Getting Back to SEO Basics

Since the Google Panda changes rocked the SEO world last year, webmasters have been struggling to keep up with the near daily update from the search engine giant.

Affiliates who were once only concerned with the quality of their content must now add the threat of an over optimization penalty and the death of link networks. But is all that daily worry really necessary?

Back to Basics

In a recent posting on SearchEngineland, digital media expert Kerry Dean pointed out that many of the “new” demands from Google amount to little more than SEO best practices. Specifically he cites:

• Increased attention to authority and trust.
• The demand for a continuous stream of high quality content.
• Building quality link networks organically, rather than quantity networks that are
  bought and paid for.

It’s a message that SEOmoz, SearchEngineLand and, even CAP has been hammering home for months. Quality and a commitment to the fundamentals are the keys to top page ranks.

Not Everyone Knew the Basics

Plenty of SEO watchers are crying foul over the Panda updates because they tend to favor big sites. While that is, to a certain extent, true many of those big, bad authority sites aren’t leveraging that power. Instead, according to Dean, corporate sites are making the very sorts of basic SEO mistakes that draw down page rankings from rank amateurs.

For example:

• Many big brand sites have bread crumb trails that start with “Home” rather
  than the brand name. This defeat the purpose of bread crumb trails in the first
  place and is confusing to search engine bots.
• Big corporate sites that duplicate tags across multiple products pages.
• Authority  sites that don’t even bother using robot.txt files to direct web crawling bots.

Shooting for the Ideal

Google has made no secret of its desire to let quality content and white SEO practices drive page rankings. (This is another pre-Panda concept.) Dean’s point, which he illustrates so well, is that Panda really hasn’t changed anything.

There’s no getting around the fact that Google is calling the shots in the search engine  ame. Around 66 percent of all web searches are done on Google, so they earned that right.

At the same time, Google makes the path to higher page ranking very clear. As Dean says, the same basic SEO techniques that worked pre-Panda still work today.

For a complete list of Dean’s suggestions for revisiting the fundamentals of SEO, check out his full posting.

Are you getting back to SEO basics in the post-Panda era? Share your tips and tricks with the CAP community on our SEO Forum.