Simple Ways to Protect Your Website from SEO Failure
With every algorithm update, SEO becomes more complex. However that isn’t to say that as a website owner, you don’t have any control. There are certainly simple, straightforward ways to protect your website from any SEO related fallout.
This is by no means an exhaustive list, but here’s a high level list of ways to keep your website on the “good” list:
Hire a reputable SEO provider
Whether you are hiring an in house team member or outsourcing to an SEO agency, website owners need to understand that the industry isn’t regulated. Anyone can call himself or herself an SEO expert. To keep your website (and your business) protected it’s necessary to do your due diligence and spend some time researching what’s right and what’s wrong in the industry before hiring anyone. During the interview process, it’s necessary to make sure that the potential hire is going to implement a strategy that is in line with the current search engine Webmaster Guidelines.
Request reports and ask questions
The number of potential clients we speak with that have no idea what their current or former SEO firm is doing for them continues to amaze me. Ultimately as the website owner, it is your responsibility to know what your SEO provider is up to at all times. At a minimum, they should be sending quarterly or monthly reports with a list of every single activity, many of which should have been approved beforehand. An SEO client remains a critical part of the SEO implementation process. If you are ever unsure what’s going on or why, speak up and ask questions. A reputable SEO provider should be able to back up their execution strategy and provide detailed reasons why they take a specific approach.
Don’t buy links
To clarify, don’t buy links for SEO link building purposes. There are legitimate reasons to pay for links online in the form of advertisements, reputable industry directory listings, sponsorships, press releases, etc. These links should all be “no followed” to tell the search engines that the purpose of the links is to drive traffic, not to manipulate rankings.
Approach a redesign carefully
So many website owners go into a website redesign without thinking about how it will affect SEO or SEO is an afterthought. This is a HUGE mistake. SEO needs to be a part of the conversation from the very beginning. Even if you’ve never “done” SEO a day in your life an existing website still has earned a certain level of search engine trust naturally over time. Working with an SEO professional, review what is changing and what’s staying the same on the site. If URL, content, and linking structure changes are being made, that can affect your organic search traffic. A reputable SEO professional can make recommendations in order to preserve as much of that trust as possible.
Categorized in: SEO
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