoting your site elsewhere by linking to it.

Following these best practices can help ensure you earn your links, engage in high quality on-site SEO, and grow your business organically.

The most exciting part about creating a new website with WordPress is how quickly and easily you can deploy it. You can then tinker with every little setting, add in new plugins to extend your WordPress installation and customize your code until your website reaches perfection.

On your way to making that perfect website, it’s important to keep in mind that you will need to customize certain things like your titles, meta descriptions and links while enabling things like sitemaps for search engine spiders to use.

Below is a comprehensive list of must-have SEO and SEO-related plugins for your brand new WordPress site.

Bear in mind that not all of these plugins have to be installed together as some bring the same or similar features that other plugins allow. Some plugins may be better for you to install due to the technical skill required or the degree of optimization that you can perform. This means that you should thoroughly review the plugins and their features individually before installing them.

1. WordPress SEO by Yoast

This WordPress plugin has been around for years and it has attained the status of being one of the most highly rated plugins available for WordPress. It brings the basic features that allow you to optimize meta keywords and descriptions on each page or post while bringing some more advanced features that make creating a high quality website easier.

For example, WordPress SEO by Yoast comes with a feature that allows you to provide a “Focus Keyword” that you can optimize your post or page for as you create it. If your focus keyword is lacking in density, this plugin will suggest a few ways you can include it in your content to make it more agreeable with search engines. This makes it a must-have for your WordPress site if you plan to blog or to fill it with hundreds or thousands of articles.

WordPress SEO by Yoast provides XML sitemaps, RSS feed optimization, social sharing integration and the standard SEO features like tweaking the meta content of your pages.

2. All-in-One SEO Pack

While debatably not as feature-rich as WordPress SEO by Yoast, the All-in-One SEO Pack plugin makes it easy for novice webmaster and website owners who want to perform quick SEO on their website to deploy a brand new WordPress site.

The basic set of features that other SEO plugins for WordPress provide are available with the All-in-One SEO Pack. You can change individual page titles, meta keywords and descriptions.

The unique features that All-in-One SEO Pack provides includes the ability to fine-tune navigational links, utilize advanced canonical URLs and generate meta tags automatically based off of your content. All-in-One SEO Pack is also one of the few plugins that supports the features needed for WordPress e-commerce websites.

3. SEOPressor 5

SEOPressor 5 provides you with real-time recommendations that refresh as you write content in the WordPress administration section of your website. It analyzes keywords in places besides your content’s main body, which means that your title and header tags are included in its evaluation of your keyword usage.

The interesting part about this plugin is that it seems to rate keywords in a way similar to how Google and other major search engines value them. This allows you to stop focusing on just one exact phrase or long-tail keyword while trying to aim for other keywords that are related due to latent semantic indexing and other newly added features to search engines.

In addition to this, SEOPressor comes with a handy feature that will automatically stylize and decorate keywords while adding alt text to images.

4. SEO Ultimate

SEO Ultimate provides all the standard features that other SEO plugins provide, but it also gives you a few handy features that you won’t find in any other SEO plugins.

The most important feature that it provides is referred to as “Deeplink Juggernaut”, which is just a fancy way of saying that it can automatically create a deep interlinked scheme for your website by searching for keywords in your post and then automatically linking them. You can use this to link your posts and pages while creating your content with the autocomplete link tool provided, or you can scan your post after you’ve completed them to create links.

The best part about the Deeplink Juggernaut feature of SEO Ultimate is that it allows you to avoid most over optimization penalties by giving you the ability to control how many times a page is linked across your entire website in content or just how many times it’s linked on just one page.

The other key feature that SEO Ultimate provides is Open Graph integration, which allows you to maximize your content’s documentation and compatibility across other networks like Facebook.

5. Google XML Sitemaps

While most SEO plugins include the creation of XML sitemaps as a standard feature, not all of them do. Sometimes, you may just want to ensure that your sitemaps will be as compatible as possible with search engine spiders.

To achieve this, you can use the Google XML Sitemaps plugin. It will create a sitemap that can be easily interpreted by search engines, which in turn ensures that every piece of your content is crawled and indexed. This is especially useful for brand new WordPress sites, as search engines tend to miss content even when it’s linked directly from the main page simply because your website is new.

The other plus that this plugin brings is that it will automatically notify search engines when you create new content. This will help foster more visits by search engine robots, which in turn means that your content can begin ranking faster.

6. W3 Total Cache

The speed at which your website loads is one factor that search engines like Google use to determine how useful your website is to visitors. It’s also one of the most influential factors on statistics that can negatively affect your website, such as the bounce rate of your visitors.

W3 Total Cache works by taking everything that would normally be left up to a potentially lengthy database query and then caching it as a plain HTML page that can then be served up almost immediately. This is a great plugin for websites that are likely to receive a lot of traffic in the future or for websites hosted on shared hosting plans that can potentially be affected negatively by other customers with unoptimized sites.

7. Contextual Related Posts

With the recent Google Panda and Penguin updates, interlinking content that is closely related has become more important than ever before. Although there are a few plugins that can link related posts, they don’t do so with the same depth that the Contextual Related Posts plugin does.

It comes in two flavors: you can have posts linked automatically right after you install the plugin or you can create custom templates for a manual placement. It supports WordPress thumbnails and allows you to define which of your posts should be excluded from displaying related posts.

8. 404 Redirection

As you rearrange the pages on your website and tweak the URLs, you’re almost guaranteed to have links that will ultimately provide 404 errors. Instead of letting these pages become completely removed from Google’s listings, you can use 404 Redirection to turn 404 errors into 301 redirects to your home page.

This will allow you to pass any link authority that your old links had to your website’s homepage.

SEO is full of different responsibilities and things you need to consider—analytics, content, social media, design—so it can be tough to know where to start. You might have your website up and running with a little bit of content, but actually optimizing that site will take a collaborative effort between all the departments in your company. Everyone needs to be on the same page, and that all starts with prioritizing your tasks correctly.

A List to Help You Prioritize SEO Tasks

Taking a look at all of the different things you need to do in SEO is a great way to help make sure you’re on the quickest path to success. I recommend putting your different tasks into groups based on priority so you’re not wasting any time having to go back and re-do things.
Below are a few different categories you might want to consider:

First on the SEO Priority List

• • Check your indexing.

If your website isn’t being indexed by Google, you’re not showing up on the SERPs. This means that when people search for something related to your company, they have absolutely no way of finding your website. Oftentimes a noindex is just a small button you need to press or code you need to change, so it’s easy to miss.

Resource: You can visit this article learn more about changing your index status.

• • Get rid of duplicate content.

If you have a lot of duplicate content on your site you are going to get penalized, which means your company will drop in rankings on a SERP (sometimes eliminated altogether). You need to either delete these pages completely or go through and put fresh content on them in order to remain in good standings with Google.

• • Install social sharing buttons.

I always make this a priority because it’s easy to do and it’s an easy way to start building visibility for your company. Social sharing is important, so the faster you can give your visitors access to sharing your content, the better.

• • Check your navigation and design.

Before you can really begin optimizing your site, you have to have a site that works. Navigation is something that is important to Google when it comes to rankings, so make sure you don’t have too many deep pages (4 clicks to get somewhere from the homepage) and your site isn’t too confusing.

Second on the SEO Priority List

• • Mobile compatibility.

Once you have your desktop website all set to go, it’s time to move on to mobile. Even if you haven’t fully optimized your desktop site yet, I still recommend starting to think about mobile so that you have something out there. Have a responsive web design and make sure that pages can load quickly for a phone.

Resource: You can learn more about mobile optimization in this Forbes article.

• • Local search.

Again, once your website is all setup and ready to go, it’s important to get involved in local search. You need to claim your business (it may already be created even if you didn’t do it) or create a new business listing on sites like Google+ Local, Yahoo Local, and Bing Places so that you will show up for those searching locally.

Resource: Visit this article if you need help getting started with local search.

• • Get started with keyword research and content.

It’s important to do some keyword research to get an idea of what your audience is searching for and where your competition lies. Once you have an idea about terms you may want to rank for, you should get started writing content. Find good writers and put out fresh content a few times per week to get into a good rhythm.

Resource: The Google Keyword Planner is the best and most popular for keyword research.

Third on the SEO Priority List

• • Being building links.

Once your website is set and ready to go, it’s time to start building links and promoting your website by working with other authoritative sources. There are many black hat tactics out there so you have to be careful, but in general earning links for your website just takes some good quality work. Consider guest blogging for quality sites in your niche and playing around with social media contests to start creating buzz about your company.

• • Use relevant title tags.

Your page title is going to be how Google and the search engine bots learn what your page is about and then categorize it accordingly. After you’ve done your keyword research, go back and check to make sure that the content on your site has relevant title tags, or title tags that match up with your keywords/goals.

Last Priority

• • Experiment with some SEO tools.

SEO tools are an absolutely necessity for many small businesses, but I still think they can be put last on your list of things to do. You shouldn’t get fancy with SEO tools under you know you have a solid website and have a good rhythm going regarding content and link building. Once you do, tools can be very helpful (especially with analytics and data).

Resource: Check out this article for some of the best SEO tools out there.

Of course, there are quite a few more SEO tasks that you’ll need to deal with as your company continues to grow, but above are some of the biggest and most important. Let us know how you prioritize your SEO efforts or if we’ve missed anything important in the comments below.