Valeo Marketing

Future-Proofing your SEO efforts

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SEO can be a daunting subject. It’s easy to see the value of ranking well for important terms, but all the complexities that go into that can become overwhelming. In our 5-part SEO email series, we try to get people started off on the right foot with their SEO. As Googlefuture-proof SEO and other search engines become more aggressive about weeding out spammy sites or sites using manipulative tactics, it’s more important than ever to do things the right way.

How to Future-proof your  SEO

There seems to be a strong initiative within SEO companies, and even internal SEO providers, to placate their client with immediate results. This usually takes the form of hammering after a single high-value keyword with no acknowledge to long-term repercussions. This is NOT the way to do future-proof SEO. Google knows; don’t trick yourself.

There are a few easy ways that Google can track your manipulation of their search engine. They almost all boil down to the fact that you are likely building links to the site in an unnatural manner. A few common indicators of manipulative linking practices are:

  1. Changes to the diversity level of anchor –text and target landing pages of links coming to the site.
  2. Unnatural volume for a given anchor text (this is the case if you were smart enough to keep other SEO efforts the same).
  3. A lack of synonyms, branded, non-branded, and black anchor text.
  4. Changes to the percentage of no-follow vs. do-follow links.

These are all ways of noting that you are making an effort to manipulate Google’s rankings and Google doesn’t want that, they want the most relevant results. Even if Google doesn’t delist or demote you on those keywords, you sure can bet that they will discount your efforts and more importantly, your long-term outlook won’t be nearly as bright.

How to future-proof your SEO:

Everything you do with SEO, do ultra-whitehat.

  • Never try tackle just one keyword at a time, that way you won’t increase the velocity of links for such at an unnatural level.
  • Use synonyms and multiple phrasings for any main keyword you are going after. You will likely pick up rankings for results you were abandoning while reinforcing your main position.
  • Fix the link-juice holes in your site. There are always ways to improve the links you are naturally getting from the traffic that is coming to your site. Consider asking people to link, use social bookmarks, making articles embeddable.
  • Remember that SEO is not your end-all, be-all marketing strategy
  • As Google Engineers see it, SEO is simply a bug in their current algorithm. They will continually improve the algorithm to make SEO less and less useful. So make your site worthy of ranking on its own merit.

In short, ensure your SEO efforts today will still be fruitful in the future by producing high-quality content and promoting it effectively.