Google’s Panda Update – How Did It Affect Your Sites SEO?

Building a quality website after Google Panda Update. Honestly, if you would like to get lasting success with your website, then get ready for the worst by simply creating a site that adds value. As Google is constantly improving its algorithm, more and more low-quality content is going to end up being weeded out. Therefore if your main focus is on cheating the system, do not count on your website to rank well much longer.

Not so long ago, it was entirely possible to publish a low-quality article filled with barely-readable text that was focused around a specific keyword, and rank well this way. Post-Panda, there are specific factors at play which make this a less-than-optimal strategy..

How To Beat The Google Panda Update

Article Length

If you are creating an article based around a specific keyword, you should have 500 words as a bare minimum, and ideally 1,000+ words if you want it to rank well. And as I mentioned, this should be perfectly readable, helpful content that your visitors will actually want to read, it must also correspond to the description that you’ve provided for your site’s SEO.

An additional bit of advice: For those who prefer to outsource article writing, steer clear of cheap article writing services. I can tell you firsthand that you will get what you pay for. Folks who sell at a rate of $1 per 100 words aren’t inclined to supply you with the kind of material that will keep your visitors on your website for long. Like i said earlier, after the Google Panda Update quality content goes a long way to rank your site.

Keyword Density

Keyword density represents the percentage of times your keyword appears in the article (so a keyword density of 2% means that your keyword appears twice per 100 words). If you question ten people about keyword density, it is most likely you’ll receive ten entirely different answers. Some people will say 2%. Some will say 3-5%. Other people may tell you that it hardly matters. Having said that, the common consensus among those who actually know what they’re talking about is that keyword density is simply not a very important factor, especially Post-Panda.

If you’re still uncertain of keyword density’s loss of significance, check out this article on SEOmoz. http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/seo-myths-that-persist-keyword-density

Post-Panda On-Page SEO

Here are some tips that will help you with your on-page SEO efforts.

1.  Place your keyword into your page title, description, and keywords.
2.  Feature at least one hyperlink using your keyword within its anchor text.
3.  The page which includes your article needs to be in the format of either “howtoloseweightfast” or “how-to-lose-weight-fast”. They are equal in Google’s eyes, and are both optimized to rank very well.
4.  Your keyword is incorporated in the first 50 words and last 50 words of your article, ideally the first and last sentence of the article.
5.  The keyword your are targeting should be bolded at least once, italicized once, and underlined once.
6.  Your keyword needs to be placed within the <h1>, <h2>, and <h3> tags once each per article if possible (though common agreement these days seems to be that h1 and h2 alone are adequate). And don’t forget: if you’re utilizing WordPress, you may already have title text that uses the header tag, dependant on the theme you’re using.
7.  Add your keyword in the filename as well as alternate text of pictures which you place in your page. The filename can contain dashes, so for instance it might look like “how-to-lose-weight-fast.jpg”.
8.  Mix in LSI keywords (Related keywords). You can easily find these by doing a Google search for your keyword. Just make sure to not spam these too much, keep in mind we are just optimizing our page for a single keyword.

Off-Page SEO

I’m not really going to devote a lot of time on this section of Post-Panda SEO. You will find a bunch of strategies which you can make use of to effectively build backlinks to your site, probably enough to fill several guides.

Nonetheless, I’d like to provide you with just a few simple precautions for Link-building in such a way that your site won’t get slapped by Google and get knocked back a few pages in the Search Engine Results Pages.

Try to get fewer, but yet higher-quality backlinks to your website. You will find lots of people out there who’ll sell you thousands of backlinks for a cheap price.

Keep this in mind: A single PR5 backlink is worth more “link juice” than  hundreds of PR0 links. Not to mention it appears a whole lot less spammy to the search engines.

Think about creating “buffer sites” which link to your money site. As an example, you might create accounts on several social networking sites like Blogger, Tumblr, Xanga, WordPress, HubPages, Squidoo, or LiveJournal. Add a backlink to your money site into an article posted on these sites.

Then, do the bulk of your backlinking to that article on the social networking site, which will subsequently pass the link juice back to your money site in such a way that you will prevent a Google slap, seeing as technically there’s only one direct backlink to the money site. Link building using this method is known as a Link Pyramid and still works even after the Google Panda Update.

Commenting in high-PR blogs to get a backlink is okay. But, ensure that the blog is truly relevant to your site’s content, make sure that your comment does not look to spammy, also don’t waste your time commenting on blogs which have already been spammed to death. You’ll receive very little link juice when the site has >100 outbound links, plus posting enough of these types of links may even have a net negative effect.

Google Panda Update – Bounce Rate Now Important Ranking Factor

The definition of bounce rate, as outlined by Google, is as follows:
Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the visitor left your site from the entrance (landing) page. Employ this statistic to measure quality – a higher bounce rate typically means that the site’s entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors.

The more interesting your landing pages, translates to visitors staying on your site longer. You can reduce bounce rates by optimizing landing pages for each keyword and ad that you run. Landing pages should provide the information and services that were promised in the headline and description.

Bounce rate has become one of the more significant SEO factors in the Post-Panda world. And when you consider it, this makes perfect sense. If a person clicks a Google link, takes a good look at a website, says to themselves “this particular site is actually spammy garbage”, and clicks the Back button, that’s definitely not going to help your bounce rate.

Bounce rate most likely won’t affect your page rankings a great deal in the very short term when a your website is first establishing itself, but after the Google Panda Update, you might be in trouble if a high bounce rate continues.

It is important to build a site which motivates visitors to spend some time clicking around and exploring. It can be a site filled with helpful reviews or useful articles, whatever. Just make sure your websites visitors are sticking around for a bit, and you’re good.

Final Thoughts

Getting your site ranked well on Google, Yahoo or Bing doesn’t have to be a huge challenge, not when you’re going about it in the right way. When undertaking any sort of SEO, whether it is on-page or off-page, ask yourself this:

Am i adding value to the web, promoting my site in a legitimate way, getting the SE’s (Search Engines) to see my site as an authority in my chosen niche. If you can answer yes then there is definitely no reason why you shouldn’t be able to achieve solid rankings after the Google Panda Update.