Remember when you were younger and were taught (hopefully) about safe sex? Sleeping with someone is like sleeping with all their past partners, so make good choices.
The new Google Penguin 2.0 release is bringing this lesson home for businesses that market online. If you’ve worked with a lousy or downright shady SEO team in the past, that little infection they gave you through their outdated optimization practices may be flaring up big time with Google’s new updates, and your rankings are suffering as a result.
What Is Safe SEO?
Google has always said you should create good content on your site and avoid junky link building. That’s the responsible thing to do. But in the past, it was much easier for many SEO companies to manipulate the search engines by building highly questionable links to get rankings for their clients.
With the Panda and Penguin updates, sites with old-school SEO got hit hard. Safe SEO means that your marketing vendor engages only in tactics that genuinely help Google in its mission to connect searchers with the most relevant and helpful content.
Here are some things to demand from your SEO team to ensure they are practicing Safe SEO:
- Make sure everything you produce for your site is unique to you. Don’t take any content from any other site out there, regardless of how great you think the writing is. Duplicate content is a big no-no in the eyes of Google.
- Don’t over-optimize your site. Pay attention to what your SEO vendor is putting in your meta titles and descriptions. (This is the code the search engines use to help determine what a webpage is about.) Make sure they aren’t duplicating content or stuffing keywords. Ask what they plan to populate the anchor text with and make sure keywords aren’t being overused. A good rule of thumb is if it doesn’t feel right, it’s not.
- Be mindful of who is linking to you and who you link to. If your SEO team says they are doing “link building tactics” for you, ask more questions. Ask to see where they are getting links from each month. If you run a bicycle shop, you should see links coming to your site from bike shop related sites. If links are anything other than that, along with perhaps a few business directories, they will create problems for you down the road (or may be creating problems right now). It’s also important that any link building that is being carried out is varied in content. If you have the same description of your business on every single site that links to yours, it’s not natural in the eyes of Google.
Practicing Safe SEO
There are honestly at least a dozen other things you need to be looking out for, but your job is to focus on selling your product. You have to find a web team you can trust to do the right things to get your site ranked, because frankly you will never have enough time to check every single thing they do.
Remember this mantra of Safe SEO: If your SEO efforts help Google in its mission to provide the most relevant search results, Google will reward you.
The real role of your SEO team is to optimize your site so that you are making Google’s job easier. If they do that, they’re practicing Safe SEO. If your team is trying to outsmart, beat, or do anything that doesn’t look normal in the eyes of Google, you have a nasty infection on your hands and we suggest you get it looked at pronto.