People are still whining about the Penguin update, and they are none too pleased about the 2013 Penguin 2.0 update. This is the update that went a long way in removing over-optimized site. In that sense it is fair to feel a little sorry for the webmasters that were caught by it. They spend their money on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tools, monitoring, and check their keyword trends every day, and then Google turns around and says, “Naughty, naughty, you are trying too hard.”

Still, Penguin exists and you now have to play on a level playing field. In other words, here are some post-penguin SEO strategies that offer you no leverage but also won’t see you penalized by Penguin.

Focus on PR and conversions

PR in this sense means public relations and not PageRank. PR and conversions is the sort of thing that may not matter as much if you were running a regular website or a blog, but for an eCommerce site it is necessary. People who are punished by the Penguin updates are the ones who concentrate too much on search engines and not enough on users.

If you concentrate on users with your eCommerce site (in the traditional sense) then they will have a great time on your website but will not buy anything. So, you need to concentrate on PR, by which you thrill your user and give them the great time that Google demands, and you concentrate on conversions, which means you do all you can to turn your accumulated goodwill into sales.

Do not forget about search engines

Just because Google seem to punish the people who over optimize, does not mean you should ignore search engines. Google wants you to put the user first, but that does not mean you cannot put the search engine a close second.

Spammy links

The most well known voice in Google is that of “Matt Cutts” the engineer with Google who has a blog. He says that the 2013 update is the fourth iteration of the Penguin update, and said that one of its features is the identification of “spammy links.” A website that has spammy links may also be said to have an “unnatural link profile.”

All of this is a bunch of fancy lip wiggling, and just means that people who have tried too hard with their back linking are going to suffer. If you want to avoid these sorts of penalties then try to make your backlink profile a little broader and make your links a little more relevant.

Help creating a broader and more relevant backlink profile

Broader means concentrating on more than one type, so you are looking to have backlinks from:

? Social media networks (also known as social media mentions or markers)
? High PageRank and low PageRank Blogs
? Guest blog posts
? Website
? Reviews sites
? Article sites
? News sites
? Comment sections
? Forums< If you want a more relevant backlink profile then link to product pages from reviews of that product. Link from pages where your potential customers are likely to visit, and not just from pages that a lot of people visit. For example, if you are selling birth control, then links from a children’s cartoon site will not be relevant, but links from a lingerie store will be.

Be wary of aggressive inbound linking (backlinks)

This happens when your back linking becomes a little overzealous and you end up getting forty or fifty backlinks in just one week. A naturally occurring backlink profile does not often jump up and down like a gorilla on a trampoline, it willing often go up and down with a nice gentle curve.

High quality backlinks vs. low quality backlinks

There is no such thing as bad and good quality, so long as the links actually work. What people are referring to when they say this is relevancy and anchor text. Relevancy is mentioned earlier and involves things such as having your backlinks come from websites that are visited by your target audience.

High quality anchor text means that it is readable by humans and relevant to the page it links to. Anchor text that is just a list of keywords or is something un-descriptive such as “Click here” is generally seen as poor quality.

Don’t buy SEO eBooks on Penguin

Even the programmers at Google cannot predict the extent of the changes that the Penguin updates have caused, which means you need to take advice from the Google articles on the Google website and not from eBooks. Books in print are better (but not by much), but eBooks are often full of plausible lies and plausible guesswork. It will not help you to make your website Penguin proof.

If you are desperately worried about the Penguin update then change your priority from getting to the top of the Google search engine results page to thrilling your viewers and making them want to stay. This attitude alone will keep you out of the icy claws of the dreaded Penguin.

Author Bio

This post is written by Kate Funk. She is a professional blogger and writer at www.english-educator.com. She specializes in topics of interest to techno geeks and networking enthusiasts.