Have you ever wondered if your blog is being affected by the Google duplicate content penalty?  Obviously, if you’re plagiarizing content or simply aggregating RSS feeds, and that’s your game, you can expect this to happen.  But you might be affected by this or other ranking-killing issues without even knowing it.   By looking through the following list of suggestions and applying them, you can easily ovoid these problems, and overcome them if you’re already taking a hit.

Update Frequently – The last thing you want is to get trapped in the Google Sandbox.  Lack of content and websites that do not update frequently are the most likely to face this problem.  It’s understandable that updating a website five times per day can be a sometimes impossible task, but update your site once per day. And when updating your content, be sure not to use too much keyword repetition, if at all avoidable.

Spotless Links – Take a good look at your site and seek out links to external sites that are in your comments and/or posts.  Make sure to remove any links that may lead to any type of objectionable material.  Having links to external websites that contain this type of material can have a very negative effect on your website.  It will most likely decrease your search engine rankings, and as a result, your traffic will slow down.  If you are diligent about removing these types of external links, your website will be able to rise back up in the rankings!

Backlinking – Google’s favorite things are links. Without a pretty substantial number of links on your page, you may not rank very highly with competitive keywords.  With this said, it is important to note that there are two types of links:  Superior links and inferior links. Examples of inferior links would be links that come from link farms, and also links from completely unrelated websites.  Superior links are from related websites and aren’t attached to link farms.

Trust - Building a site that is trusted is incredibly important.  When you’ve built up a certain level of trust, it ensures that people will return – even if you are offline for three or four days.  There are several different ways in which to build a trusted site, but the most important way is through providing quality content that is either highly useful or highly entertaining, and whenever possible, completely original.

Proper Hosting – What would you do if you woke up one morning, and got on the computer just to find out that your rankings, which were page one rankings, had completely disappeared?  After the panic subsides, and your adrenaline calms down, what exactly do you do?  Call your hosting provider to find out if they have had any outages.  If your site is not a trusted one, you very well may have lost all of your content. This is one more reason that maintaining a trusted site is so important.

It is never a pleasant experience to be in the sandbox. The last thing anyone wants is to be penalized for something when they are in the process of building a business. Taking the proper steps in order to ensure that you are within the guidelines is very important. It can mean the difference between front page rankings and 10th page rankings. The above are proven methods used by the pros to make sure that their website is properly ranked. By implementing them yourself, you’ll notice a steady increase in your traffic.

What other tips do you have for staying out of the sandbox?  Share your thoughts in the comments below!

Optimizing your website to gain search engine positioning can be a process that takes a lot of time and focus. It’s no wonder a lot of entrepreneurs hire SEO firms to handle this for them. But that can be very expensive, and it’s hard to know which firms are the best. While many stick to “white hat” practices, others resort to actions that can get your site penalized if found out.

There are a lot of SEO tactics you can employ yourself though, and there are some mistakes a lot of site owners make that are hurting their search engine rankings. Correcting just a few things can actually make a significant difference. Below are three of the most common mistakes made by online entrepreneurs. Correcting these won’t guarantee you a first place Google position, but it will get you on the right track.

1. Ineffective Page Titles – If the name of your company is all that comes up at the top of your site’s pages (in the title bar), it will only help improve searches for your company name. And those searches aren’t made by people you need to attract. They already know who you are. To attract people searching for what you do rather than who you are, customize the <title> tag for each page to reflect what that page is about, being sure to use key search terms whenever possible. This will increase the chances of your site coming up as a search result for those keywords.

2. Placing Text in an Image – If you’re not an html or php pro, it can be difficult to get your site to line up exactly as you want it. All those <div> and <style> tags can be a real pain. So putting text in an image is a great idea, right? It’s lined up exactly where you want it, and you can even use funky fonts! But hold on. Search engines don’t know a picture of a squirrel from an image of your bio. To them, it’s just an image. So any keywords or phrases that are in the text within the image are not considered at all for SEO purposes. Sure, you can add <alt> and <title> tags to your images, and that will help to a degree, but it isn’t actual content, and content is what the search engines love most.

If you’re trying to optimize your site for search engine ranking, be more concerned with the context of your text than the design. That’s not to say design isn’t important. It is very important from the standpoint of providing the right experience for your site visitors. But you can have both – a great looking site that has a first page search engine position.

3. Not Using Analytics – Google analytics (or comparable statistics tools) can make a big difference for you in a lot of ways. Using Google analytics isn’t going to help your SEO directly, but it will tell you if what you’re doing is paying off, and that’s worth a ton. Many site owners are just concerned with how many hits their site is getting. This is an important statistic, but only in conjunction with other numbers.

For example, if your site gets 2,000 hits a day, but 90% bounce (leave practically immediately after arriving), it’s not doing you much good. Studying your bounce rates, traffic sources, click-throughs, and other pertinent information will tell you if what you’re doing is working. And if you’re tackling your site’s SEO on your own, you need that knowledge. A big part of making SEO work is tweaking it as you go to constantly improve, and analyzing your stats will help you identify holes and make adjustments as necessary.

Again, SEO isn’t as easy as a lot of people think, but just about everyone can improve their site’s search engine status to some degree, simply by avoiding the above mistakes. What other SEO blunders do you see site owners making? Share with the community in the comments below.