Periwinkle House of Design

Checklist Point #10 – Inbound Link Profiles Getting links back to your website has always been one of the main jobs for any webmaster.  Although Google didn’t like it, they did tolerate the behavior, at least until they rolled out their Penguin. Overnight, established websites dropped from the rankings.  Pages that had been holding the top slot for years suddenly disappeared. Google had done something that no-one believed they ever would. They started to enforce their guidelines relating to “link schemes”.  “Any links intended to manipulate a site's ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme. This includes any behavior that manipulates links to your site, or outgoing links from your site. Manipulating these links may affect the quality of our search results, and as such is a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.”  Finding Backlinks to Your Website There are several tools you can use, some free, some paid.  Ho...

Checklist Point #9 – Content Quality This is a huge component of modern SEO. If your content is bad, then getting everything else right won’t fix the site. NOTE: Google can certainly detect bookmarks and social shares, so are able to use them as indicators if it wants to. The biggest problem that I have found concerning content quality is that webmasters are not very impartial when judging their own. There are a number of things to look out for as you assess the content on your website.  Here is a checklist (in no particular order): • Has the content been copied and published by other websites? This is a common problem, though setting up Google Authorship for your site should keep your content safer moving forward.  To check whether your content has been stolen, you could use a site like Copyscape http://www.copyscape.com). See how there are 9 results in Google, each with the identical text. If other sites have stolen your content and used it on t...

Checklist Point #8 – Legal pages  There are several pages on a website that we can refer to as “legal” pages.   These are things like:  • Privacy  • Disclaimers (including any medical or earnings disclaimers).  • Contact Us  • Terms  • About Us (we talked about this earlier in terms of visitor trust).  • Display of any documents on the site.   These might include things like cookie policy, anti-spam policy, outbound link disclaimer, and so on. Does your website include all of the necessary documents?  Legal Pages Checklist  Not all of these pages are necessary for all types of websites, so check which pages your site needs and add them if they are missing.  • Do you have a privacy page?  • Do you have a disclaimer page?  • Do you have a terms page?  • Do you have a contact page?  • Do you have an about us page?  • Do you have a med...