Google SEO: Times are A-Changin’
Google is changing
Once upon a time you could manipulate Google’s algorithm. So, if you wanted to rank for a dental word/or dental term, you simply used a few ‘short cut’ techniques to boost your dental marketing online, and up went your rankings, traffic, and cash.
Some of these techniques were:
Keyword Stuffing
Back then, keyword tag stuffing was simple. SEOs would take a keyword and put it everywhere they could find a place to put it.
Keywords were stuffed in title tags, meta tags, navigation, content, anchor text, URLs, domains, if there was a place to add a keyword they did it (and this worked).
But then Google became aware of keyword density. So if there was too much on your page, you wouldn’t rank as well.
Hidden Text
Back then, you could easily hide text in your pages by using the same color font on the same color background. At first the algorithm couldn’t pick this up and people would stuff relevant content in the page backgrounds, while minimizing what was on the page itself. But Google soon frowned on this practice and de-indexed some well-known sites.
Google has now also found methods to identify many of the techniques, as they are able to read CSS and find their way around Java Scripting too.
Link Buying
At one time, you could get links, any links, and add them to the pages of your site, then watch the pages rocket to the top. So if you needed to rank for a competitive term, then you bought 10,000 links In the old days, most of these were, ahem, questionable sites, which would be pointed in your site’s direction.
But Google grew wise to this too, and the links got devalued. Ironically, this helped to make “link selling” a lucrative business. As you’d buy a link, it then got devalued, so you needed to buy a new link – it was a self-perpetuating industry, but it worked! Not anymore.
Link buying is still around, but Google has taken a very special interest of late, in deterring, if not eliminating this practice.
Advertising
Google dislikes the overuse of ads so much that they have created an algorithm that punishes sites that have too many ads on their homepage. Of course, they are a bit vague about just what that means, but it happens.
In summary, now be aware of ‘short cut’ solutions and instead, we suggest you speak to the experts at Dental Focus Web Design!
Best wishes,
The Dental Focus team.