Google’s webmasters recently advised site owners to get in touch after fixing the issues that led to a penalty, putting strong emphasis on the resubmission process.

The search engine giant has been in touch with a group of penalised webmasters, providing unprompted advice on recovery from a paid linking scheme. The advice provided some helpful insights for the website optimization industry in general.

Document your actions

If you’ve ever suspected your site was suffering under a penalty, your SEO company probably advised you to get on it right away. What they may not have told you is that it’s just as important to document what you’re doing to resolve the problem. Google’s webmasters have noted that records are also SEO tools in this area. Sites should keep a record of what they’ve done when trying to sort things out, as this counts as evidence in their favour if they’re not able to fix it. It can also help make a case for resubmission.

Most sites struggle to get attention. The surest way to grab some attention is to stand out in some way, but how do you manage that? One of the possible answers is by becoming a content curator for your industry.

You see a lot of content curation all over the net. The social bookmarking sites are essentially a form of content curation, forming a place where internet users can go when they want to tap into valuable content. Many entertainment sites, such as Cracked.com, make use of content curation techniques for their articles – which then turn into hugely popular forms of content for their own site. Gathering information on other people’s sites is a great way to draw users to your own.

Still not convinced? Let’s look at the benefits:
*Easy fresh content. Content curation isn’t about featuring the content of other sites, but rather talking about it. ‘Top 10′ articles are easy to write. You can talk to us at Searchengineoptimization.co.uk about content.
*Popularity. Resources tend to be popular sites. More traffic gives you more opportunity for conversions.
*SEO link building. What’s that you say? Giving away links isn’t link building? As your search engine optimization agency can tell you, giving away links is often a great way to get links.

So what are you waiting for? Start curating!

The internet community has used symbols right from the start. These handy little signs say more in a smaller space, saving on typing and slotting in nicely with the way computers work. For some reason, though, the search engines have long had difficulty recognising symbols and punctuation marks. It appears, for Google at least, that some of these difficulties are now in the past.

Google’s team has stated that a number of the most commonly used symbols, including the hash tag, at-symbol, dollar sign and percentage symbol, will now be indexed. The change came through with a number of smaller algorithm changes not too long ago, but may have a big impact over time.

Smart site owners and the average search engine optimization company have equally avoided using symbols where possible. The rise of Twitter and an evolving social language, however, has meant that a lot of symbols can’t be avoided. If you’re trying to integrate a social media marketing campaign with your SEO, the change is good news. You can discuss the effects of SMM language on your site with us at Searchengineoptimization.co.uk.

The change may have an impact on more than just content. With symbols being indexed, Twitter’s position may become even more powerful, as more users are indexed. Site owners will also be able to directly tap into trends when hash-tagged content is indexed.

This may sound a little too dramatic for a single blog entry, but your blogging habits determine the success of every entry. If you don’t get into the habits of good blogging, your efforts – and your investment in your organic SEO – are wasted.

1. Embed links when writing. Good blogs are full of links. They are there not in the ‘link stuffing’ kind of way, but to serve as references. The best blogs constantly refer to related posts and to posts on other blogs. This keeps readers reading, builds your presence in the blogging community and, most importantly, adds to your SEO link building.

2. Socially share. Get into the habit of telling your social networks when you post a new entry. Tweet it, make it a status update, and put it out there on Reddit and StumbleUpon. Talk to us about the value of social sharing in SEO at SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk. Once you’re in the habit, this should take five minutes maximum each time.

3. Drop some references in comments. Finally, after you’ve promoted your post on social networks, promote it again in related posts. Spend ten minutes reading around the net. Question and answer sites are another good opportunity to post links.

Smart online marketing plans feature social media. It’s unavoidable. Too many people are active in social media for businesses to ignore it. If you want your marketing plan to work on social media, though, you need to take most of the ‘marketing’ out.

How does this work? Success on social media sites is all about attention, and attention is easier to get with variety. Marketing plans with well-defined goals tend to be too focussed on promoting the business to attract continued attention. You can discuss this with us at SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk. While many businesses stick to their marketing guns, you’ll notice the most successful campaigns on social sites are those that loosen up a little.

To gain and keep attention on today’s net, the best plan is to create a mix of marketing and non-marketing content. Monitor some of Twitter’s success stories and you’ll see that the popular business users tweet about non-business things most of the time. Tweeting about things they’ve read, jokes, office stories and even what they just had for breakfast makes the marketing material more palatable.

The same applies across the board, socially. Of course, traditional marketing has its place in an online plan. If you’re trying to make use of the SEO tools available in social media, though, don’t be afraid to leave some of the marketing mindset behind.

Images can and do attract links. They’re just as much a commodity on the net as text and, happily, can be used to better effect than text-based content. Before you can use images to attract links, you need to own them and you need to be aware of their marketability.

Let others use your images

The key to getting links via images is sharing. Let other people access your image library but ask that images be credited with a link in return. This works just like infographic linkbaiting, without the built-in time limit that trending infographics are prone to. You can discuss this with us at Searchengineoptimization.co.uk.

Retailers: why invest in images

Images can be worth investing in for more reasons than links and retail sites are a good example of this. Internet shoppers only have product descriptions and photos to judge from. Having a different set of pictures from your competitors can be what gives you an edge. It can also turn your site into a resource for your industry, netting you links and traffic from review sites and blogs.

When you’re talking to your link building services company about your site’s assets, don’t forget to throw your images into the mix. Sharing images attracts links for organic SEO over the long term.

1. Publicise. So many blogs fail to reach their full potential because no one knows about them. Blogs should be publicised via social media, in comments, during online conversations and anywhere else you can think of. Get in the habit of talking about your recent posts.

2. Link between posts. This is almost a sub-section of the first habit as links between posts are a kind of in-house promotion. It also strengthens your site and you can talk about this aspect of SEO and marketing with us at Searchengineoptimization.co.uk.

3. Develop a URL formula that is SEO-friendly. There is so much information that could go into a blog URL, it’s easy to clutter it up. Resist the urge to categorise. Go for keywords.

4. Reach out to other blogs. If you’ve had any experience with the blogging community, this one should go without saying. You’ll notice that the biggest blogs on the net have a huge amount of interaction with other blogs and writers. There’s a reason for this. The more people you involve in your blog, the more people will read it regularly. You need support, go get it!

We’ve all come across them from time to time. Headlines that are the Internet equivalent of a witty remark may be interesting but they aren’t likely to draw traffic if they don’t seem to match the search query. For example, ‘SEO: What would Mr T do?’ is something that might draw a smile from someone searching for SEO advice but is it likely to get their click? If the search is a serious one, probably not.

Does this mean you should never try to be clever or cute with headlines? No, it doesn’t. Writing an SEO headline is much like participating in search engine marketing; you need to catch attention any way you can. If you’re engaging in a high-competition area, it’s likely you’ll have to use all your ingenuity to craft titles that will stand out in the SERPs. This is something you can discuss with us at Searchengineoptimization.co.uk. The warning sign to be watched for is when you catch yourself concentrating on the ‘clever’ rather than the marketing angle.

Headlines can be extremely effective search engine optimisation tools but only if you know how to use them.

Press releases were once a tool that every SEO company would recommend. They were a great way to get links out into the wider world with relative ease. Even though many SEO and marketing companies still recommend PRs, the form itself isn’t very effective any more. What it needs are a number of supporting structures.

To be effective, press releases need to be looked at as part of a bigger strategy and you can discuss this with our experts at Searchengineoptimization.co.uk. They can be used to open doors, push marketing objectives and further social media marketing. They just need a bit of a push.

When sending out your press release:

* Support it with snippets, not entire reproductions – publishing the entire press release on your social media page isn’t going to generate as much interest as publishing a small snippet
* Generate links by publishing on popular sites – press releases are one example of how scrapers can do you favours. A PR published on a good site will be scraped and your link is spread all over the net
* Make sure your press release is part of something bigger – PRs aren’t hefty enough to work alone

1. Empty pages. You can’t expect a page with nothing on it to rank well and you can’t expect it to contribute much to your site either.

2. Too much clutter on pages. Many sites have a heavily structured page template. While this can make the creation of new pages a lot easier, it can get in the way of fresh content. Essentially, all the search engine spiders see with such templates is the same old content. Cut back for better results.

3. Too many ads. The search engines ignored on-page ads for a long time but they’re now cracking down. Make sure your ads stay out of the way of content. You can talk to us at Searchengineoptimization.co.uk about the impact of advertising.

4. Similar content. Sometimes, in the rush to get keywords onto pages, companies commission articles that are essentially the same. While keywords are still major SEO tools, this kind of approach can be damaging. Your readers don’t want to see 100 articles on computer keyboards and Google doesn’t either.

5. Thin content. Too little real information is a major sin in Google’s eyes post-2011. If your articles aren’t contributing to the knowledge of your readers, chances are the articles aren’t contributing much to your site’s rankings. Create quality content to succeed.