Google Panda Effect: Follow Basic SEO

This is a guest post by Sahil Bajaj from TechnicalSafari.com.

Recently Google Panda update has affected the website ranking system. With this new implemented algorithm many of the websites has achieved success but most of the popular blogs or websites has it all wrong and has loosing experience for this new algorithm.

So every blogger right now is seeking for the right way to overcome the Google Panda Effect.

So why not start with a basic SEO practice, its right time to regain some valid SEO points in to your mind. Basic is what we all are missing right now, according to SEO experts this new algorithm could demand some basic thing to keep up. So, it’s time to start from basic of SEO to remove Google Panda effect.

Why AGAIN Basic SEO? : Google Panda Effect

Google Panda though is a secret but it demands some serious explanation on SEO. So now there’s a need to follow some basic things. This post is just a reminder for some main and important things to follow. So without talking much about other things I am going to list here some basic things for SEO which you need to follow very carefully to avoid Google Panda Effect.

Basic SEO: Remove Google Panda Effect

1. Interlinking

Well linked posts are always preferred and it allows the reader to easily navigate on your site. This requires page navigation or static text linking. I am not recommending image link, as it is not crawled by search engines, so this thing can’t tell that you have linked your page.

Interlinking and SEO are interrelated and is crucial to SEO strategy. It shows how you link your inner pages, the web pages residing your domain. It may also include:

Navigation text links: Some people consider images as their navigation links, but in case if you use ALT attribute of the image tags and use right text with it, it is like using anchor text. But the main point is you can use your navigation to create right keyword density by using proper anchor text. Through your navigation, if you link to your guest post service page by using ” Guest Post Services” as your anchor text it is far better than simply using an image without the ALT attribute.

Breadcrumb links: These are the navigation links that appear at the top of the page as your visitor first clicks in a category, then a sub-category and then a link. For example Gadgets >> Mobiles >> Acer. All the expressions in the above mentioned breadcrumb navigation example contain relevant keywords.

Now What You Need To Do?

• Use page navigation plugin which shows next and previous post in every single post.
• Use related post widget (or plug-in)
• Use recent post, featured post plug-in.
• Use SEO auto links plug-in or link a static text with proper anchor.

2. Sitemap

Sitemap is utmost important so make a sitemap for readers as well as for search engine. Sitemap created for your website tells the bots like googlebot, or bots from yahoo, bing and others, which part it needs to index. So if you want your blog or site to get indexed by search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing etc. then it is the utmost important part.

Once I asked my fellow blogger about the use of Sitemap and like a newbie I asked:

I would like to know that do we need a sitemap for a website and is that really necessary to have it either .html or .xml one. IF suppose the site is perfectly navigated by crawlers and users too then also does it requires to have a valid sitemap??

The answer to which I got was:

Having a Sitemap is good for two reasons.

Firstly it helps visitors to navigate their way around your site.

Secondly it helps the search engines find all or at least a lot of the pages you have, so they can then crawl and index them.

I think it’s better to have a normal page as a Sitemap, it’s more visitor friendly than XML ones. Problem is if you have a large website it`s harder to create, and if you keep adding new pages harder to keep updating it manually.

and

An HTML sitemap is used by visitors to navigate between the web pages. This make website user-friendly and visitors loves to visit the site again and again.

An XML sitemap is used by Google for gathering the information about the site.

Both these types of sitemap is very helpful in website promotion. Also sitemap must be updated regularly if a new page or new content is added.

A sitemap is always recommended on a website which is based on Ajax or flash.

3. Links From Your Site

Try to limit the number of outgoing links to make the page effective in search index. Also try to look out for these things in your site:

• No broken link
• Dead link
• Malware link
• Bad Links in your comment section

4. Proper Use of Anchor Text And Related To Links

Fooling your readers is a bad idea for few extra page views. But what is Anchor text? O.o Umm Anchor Text 😮 Yess… Anchor Text is visible, clickable text in a hyperlink. It basically tells the search engines what the page is all about. It actually determines the ranking that page will receive by search engines.

If we use it wisely, anchor text can boost your rankings in search engines. Search engine algorithms are designed in such a way that it can offer highly relevant search results and this is where anchor text comes in to play.

Anchor Text Can Be Used In:

• Links on your home or main page – important spot
• External links – links from other sites
• Internal links – links on your pages
• Navigation maps

5. Use of Alt Tags

Use descriptive way to make an image identifiable with some related words and use Alt tag for your image. Don’t keep image name as “img001”, it will not do any favor as it has nothing to say about your image. These things should be descriptive and in proper way for your image:

• Title
• Description
• Keyword tag

Why Alt attribute are useful?

It brings following benefits to your website:

• Today there are various web browsers with different capacities, some can not display images or only a restricted set of type of images, and some are configured not to load images but if your code has the alt attribute set in its images, then you can get the preference of most of the browsers and they will display the description you gave instead of the images.
• Moving on to visitors, some of them have color-blindness, far sightedness, now here the alt attribute is of great help, for those people who can rely on it to have a good idea of what’s on your page.

6. Use Robots.txt File

You can block any page by using Robot.txt file, which you don’t want to indexed or crawled. Robot.txt files allows or disallow spiders, which pages to crawl and which not to.

For example: If you don’t want to crawl old updates, which is the negative part of the SEO, then you can disallow it in Robot.txt files. Old updates are like, if you have updated an old post, than that post will not be indexed again.

7. Design

Your design should be catchy and it must be same on all the browsers, so you need to test your website in different browser. The best way to test your site is to test it in any text browser, to make sure that your site is visible properly to search engines. For example sometimes I check my site on every browser, such as Epic, Mozilla, Chrome, IE9, and the conclusion which I got is, some of the browsers are not able to show every unique aspect of my site. So for that I prefer Lynx Text browser.

A Text Browser?

Text browser is a program that lets you surf internet, view websites and web pages and even you can send emails and a lot more. Epic, Mozilla, Chrome, Safari,IE9 and many more all are the graphical browsers because they, typically, display all the contents of a web page including text, images, videos and flash animations. They all have the sense of good-looking graphics, but in Text browsers you can’t find anything like that.

A text web browser displays only the text on a web site with any links. It cannot display any images, video or flash animations.

A text browser is a good way to check how a search engine bot views your website. You don’t need to download this browser as you can check it free on Internet. You can check it here on SEO Browser and Lynx Viewer.

8. Load Speed

You must know how to speed up your wordpress blog or any site. Check your site load speed. You can use Page Speed, Yslow and WebPageTest for it. Try to work on their recommendations. You can check your website load time from various tools, one of the famous is pingdom tool.

For decreasing the load speed you must pay attention towards plugins, scripts which you are using and you must work on their recommendations. You can also use, cloudfare which offers a free option for decreasing load speed.

9. Link Exchange

Excessive linking is not so good so avoid excessive link exchange. Share your link with your Niche related site but it shouldn’t be excessive. Don’t buy links, natural link building is the best way to gain quality links, you can use three-way link exchange method for it.

Natural link building helps in increasing your website online reputation and without losing search engine credibility. Exchanging links in a limit is a good idea but excess of everything is bad, so don’t so it in excess. You can also trade links, with your fellow bloggers, but in this case also I will suggest you to work on three-way concept. For example: A, B & C are three websites, seeking for link exchange opportunities, so what they must do to maintain the decorum of search engines? Here it goes..

A gives link to B, B gives link to C and C gives link to A, in this way you created a network and you can do it with other sites also. Create a link network, exchange the links the three-way concept, then surely it will be beneficial for you. But make sure you link your site with your Niche related websites.

10. Write For Humans And Not JUST For Bots

Your website should be dedicated to your readers not to search engines. Yes there’s a need to optimize the website for better ranking and traffic but your aim should be on writing quality content.

Things you need to avoid:

• Hidden links
• Inappropriate keyword
• Cloaking
• Duplicate content
• Bad neighborhood
• Website for only rankings to earn some money

If your blog or site is getting hiccups from Google Panda effect, you need to follow the basic of SEO and need to avoid the above mentioned things.

Stick to basic SEO and then you can beat down the Google Panda effect.

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