Guidelines on safeguarding your site from black hat SEO

Safeguarding from Risky Black Hat SEO TechniquesNegative SEO has been discussed animatedly and has been in the news of late. But what exactly is it? And to what extent does it prevail? Are there enough valid reasons to be worried about negative or black hat SEO? In case your website is broken into and hacked using negative SEO techniques, what steps can you take to restore your portal and preempt as well as prevent such malicious attacks in the future?
This blog takes you through the guidelines you have to follow in order to safeguard your site from the damaging aspects of a SEO strategy. But first let us familiarize you with the common features of a negative SEO campaign.

Defining Negative SEO

Negative SEO usually implies unscrupulous tactics that a hacker or an aggressive competitor of yours resorts to for bringing down your site’s ranking on SERPs or search engine results pages. Negative methods of search engine optimization also referred to as black hat SEO has to do with infiltrating and sabotaging a website by stationing innumerable spam links to the portal. Owing to the harmful impacts of such stratagems, the affected site’s ranking takes a beating and the site eventually loses quality traffic.
Instead of waiting for the hacker or the jealous competitor to bring down your portal, it’d be better on your part to thwart such spiteful attempts much before they cause heavy damage.

1. Keep Regular Watch On The Speed with Which Your Site Loads
The speed with which your portal loads on the browser is a significant ranking parameter. In case, the loading of your site is inordinately delayed on a regular basis, there is good reason to suspect that your site has become a victim of negative SEO. Thereafter, when you take the help of crawling software to detect what you have been suspicious of all along but cannot trace anything but your site loading is delayed, then you can be sure that your site has been.

If you are technically competent, you can weed out the culprits on your own or else you have to fall back on your web hosting service or the webmaster.

2. Carry out Link Audits Routinely
Carrying out link auditing frequently not only contributes towards improving the ranking of your site on Google’s or Yahoo’s SERPs (search engine results pages) but also helps in screening out links to unauthorized portals. If your site is linking to quality backlinks, the graphs and flow charts for ‘backlink progress’ and ‘linking domains’ will have a more or less smooth gradient. But if you espy a steep drop or spike in the slopes, then there is a good possibility that your site has been hacked into. Either conduct an audit manually or take advantage of auditing software app.

3. Weed out Negative Reviews
You could lose quality traffic due to a deluge of negative reviews loaded on your site by a malicious competitor. Find your business listing on Google Maps, select the listing, and click on review summary> reviews, flag the fake negative feedbacks, and complete the report form.

4. Be on the Lookout for Scraped Content
It could happen that your original content is lifted word by word by a hacker and posted on his or her site that gets reviewed by Google before yours. Use a Copyscape software to find out if your content has been plagiarized.

5. Keep a Tab on Click through Rate of Your Keywords
Review your keywords’ CTRs using Google Search Console and if you spot an inordinate spike, report the matter to Google and start disowning the bad links.

6. Keep Checking Your SERP Ranking Once in a While
Although this goes without saying, you need to check your SERP rank routinely just to make sure that your site’s ranking is at least maintained. Make the most of tracking software to check the site’s visibility across the net.

7. Ensure That Your Security Arrangements are updated periodically
Make sure that all your security arrangements are up to date. For instance, ensure that your site is stationed on a server that uses SSL encryption technology.

Adopting an effective SEO campaign is a must for smalltime businesses

Adopting an effective SEO campaignIn case you own and operate a proprietorship firm or have just established a startup, you might be very guarded and circumspect investing your scarce financial resources. So, you may consider allocating resources for small business SEO a dispensable and futile expense as you believe that SEO is not as effective as it used to be for promoting a firm or enterprise. Nevertheless, contrary to what you think, the significance of SEO is growing day by day vis-à-vis all the concomitant segments of trade and commerce.

Hitherto, SEO used to be indispensable for medium and large-scale outfits but with passage of time the online marketing strategy is proving to be equally vital for small and micro-sized businesses.

Defining SEO

Apparently, small business SEO may appear quite simplistic to you but in reality it can be remarkably complicated than you may envisage. SEO is not just about developing meaningful, original content, and keying in the relevant keywords but also about paying attention to other aspects that can be categorized under the heads of ‘on-page’ and ‘off-page’ optimizations. On-page optimization means taking steps for bettering your business portal’s ranking across SERPs of search engines like intuitive webpage design, fast loading times, and smooth navigation.

On the other hand, off-page optimization involves efforts to build quality links so that your e-commerce site becomes popular across the net and attracts a high volume of quality traffic. At the same time, implementing measures to bolster presence on automated social media platforms is also an off-page optimization endeavor.

Getting Started

It would be very imprudent on your part to completely disregard small business SEO simply owing to the technique’s complexity. You’d be investing much less on a search engine optimization plan for generating incoming traffic (read online leads) compared to your investments for engendering outbound or offline leads (through cold calling for instance). However, you’ll have to spare sufficient time for devising an intelligent and workable SEO campaign which you’ll have to find if you sincerely wish your business to grow and develop.

To say the least but not the last, once you get the hang of SEO, you’ll be in a position to take advantage of the following tips for improving your site’s position on the search engine results page of Google or Yahoo.

1. Local SEO-Though your business is much smaller than MNCs and big companies, you enjoy an edge over the latter as Google gives preference to local content. However, you need to have a clear idea about who comprises the local audience if you want Google to favor your business over the large corporations. You can make the most of the web-based tool, ‘Google Keyword Planner’ for punctuating local content with keywords running into many words or a long phrase.

Look for extensive phrases that capture the essence of your business, and create content revolving around such phrasal keywords. Most importantly, if you’ve more than one business address, ensure that the NAP is consistent for all locations throughout the web.

2. Link BuildingLink building is extremely crucial for augmenting the visibility of your site across all social media sites and other web-oriented platforms. Hire established bloggers to write quality guest posts, request your steadfast customers to write positive feedbacks about your product or service so that your site receives maximum publicity. Alternatively, steer clear of black hat methods and spamming techniques if you want to avoid getting penalized by Google.

3. Social Media-Automated social media can go a long way in driving more traffic towards your site. Therefore make sure that you routinely post fresh content on Facebook and Twitter.

In order to tap the aforementioned small business SEO to the optimum, you can log in at www.localseojacksonville.biz or make a call to 904.425.9679.