Welcome to the Inspiration Marketing digital strategy guide for 2014. My name is Patrick Naughton and I am the head of digital marketing for Inspiration. In part 1 of our digital strategy guide I am going to give you an overview of SEO red and green lights. By red lights I mean techniques that you should not be performing and green lights - techniques that I would recommend for 2014 and beyond.
2. SEO Red Light s
• Building as many links as possible from as many
sources as possible
• Using anchor text to manipulate your keyword
rankings
• Writing content for search engines
3. Will Google Penalize
Me?
• The short answer is yes. You can’t run and you can’t
hide!
• Google Panda and Penguin updates focused on poor
user experience and content and backlinks
4. Diagnose a Penalt y
• There are several ways that you will know that your
site has been penalized
• Manually penalty, drop in traffic
5. Benchmar k Tr af f ic
• You can use Google Analyics
• Run a test against site traffic and Google updates
6. How t o Fix SEO Red
Light s
• Diagnose toxic links and submit a disavow
document
• Re-write poor content
• Give a better user experience
7. SEO Gr een Light s
• Building a website that delivers the best user
experience
• Clean backlink footprint
• Developing inspiring content that will earn you links
naturally
• Writing content for your target audience
• Embracing social media with open arms
• Focusing on conversions
Welcome to the Inspiration Marketing digital strategy guide for 2014. My name is Patrick Naughton and I am the head of digital marketing for Inspiration. In part 1 of our digital strategy guide I am going to give you an overview of SEO red and green lights. By red lights I mean techniques that you should not be performing and green lights - techniques that I would recommend for 2014 and beyond.
To start off here is a snapshot of SEO red lights – techniques that fall under this category include building as many links as possible from as many sources as possible. The theory been – more links = better rankings. Using exact match anchor text used to manipulate the algorithm. An example been – I want to get found for the Keyword SEO – I am going to have 500 anchor text backlinks with the word SEO. Another outdated technique is SEO content writing to manipulate the algorithm. What I am talking about here is keyword stuffing and writing content that provides no real value to its audience. All of these methods will leave your website open to Google penalties.
If your website has thin, poorly written content or backlinks that look spammy your site may be penalized by Google. The reason why is that Google has released a series of updates that influence the way its algorithm processes and ranks websites. There was two major updates of note Panda and Penguin. The Panda update focused on user experience and content while The Penguin update focused on exact match anchor text links and other techniques.
There are several ways to diagnose if your website has received a penalty. Google may give you a direct notice through Webmaster Tools or you may have noticed a significant drop in traffic over the last year or so.
You can use Google Analytics to view your traffic and help with the diagnoses or you can use tools like The Panguin Tool from Barracuda Digital – which benchmarks your traffic against the Google updates so that you can see if there was an significant drop in traffic changes that coincided with a Google update.
For your website to bounce back after a Google penalty you need to find the source of the problem and fix it. You can use tools like Webmaster Tools, Open Site Explorer and Link Detox to diagnose low quality links. Once you have a list of poor quality links you can then submit a disavow request in Webmaster Tools. If your website contains thin or poorly written content I would recommend re-writing the pages. If your website delivers a poor user experience you should develop a new website that delivers the best possible experience for your audience. Your website can recover from Google penalties it just takes time and a fresh approach to SEO.
Which leads me on to SEO green lights. This is where you want to be in 2014. Your website should deliver the best possible user experience. Think about mobile and responsive web design, good navigation and calls to actions. Your site should have a clean backlink footprint - with any toxic links disavowed. Your content needs to inspiring – think about your target audience and what type of content they would most likely engage with. Content that rocks earns links naturally. Use social media that is most relevant for your business - Whether it be Google+, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest. Focus on increasing conversion on your website – through A/B testing better calls to actions or copy that sells your product or service. In part two of our digital strategy guide we will go into more detail about how to develop each of these areas further.
Thanks for watching and I will hope you will join me in part 2 of our digital marketing guide next month.
