Late last week, Search Engine Journal posted a “whiteboard Friday” video with SEO expert Rand Fishkin discussing the importance of SEO maintenance and monitoring.
With all the fear surrounding Google’s latest Penguin update, it is essential for webmasters to strongly focus on the current state of their website(s).
If you take nothing else from this video, let it be this: despite what Google has been saying, negative SEO is extremely serious and potentially dangerous to the future success of your online business.
Points from the Video
Here are a few of the more important points from the video:
- Classic methods of negative SEO include: malware, hacks and injections; spam reporting; and pointing nasty links to your site.
- Everybody is going to have some spam backlinks, even if you have never given “blackhat” SEO a second thought – this is natural and there is no way of avoiding it.
- Avoid on-page and off-page SEO that is unnatural. When an outsider looks at your website, is it easy to see that it has been “overly optimized” for the search engines? Examples of sites to replicate include: Amazon.com, Zappos.com, and Tech Crunch.
- Make sure you are using Google Webmaster Tools to monitor your website.
- Check out SEOmoz for tools that can help you better monitor and optimize your web properties.
Although this video will take about 20 minutes to watch in its entirety, it is well worth it. The five points above are just the start! Check it out at Search Engine Journal here!