Small Buisness Web Sites

Many websites are penalized by poor content management and linking strategies. There are a number of symptoms to look for to determine if you have been penalized by search engines.   Your website is at risk if your site has been penalized in the last year. Your ranking has declined or your traffic has declined then you might be suffering from one of the following three items:

Website at Risk – Poor content

We cannot emphasize the quality of the content of your website enough. If you have low-quality content, content that would be considered spamming, or content that is not useful to the reader then both the readers as well as the search engines will not be ranking your website very well. Write for the reader and try to answer the question that you believe the reader is searching for. Make it useful and informative. Make sure that the Content is unique and don’t use someone else’s content. You should also avoid duplication on your own website even if you wrote it. Some areas that are easily overlooked on websites is the content on the header page as well as the footer page. this could cause you some problems. keep the content new and exciting, refreshing old content, and keep it interesting and useful for the reader.

Website at Risk – Poor on-page optimization

Avoid packing your title and content full of keywords. This typically will get you penalized by search engines including Google. The easiest way to test whether you becoming spammy or not is by looking at the content, tag lines, etc., and ask yourself does this look spammy? Is it natural? Also, avoid linking content since it is frowned upon by search engines. Write for the users and readers of your content and don’t write for the search engines. You will be much better off in the long run.

Low-quality backlinks pointing to your website

Back links are particularly problematic for many website owners. Back links are links from other websites to your website which you have really no control over. However, if you have a lot of backlinks from other websites that are spammy, then it will bring your website down as well. Investigate tools that will help you within identifying back links and contact the webmasters to determine how you can have the back link removed. Alternatively, you can implement a no follow approach telling the search engines that those back links are not valid and should not be included in the analysis.

These three activities, when followed, will significantly improve your website optimization and ranking in search engine indexing. It takes a bit of work. Particularly with large sites so be prepared to put a lot of effort into this. From the get-go focus on quality content.

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