The world of SEO is changing all the time. Just last month, Google released what it called its “rolling Penguin” update to its ranking algorithm. It changes the nature of SEO in some fundamental ways. For starters, random backlinks with no context are no longer going to help you find your way to the top of the search rankings on Google. Google is getting smart to this sort of thing. And the barriers to getting it to trust you have been raised ever higher. Then there’s the fact that Google’s objective with page ranking is to give consumers what they want. They want searchers to be able to type in a query and get given back the exact answer they were looking for. This is what the Penguin update was all about.
Content creators, therefore, have to go out of their way to make what they produce relevant.
So in this new era of smart ranking algorithms, what legit ways are there to improve your site ranking?
High Quality And Memorable Content
The reason that Google is the most popular search engine in the world is that it has an uncanny ability to serve up the content that people most want. Bing might try, but if we’re honest, it just can’t compete on relevancy.
But to stay as top dog, Google needs to make sure that it’s giving it’s users a great experience when they use it. If it keeps forwarding them to crummy websites with junk information, they’ll go somewhere else, like Yahoo, to get the info they want.
Content creators are, therefore, backed into a corner. They can’t just spam out 10,000-word posts, hoping that that will get them to rank higher on Google. Instead, they’ve got to produce compelling content that users will want to read. Google has started measuring what it calls “dwell time.” This is the amount of time that people spend on a particular website. It does this because it is an indication of a site’s quality. The longer they stay on a site, the better the content on the website is. Google takes this into account, and then boosts the site up the rankings for a particular keyword.
Guest Posting
Penguin might mean significant changes to Google’s ranking algorithm. But that is not to say that link building is suddenly a thing of the past. Links are still massively influential in how Google ranks pages.
So how can you go about making links if you’re brand new to the world of the internet?
An excellent way to get started is to do guest posting. A list of guest posting sites found here. Guest posting allows you to produce legitimate content. And, in return, you’ll get a few backlinks to your site. Some bloggers are trusted differently to other bloggers. Bloggers with a higher trust score will boost your site ranking more than those with lower scores.
If you’re blogging on Forbes or Inc, for instance, their backlinks will be worth more than your mate’s blog.
