If you are like a whole lot of business owners in 2012, you have lost your rankings and are trying to figure out what your next move is. Here are some steps you can take to help pull your site up out from page 97!
1. Run a toxic links report. You need to check out your back link profile to find out if you have spammy backlinks. If yes, then you need to get rid of them immediately. This is not the time to be thinking about all of the hard time and money you invested in creating them. Hopefully you already earned a ROI from that activity.
2. Check your site for duplicate content. The Panda penalty is all about duplicate content. Head on over to copyscape.com and run a report. There you can see if you have any duplicate content on your site. Fix any duplicate content immediately!
3. Fix any over optimization. One thing we have seen cause a penalty is being too focused on link building for a small set of keywords. If your anchor text optimization percentage is too tight, you need to either delete links, or build more without using any of the same anchor texts so that you can dilute the anchor text density.
4. Check Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics for any warnings or errors. If you have duplicate title tags, duplicate meta description tags, now is the time to fix them.
5. Connect your site to your Google+ account. One of the main methods going forward that Google is going to be using to rank sites is based partly on what is called “author rank”. You want to make sure that you are on Google+, that you are using Google+, and that your blog is connected to your personal Google+ account. 2013 is seeing even a bigger shift towards transparency.
6. Start producing high quality content and putting it first on your hub (your blog), and then promoting that content throughout all of the social media sites. The goal of social media is to drive traffic to your blog. The goal of your blog is to capture leads. If you aren’t getting traffic or leads, then figure out where on your pipeline you need to do the most work and start fixing things!
7. Focus on real media opportunities. Real media opportunities can be things like radio interviews, guest blog posts on high traffic blogs, sponsorships, and more. You need to learn to think like a marketer and start to figure out creative ways that you can make your story or your product be a good match for others so that they can cross-promote you.
There is a lot more that you can do and need to do to get top rankings, but those seven things will get you off on the right start!
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Lately we have been getting a lot of emails and phone calls from frantic website owners and even other SEO companies telling us that their sites have all of a sudden lost a lot of rankings and traffic and what can they do about it. Before doing anything, the absolute first step is to determine if your site was penalized, and if it was, if it was penalized due to the Panda update, the Penguin update, or both.