The most frightening in the Internet world is none other than the penalties.  Your business could land in the graveyard as quickly than you can imagine. Believe it or not, penalties could actually ruin your business.

This article is precisely about how to avoid algorithmic penalties, to stay in good standing with Google, and to keep on raking the benefits.

Before I discuss about the how, let me help you understand the basics of the Google penalties:

1. Algorithmic penalties are of two kinds of search engine penalties which are the manual and the algorithmic.

• A manual penalty means a person decided to put a stop on your online activities. Usually, for this one, you will receive a notice from the Google Webmaster.
• An algorithmic penalty is when you violate the guidelines. Naturally, Google will penalize your website and your ranking gets affected.

2. This article is about prevention. Once you get an algorithmic penalty, your ranking will obviously decline. Surely, you can recover, but it will be a long journey. Now, here are 5 tips to make sure that you are safe.

Tip #1:  Understand the rules and never break them.

If you need a complete guide, Google posted them here. Whether you like it or not, Google creates the rules and every user must follow suit. No need to apply shady schemes because Google will know about it.

If you want to succeed online, then Google’s guidelines should be your ultimate roadmap.  Read it carefully and abide by the rules.

Tip #2:  Analyze your content.

Upon reading and following tip #1, then you would know that the culprit is usually spammy content. Content auditing is actually not really difficult. You just need 2 things:

1. You must understand Google’s guidelines.
2. Examine your content. Is it high in quality? You are not keyword stuffing? Your images have alt texts? Even the littlest details will make a big difference so carefully look through your content.

Tip #3:  Tidy up your links.

Don’t wait for a manual penalty to happen before you tidy up your links. Start early and build a strong link profile. A link profile refers to the links pointing to your website. Google ranks these links basing from these qualifications:

• The standard of excellence of where the links came from – was it from a reputable site or not?
• The anchor text used – what is the text used in describing the links.

To know the list of links, you can go to Google Webmaster. Hence, don’t believe everything you read online, and educate yourself on the link building myths. If you suspect any links, disavow them immediately.

Tip #4:  Develop awesome content.

 Remember, your website is nothing without your content. Provide relevant content to your audience and apply these:

• Writing may take a day or two, but marketing is an everyday task.
• Of course, you just don’t write. You need to edit and update what you posted.
• Don’t just stick one type of content. Add mixing videos and inforgraphics into the page.

In the end, you would want people to react with what you publish. Make people rave about your content and links will naturally come your way.

Tip #5:  Know the latest algorithm.

Google constantly innovates. The rules before won’t be the same rules now. Of course, things will evolve. To avoid violating the algorithmic rules, check Google’s blog and the official webmasters blog.

If you are active online, you would noticed some websites are utterly horrible. When you are about to begin something and start your research, then a website does not perform the way you want it to be. It could simply be an outdated website that the owner abandoned it without no plans of reinventing it.

Well, sites are not intrinsically horrible, and they can still be rescued. On the other hand, it is better to start fresh all over again. Here are the four suggestions to revive a dying website.

1. Don’t go to the technical details just yet!

Usually, you would want to work on a site and fix crucial SEO concerns, but that shouldn’t be the case! The first important phase is to address any customer concern. You are there to serve their needs.  Help them attain the things they need and you will be rewarded by Google with brownie points. Thus, you need to catch up on some tips Google provided here: Interpreting ‘Quality’ According to Google (Part 1)

Aside from that, it also best to evaluate the whole scenario. Talking with the clients will give you the opportunity to know their problems with the website. You will also find out anything that was not helpful in the past. So, there’s no need to make the mistakes again. Focus and give more importance to the strategies that worked before.

Now, if you are a technical person, do not allow yourself to carelessly edit or alter because getting technical at this point may affect the higher ranked pages. Plus, this not the time to do that. At this point, you need to look at the bigger picture. Create a roadmap of this project to make yourself aware of the progress and to complete it in the most organized way. Here are examples:

• Site crawling – Can search engines crawl the entire website?
• Algorithms and penalties – Did the website commit any violations?
• Indexing issues – Are the pages indexed by Google?

2. Be realistic and follow the plan.

Create an attainable objectives and key performance metrics from the start. You can jot down the progress and do this on a weekly basis. Progress could be mundane like added CTRs to more sizable gains like web traffic, ranking, or conversion rates.  Keep your head on the game. Below are the things that could help:

• Keep control over possible chaotic optimization plans, and use project management tools.
• Give more attention on activities that concerns the customers and their goals.

Other goals could keep you away from the more important actions. Usually, this happens when there is too much excuses and demands on various activities. Thus, it is important to use boards and other means to keep track with the project. It helps if you use interactive boards to visualize your progress. There is a clear distinction between what needs to be done and what are already completed.

For now, I will stop here. Don’t worry because I will continue the discussion on 4 Suggestions in Improving Horrible Websites (Part 2)

There are some businesses that prefer to rank for a bigger region instead of optimizing for a specific location. This is more practical because they give services in different areas and may not be able to have actual customers visiting the store.

Performing a well-planned regional SEO approach can assist broaden the many times your content is shown and the number of users that read your content devoid of straining your bank account to finance physical offices in a small city in the region. If you do this the right way, you can definitely rank in the SERP for the desired “near me” searches which are the usual places to get suggestions.

What is the distinction between Regional SEO and Local SEO?

There is a crucial distinction. Brian Harnish said, “Local SEO is a strategic process that focuses on emphasizing the optimization efforts of local brick-and-mortar businesses.”

• A lot of physical stores, also called service area businesses, try to perform local SEO and put up a virtual office which also need its own set of employees. However, it’s basically operating via the internet. This is done to boost the online presence in the local SERP.
• This is permissible by Google’s guidelines for as long as there are people doing the job during business hours. However, if a user complains and Google thinks that you are defying the law, then Google could suspend your listing. Of course, you can always ask for a reinstatement but that certainly will take a long time. So, always make sure to follow Google’s guidelines.

How do you Improve your Regional SEO?

To avoid the downward surge of your online visibility despite your intense SEO efforts, here are 5 suggestions to improve your regional SEO approach.

1. Investigate Your Area

• It is always wise to know your area by means of investigating. Do your research before you do anything. Find out the cities that gets the most organic attention for your services or goods.
  • Do a Local Keyword Research
    • Do this comprehensibly and don’t forget to add geo modifiers, also called geo tag or geographic modifiers, to your keywords.
    • Differentiate this with the report of the Google Analytics. Find out if there are identical (or diverse) data. When you are done with your city list, try to position them starting from the highest to the lowest search.
  • Classify Your Cities
    • The next step is to classify them in lone regions so we could lessen the number of the regions pages as we go on.
    • An example would be, if you want to rank in Dallas in your SEO services, then aim for business districts like Frisco, Irving, and so on. Take note that Fort Worth is only less than 40 miles away from Dallas and it could be wise to put them in just one area. Perhaps, your Dallas, Fort Worth page can focus on most areas of North Texas.

2. Maximize Doorway Pages

• Google describes this as “sites or pages created to rank highly for specific search queries.”
• Further described as a set of identical or dualistic pages and goes to the same destination and that could hurt the user’s experience. Building doorway pages is the latest thing that should stop. Funny thing is that there are times that they work. In 2017, John Mueller said during a Google Webmaster Hangout that a well thought of doorway pages is a great scheme if done the right way.

Now, you have an idea on how to improve your regional SEO. But wait, I have more for you coming up on the second part.

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Black hat is a practice that defies search engine guidelines to gain high rankings in Google. These results to a penalty from search engines. Most of the time, a site is not aware that they are afflicted. While it is true that in the beginning, a site will really rank high in Google. Eventually, search engines will downgrade it for such unethical practices.

What does Black Hat SEO mean?

• SEO is a procedure of designing a site with the aim of ranking high in search engines like Google. It is an imaginative means of “optimizing” content to gain organic traffic as oppose to paying advertising fees, which could be expensive.
• When you do website optimization, there are two kinds: the white and the black hat SEO. The white hat SEO utilize lawful means to rank high. Black hat SEO intend towards search engines and not people which could misguide the algorithms and the users.

Today, Google and the other search engines has advanced algorithms to help find black hat SEO. Here are some black hat SEO schemes you should know:

Paid links

• Google defines a paid link when it is paid by either goods or money. Nowadays, Google gives a considerable resources to close paid links and link farms. To determine this, take a look at the “anchor text,” the text or phrase that contains the link.
• If text is irregular with no association to the link, it could be a bought link. Take a look at the number of links on each page.  “Keyword stuffing” happens when a keyword is used in an excessive number of times. These keywords they used may be a popular so this ensures that Google search ranking is high. If you repeat the same keyword on the title, the meta description, or anywhere in your content, that is keyword stuffing. To not be penalized for keyword stuffing, avoid using the keywords multiple times.

Hidden Links

• Just how like the name suggests, it is a type of link that you cannot see. Google emphasizes on these things:  putting a hidden text behind an image, adding a text with a 0 font size, inserting a series of white texts on a white background with white text. Basically, you are being sneaky adding texts or links that can’t be easily detected by the human eye. More on 9 Bad Links That Can Get You in Trouble.

Cloaking and Redirects

• When websites present two distinct content to search engines and to users, that is clocking. Meanwhile, if you have experienced clicking on a website and ended up in another website, that is called a “sneaky redirect.”
• For cloaking, let’s say that search engine will see plain texts while the user can clearly see images. So, there is a clear difference between what the search engines and users see on your website.

Black Hat SEO will harm your Google Rankings in the long run.

Three things you learned here: 1) hire a good SEO firm for your website, 2) build educative content, and 3) follow Google’s guidelines at all times. Apply these three tips and you will never go wrong.

In part 1, I discussed the two ranking essentials for landing on the 1st page of the SERPs. I gave some tips in pushing content to the highest portion of Google’s search results. Today, I will share the rest of the tips.  So, let’s start with…

Enhancing Your Content for Your Audience

• While it is true that possessing a high organic search ranking is vital, the most important task now is building the needed user experience.
• The prime focus of the content is to be able to reply to the user inquiries and challenging the appropriate action. Build one of a kind content that responds to as much user inquiries as possible. At the same time, it should contribute practicable solutions. Writing a content with the users as the major concern is crucial in developing organic ranking.
• Your content must be extraordinary, original, and distinct.

The Significance of Link Building

• The quantity of backlinks to a page is associated to a towering organic rank that is greater than any other element.  In one SEMrush research, it tells us that there is a humorous drop on the quantity of the referring websites in high volume of keyword searches for the search results on page 2 until 15.
• Although backlinks are vital, the quantity of links more vital. From a wider point of view, backlinks turn out to be an affirmation of your content. The more unique domains linked to your content, the more users will recommend your content.
• Your approach should zero-in on gaining pertinent and authoritative backlinks. The directory links, or links that came from the same website because they are simpler to spam, are NOT counted.
• The dilemma is, without your presence felt, how do you then entice back links to your website the natural way? This will entail link developing scheme. A lot of approaches will be used here.
• The first step is to build an outreach template which is your way of getting in touch with different people you like to get links from. Actually, there are a lot of sources for you to have backlinks if you have an idea where they can be found. Read below to guide you:
  • Analyzing the rivals’ links.
  • Guest posting on other sites.
  • Repairing broken links.
  • Getting shares, links, or mentions.
• The above mentioned are simple outreach schemes to push not mechanically links returning to your site.  The more reference you get, the more chance your rank goes up for a particular keyword search.
• It is important to put your attention on potential sites and influencers.

Branding and Further Campaigns

If you supply a high-quality article, there is a possibility that when they do an identical search in the future, they could click on your content to make sure their question is fulfilled. To finance a campaign, companies resort to paid promotion. This will bring your content to your influencers and preferred audience.

Doing a marketing campaign to encourage users who engaged with your site. Obviously, the concept is to build your presence and the media exposure of your brand as well.

So, you need to optimize and enhance basing from the feedback you get. Then, realign content to your desired way. This will result to a bigger organic presence in the SERPs.