Does Google Like Your Website?
Now here's a really sticky one to think about. Does Google like your website or blog?
If it does, you can easily see that because it will rank it for its main keyword as well as rank it for several longer tail keywords that you are trying to rank for.
But if it doesn't, then you'll see your site languishing in the nether regions of the index like an abandoned ship adrift in turbulent seas.
What if Google Doesn't Like Your Website
If it looks like Google doesn't like your site for whatever reason, there are some things you can do to help the search engine like it again. It is possible to get back in its good books if something you did caused it to get sent to search index purgatory and you know what that something is.
But remember that whatever you do, it has to comply with their guidelines and not violate their terms of service in any way. In other words, you are going to have to be totally legit!
Yes you can still do that, and it is actively encouraged even by the previously vilified SEO community.
The best way to improve your site's standing in Google's eyes is to make it into a site that you would be proud to show you grandmother and be able to sleep at night knowing you hadn't plagiarized any of its content from anyone else.
In other words, you are going to have to write the content yourself (or pay someone to do it for you). Importantly, that content needs to be well written, relevant to your site's theme or niche and it's going to have to be useful!
Make Your Content Useful and Informative
Doing this and maybe adding ten or twenty new articles to your site will help it a lot. However, there is no telling how quickly you should expect to see any positive changes with regards to rankings.
Of course, if the bulk of your site is made up of affiliate marketing pages, you'll need to balance them out with more information-based pages. This is to increase your site's perceived authority on the subject it is based around.
You can and should employ some tried and tested on-site SEO strategies to help things along. By this, I mean you are not going to do anything underhand, but you are actually going to do what Google tells you to do!
What Does Google Want You to Do?
For starters, if your current and new articles have titles that have little or nothing to do with the content of the articles, then you need to change them to be relevant.
So an article about refurbishing your kitchen needs to have a title that speaks of it. Try something such as: "Kitchen Refurbishment Tips" or something similar like ″Kitchen Store Tips,″ rather than something along the lines of: "What I did Last Sunday"!
That title needs to be placed in heading tags in the page html (Wordpress blogs do this for you) and it also has to match the page title in the header section (again, done for yo by Wordpress).
If you are coding you own static html sites as I do, you will already know what you're doing and should ensure that the page title and the page H1 tags match. Your article should flow naturally and be informative and useful to the reader, but you can help things along by including related keywords within the content.
Google doesn't actually mind if you are trying to make money with your website or blog. However, you need to make sure it stays within their guidelines while remaining a valuable resource that real visitors will find useful.
Write Naturally
A naturally written article often does this by dint of the fact that you are writing on the subject anyway and you would naturally mention many of these keywords as part of the flow. You can go over what you've written and add some more in the right places so the text still flows naturally and you will have a well optimized page.
Write long articles, because the longer they are the more chances you will have to naturally include more long tail keywords that will be picked up by the googlebot when it spiders your page.
If your articles were all 400 words long before, make your new ones longer, say 600 words to 1000 words. And you can (and should) even go back and add some more useful and relevant info to those shorter articles to make them more beneficial to visitors to your site.
Keep it Simple
These are simple things but so important to boosting the usefulness of your site, which will convert into a higher ranking by Google.
This is because Google wants to see useful, relevant websites in its index and it will place those that it believes are the most relevant and most useful nearest the top of the index.
Backlinks
Now let's touch on the subject of backlinks from other web properties. It can be a sore subject for some, but if the links are attracted naturally (because your content is seen as having value by other web authors), then all is acceptable.
Whatever new ideas about SEO may be put forward, the hard fact is that you still have to have backlinks from other web properties. However, you will find that as your content becomes more informative and attractive, you will start attracting more natural links from other sites that will be happy to link to your articles as a reference for their own.
Affiliate Pages
Another thing you can do to help your site's situation, especially if it's purpose is to make money and you need to rank your affiliate marketing pages and it is rather full of affiliate reviews and links to Amazon and other affiliate commission sites, is to add more articles that do not contain any affiliate ads or external links. Such as purely informative articles on the topic of your site.
Use those articles to build internal links to other relevant articles on your site, with occasional internal links to the pages that do have your affiliate ads and reviews.
If those review pages have several affiliate links to the same site, then par them down to just two per page. Google does not like affiliate marketers all that much and it appears to be actively demoting sites that are, as it sees, excessively full of affiliate links.
If your sites look tacky or contrived with the single intent obviously to send visitors offsite to product sales pages vis affiliate links, you ought to consider updating them. You can, without too much effort re-engineer your sites to look more natural and include more useful information.
You can also cut back on the percentage of affiliate pages and by doing this, you will be giving Google more reasons to like your site again. After all, Google likes sites that regular visitors like, because they get a positive buzz from visitors who land on the most relevant sites from their index.
So make yours the most relevant and most useful website in its niche and you will eventually have Google like your site the most because of it!
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