ED UPDATE: Google rolled out Penguin 2.0 worldwide post publication – 23/5/13

You may have heard rumours about ‘Google’s Penguin’ recently, seen the tweets, maybe even read the odd blog post, and you know an update is coming, but do you know what it really means for your small business website? Could it pose a problem?

As I was working on transferring to my new site last year, I noticed a lot of the comments on old blog posts that had transferred across but that I hadn’t published at the time.

Re-reading some of them, I couldn’t help but smile. I mean, how ridiculously obviously spam a lot of them are. I don’t mean the ones that are purely garbage, or mention various types of methods to enlarge various parts of the body, I mean the ones that are trying to be real, but failing miserably.

Here are my favourites:

Today’s guest blog post is from Sam Ashdown, founder and owner of Hometruths, a specialist property marketing consultancy. She shares with us her tried and tested tips for reaching those important people in your industry through social media channels.

Social media is a minefield, and when you’re just starting to try to make a name for yourself on the various platforms, it can be difficult to find direction and focus.

Apart from having a true ‘voice’ and sharing genuinely interesting content and thoughts without selling, you also need to identify and then reach the key influencers in your industry.  Not an easy [...]

A client come to me last week complaining that they were not seeing any movement with the work that was being done on the SEO side for their site. After an initial discussion on setting expectations for how long SEO work can take, it transpired that it was brand terms that were not ranking, and this rang warning bells!

This article is the second of the series focusing on solving duplicate content issues in WordPress in order to improve your site rankings. The first in the series can be found here.

So far we have covered solving duplication problems due to category, tag and date archive directories. The next issue we discovered was in relation to lots of URLs including ?replytocom.

A client recently came to me saying the search traffic to her WordPress blog had suddenly stopped and she didn’t know why. A quick review seemed to indicate that Google had possibly penalised her as her blog posts were no longer indexed.

Ouch – not a good situation.

A quick review showed up a whole heap of duplicate content issues which could be causing the problem. This blog post explains why and provides suggestions to fix.

It’s really easy when you are in any particular business to use jargon and acronyms on the assumption that everyone knows what you mean.

In our training programmes we always teach the importance of simplicity in language and understanding and using the words your customers use.

If you are trying to get ranked for local searches, you may well have heard of ‘marking up’ your website address using ‘schema.org’.

It is critical that your business name, address and phone number (‘NAP’) is the same on your website as your Google +Local page.

The links pointing INTO your website have long been viewed by Google, and other search engines, as a representation of how popular and authoritative your website is.

As such, building links has been a focal point for any and every SEO campaign. Changes have been a foot this last year or so though – links are still important, but it’s all a bit trickier!

A recurring theme I see on all the website audits that I do is the issue of broken links. By broken link, I mean a link that when clicked, throws up an error page and doesn’t go where you want it to go!

They can frustrate the hell out of your site visitors, are not very professional, and can potentially lose you a customer.

But they commonly occur – this post will help you identify if you have a problem, where it is and how to fix it!