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JUMPSTART
JUMPSTART
SEO: HOW TO FEED
the Panda & Penguin with
your content in 2014
Why exactly did Google do that and
what is the aim of these updates?
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Penguin Updates specifically target:
Michael
Wolczyk
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You’ve had a great business idea,
created a promising business plan,
found some partners and investors and
started your business. Now you need
new customers! There’s no better way
to get new customers than from organic
online searches. In fact, there are many
potential customers out there, searching
right now for your product or your
service and you need to ensure that they
immediately find your business as one of
the first search results!
The competition in most industries is
getting tougher. In the past, many people
have tried to find ways to rank easily on
the top of the results pages on the search
engines. However, this soon caused
problems, because so many spammy
sites appeared in the search results.
As a result of these problems, Google
embarked upon a series of massive
search algorithm updates, all of which
which caused a big outcry in the SEO
scene. The most famous Google Updates
were Panda (Panda 1.0 was launched
in February 2011) and Penguin (Google
Penguin 1.0 was launched in April 2012).
Since that time, Google has produced
many more updates, sometimes more
than three per month.
Experts
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Low quality links
Aggressive internal linking
High number of links from low
quality sites (link networks)
High number of links from low
quality business directories
Very low anchor text diversity
(what’s the name of the link which
links to you?)
Panda Updates specifically target:
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Low quality content
High bounce rates
Duplicate content
Huge ad/content ratio
Bad html/content ratio
Keyword stuffing within the
content
What does this mean for your new
business? Quite simply, forget
everything you heard about “the old
way” of Search Engine Optimisation
(SEO)! Here are some examples of
“old ways” of doing SEO:
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Sections of text designed
specifically for search engines,
below the relevant content
(mostly irrelevant content
produced to focus on specific
keywords)
Producing as many links as
possible (wherever they might
come from: comments links, linknetworks, or wherever links can
be generated!)
One-to-one link exchanges
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Stuffing your content with
relevant keywords (adding a
bunch of keywords somewhere on
the site)
Stuffing your meta-tags with
relevant keywords
Creating a huge amount of
content
In previous years, it would have been
quite easy to rank well with these
techniques. However, times have
changed and now, it’s important to reevaluate your approach.
How can I start with my content
marketing? How do you optimize
your pages in 2014? How can I
help the search engines to find my
valuable content and my products?
Content Marketing is key – and in
recent months, this has become more
important then ever. Let us divide this
into the different process steps:
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2.
3.
4.
5.
Create a content schedule
Create your content
Work on content presentation
Market your content
Update your content frequently
There’s no better
way to get new
customers than
from organic online
searches.
1. CREATE
A CONTENT
SCHEDULE
Content is important and for
the production of high quality
content, you need time and
available resources. As a first step,
you should make a plan based on
the most important topics that
might bring you customers.
In the beginning it can be
impractical, not to mention
overwhelming, to attempt to
write unique product descriptions
for every single product that
you sell. An effective schedule
will help you to focus on the
most important pages first and
prioritize them. It makes sense to
choose your best-selling category,
and focus initially on the area that
brings you the most revenue.
Once you are done with these
category pages, you can delve
deeper, focusing on your most
valuable products and creating
unique product descriptions.
Also keep in mind to refresh your
sites from time to time. If you
created a page a few months
ago, it makes good business
sense to keep this page on your
schedule to update the content
with new information, add more
details and so forth. This will
show the search engines that
your content is reviewed and
updated regularly.
2. CONTENT
PRESENTATION
Once you have some useful
questions/topics, it’s up to you
how you want to help your
customers. You might just want
to keep it as basic, informative
text, or add an interesting
infographic or short video.
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3. CREATION OF YOUR CONTENT
Once you have chosen a category, start creating a category page. On this
page you can, for example, provide more useful information about your
products. Think about:
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What will be relevant information for your customers if they want to
choose one of your products?
What are the newest products?
Which of these products would you recommend to your customers?
Try to imagine: “What would my customers ask me, if they were standing
in front of me?”
If you struggle with this, visit an “offline” store, which offers similar
products to you and observe the customers. Which kind of questions do
they ask the staff in the stores?
4. CONTENT MARKETING
Make your content easy to share. Make sure you have all relevant social
media platforms included and that the shared content will appear in an
appropriate format on each platform. I’ve seen a lot of shared content
in the past where only a link was visible and the image was not. Info