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Content + SEO = Higher Rankings

Posted by Erin Meyer

White Hat SEOThe newest iteration of Penguin, identified by Google as Penguin 2.0, was officially released on May 22. Earlier in May, Google team leader,  Matt Cutts described the upcoming changes, explaining that the newest  Penguin update would  focus on identifying and addressing black hat webspam.  In the effort to penalize sites that use spammy tactics, Google hopes to reward sites that focus on producing quality content. While the webspammers are being penalized, there is plenty ethical webmasters can do to help their sites.

According to Matt Cutts, “white hat” SEO benefits websites by improving site usability and speed, while helping  to create great content. He explains, “Good search engine optimization can also mean good marketing: thinking about creative ways to make a site more compelling, which can help with search engines as well as social media.”
Though Penguin 2.0 encourages webmasters to add  educational and informative website content to improve rankings, a webmaster should not focus entirely on building content to help a website.

In a recent Search Engine Watch article, author Kristine Schachinger  recommends that in addition to content development, some ethical SEO practices must still be part of the equation. In addition to helping your website, you need to make sure nothing is hurting it. A few places she recommends looking at include:

  • Titles and Descriptions – Know what titles and descriptions mean and how to write them
  • Anchor Text – Watch out for over-optimized and overused keyword anchor text
  • Links – Inbound & Outbound – 50 percent questionable links can hurt your page or website
  • User-Generated Content Spam – Check your blogs and comment areas for harmful content
  • Alt Attributes- Use alt text but don’t stuff keywords into alt text
  • Crawl Issues – Use Webmaster tools to see how your crawls and crawl rate are doing
  • Malware or Rogue Sites – These sites can be causing you “hack” issues and sending links to their pages on your site causing damage to your link profile.

The Upright Team is ready to assist you in maintaining a complete SEO approach, including developing valuable content that will appeal not only to search engines, but to your prospective clients. Contact us to discuss your goals.