Unless you are heavily into search engine optimization efforts, you may or may not know that this spring, Google launched some algorithm changes as well as other activities that have affected rankings for all kinds of sites.
This article outlines what the new game of search engine optimization looks like post Panda/Penguin, and how you can ensure that Google algorithm changes don’t affect your SEO efforts.
#1. Inbound Links are still important, focus on Diversity.
To improve your rankings for a given page and keyword requires that there are links coming into your website page that you want to get ranked. Pre Panda/Penguin update, it was important to make sure that the keyword was used as the link text.
Post-Panda/Penguin it’s important that you have a “diverse back-link profile.†That means that you must have links coming in from many different websites, and in many different ways. It’s also important that you have diversity of anchor text as well. This means that you need the majority of the links coming into a page to be “brand†links or “url†links. That means the anchor text on the inbound link is your company name or the URL (i.e. http://www.genoo.com = URL link, and Genoo is a ‘brand’ link).
Specifically, you would want to know what the make-up of the link profile is for sites that are ranking well for the keyword, and then ensure that you stay within those parameters when assembling a link building strategy for your page.
Some tools that can help you understand your backlink profile and link diversity are Majestic SEO and Link Density.
If you want a more prescriptive analysis, so you just understand who your closest competitor is (based on a variety of on-page and off-page factors), you can use the search engine optimization competitive analysis tool available from Genoo.
