Key things to look out for SEO

[zaasmi]

When you’re doing SEO and you’re starting off doing SEO on your website.
One of the things that causes some concern is the potential for getting hit by some kind of penalty or for going awry of Google’s rules.
Let’s talk a little bit about some of those rules and and some of the ways. People do even get into trouble when they get a little bit aggressive on their SEO so one of the things that people sometimes do is they will get really aggressive in terms of the number of links that they’re creating to their website yes links will help you rank as long as they’re high quality relevant links but when you start getting links on websites that have nothing to do with you.
For example if you sell earrings and you’re getting links off of jog jogging sites that’s not really a relevant link if you get too many irrelevant links if you start going into people’s blog posts and spamming their blog comments with links back to your site if you get caught buying or selling links on your website or if you hire somebody to do link building for you and they do it in a way that’s just not aboveboard that’s just not in the way that is helpful to Google searchers then you could get hit by a penalty.
For example one of these penalties is called the Penguin Penalty now one of the ways that you can get your site ranking in search engines for specific keywords is to create links back to your website that use the anchor text of the keyword you’re trying to rank for now the anchor text is that word that you click on in the link the actual link words and what people were doing which is why Google kraid created the penguin penalty is they were creating thousands of links back to their website all using the same anchor text because they wanted to rank for that number one keyword so what this did is this obviously was encouraging spam to happen in order to help people rank better in search results and that’s not really what Google wants to encourage so they created something called the penguin penalty basically if you get too many links to your website and it really has to be too many links you’re going to know when you have too many links to your website all using the same keyword that’s not your brand name over and over and over then you might get hit by the penguin penalty so one thing that you know to watch out for is when you’re building links a lot of your links should be to your brand name or should be to your URL that should be the anchor text the clickable words in the links back to your website if you have far more links to keywords to your website then you have to your brand name then you might be at risk of the penguin penalty and what happens is you simply stop ranking for those keywords that you have too many links for so don’t go overboard always try to make sure that the links you’re building into your website have actual value that somebody going from that website where you’re getting the link to your website would actually say to themselves oh that’s an interesting site I just found or an interesting story I just found so that’s one way to stay on the right side of Google’s rules when it comes to link building now when it comes to content one of the problems that Google ran into a few years ago is something called duplicate content and it’s exactly what it sounds like it’s when content or text is copied on multiple different web sites so this used to be a big problem a few years ago when people were going to other people’s websites copying their content putting it on their own website and then ranking their own website using the stolen content so obviously this was encouraging spam and Google doesn’t want to encourage skin spam so in 2011 Google started penalising sites that publish content belonging to somebody else.

This is why it’s important to write your own product descriptions and this is why it’s important to write unique content just for your store don’t copy content published elsewhere even if you have permission because Google doesn’t know you have permission if you get too much content on your website that’s copied from other websites then you might get hit by what’s called the Panda update and that’s basically when your site struggles to rank for some searches simply because you have too much duplicate content on your site now once we’ve got your site ranking you’ve done the link building you’ve built the content you’ve done your meta tags you’ve updated your title tags you started to show up for searches then your you need to measure whether or not your efforts are actually working and that’s why you should install some free tracking and analysis packages on your website to make sure that what you’re doing is actually paying off because it’s one thing to rank in search results for a keyword but it’s quite another thing to know that the people coming in from that keyword are actually purchasing from your store so install free tools like Google Analytics which will tell you how people are coming into your store and how much they’re purchasing obviously use the tools provided in Shopify but install Google Analytics as well to get some additional information and one very important tool to install on your website is called Google Webmaster Tools and again this is a free tool as well and what Google Webmaster Tools will do is it will give information that Google has about your store so Google Webmaster Tools will tell you what keywords does Google think your website is relevant for how many links are there to your to your website and the most interesting thing that Google will tell you is what searches did your website appear for in search results and what was your click-through rate how many people actually clicked on your link when you appeared in search results so using these tools keep an eye on how many people are coming to your site from search results is it going up are you being effective in what you’re doing it’s the current strategy you’re using working and keep an eye on your sales and look at things like the bounce rate on your website and the amount of time people are spending on your website and keep striving to make happier visitors happier customers to your store to make sure that Google keeps wanting to show your website in its search results