99% blogger around you will answer that Putting Keyword in Title, URL, Image and creating Backlinks.

Do you really think that SEO is all about putting keywords in different places and creating backlinks? If so then I must say that you don’t know anything about SEO.

If SEO is so simple then every blog would have achieved #1 in SERP.

Lets Discuss basics of SEO

It is very important to understand the basics of SEO.

“SEO is a process to put quality content on top in SERP so that end user will get their desired result in minimum effort.”

If you read the above sentence carefully then you will came to know that there are two other factor that decides your ranking.

1. Search Engine
2. User

How User and Search Engine affects Ranking?

‘Search engines’ captures user behavior to decide domain ranking.

E.g. If a user search something and visit your blog/website from search results and found that your content is not suitable for them and he goes back to search engine to search more pages for same search term.

Search engine capture this and it gives the idea to search engine that either your content is not of high quality for that search term or your content doesn’t belong to that search term (means you have falsely optimized your content for that keyword). Search engine degrade your ranking for that keyword.

This decision taken by search engine algorithm based on several instances.

Similarly if your URL is coming on 2nd or 3^rd page of search engine for a particular search term but people is finding your article useful and you are getting great CTR for that page and search term then Search Engine improve your ranking.

People and Search Engine like Fresh Content

No likes to read out dated content because information in these articles not relevant with the time.

Most of the people say that Fresh means provide daily fresh new content; they are right but what about your old content? You have put so much effort on them and they have been appreciated by your readers in the past.

So you have to revamped or re-written your old articles to keep them fresh in terms of information, format and SEO.

Intelligent bloggers revamped their old articles on regular basis to get long term benefit from their old articles.

All your old articles are foundation of your blog and if your foundation is strong then you will reap benefit from your blog in future as well.

Increase Engagement with readers

I know you are thinking how engagement with readers is related with SEO but it is purely related with SEO. Let me explain how

When you start engaging with your readers, you start to know what exactly they want from you. If you provide what your readers what then your readers will start visiting your blog more frequently and start sharing your articles in their circle.

Search Engines likes those articles to be put on top in SERP which are like and share by user. ‘Search Engines’ have started give preference to social signals (e.g. Like, Share, +1 etc) so more people will share your article more strong your social signal will be.

So again I am asking same question – “Do you really know SEO”?

Till now you have realized that SEO is not all about placing Keywords in different places and creating backlinks; it is much more than that and if you will now were busy in keywords and backlinks only then change your thinking process about SEO otherwise sooner or later you will be ended up with Search Engine penalties only.

Once you start knowing about your niche, market, readers and latest trends then you will realize that SEO is much more than keywords and backlinks. SEO is an art and it takes time to be expertise in it.

Take different aspects of SEO as challenge to yourself and start working on it. Try to understand true mechanism of SEO and hidden areas of it. Once you start doing it then you will enjoy the lots of targeted traffic, sales and conversion.

What’s your view and understanding about SEO; we love to hear your definition of SEO. Share your feedback using comment section.

One week ago two of  my websites (Polish market) was downranked by Google for almost all of the keywords.

Fortunately, these 2 sites aren’t very important for us, (we have few dozen more important), but it harms us as well.

We aren’t alone – about 2 weeks ago a lot of high ranked price comparison services in Poland also was downranked by Google.

There was a lot of articles about it in Polish blogosphere, because they are really very big players – according to alexa.com:

Ceneo.pl – 1754th place in global rank

Nokaut.pl – 6061st place in global rank

Skapiec.pl – 6329^th place in global rank

Google’s quality engineer, Kaspar Szymanski (he is responsible for Polish market for the same things, as Matt Cutts for English market) wrote on Google+, that they are fighting against buying links by websites. Clear…

Evidence for our downranking by Big Brother Google behaviour (for one of our websites) you can find below:

On 8^th February (marked with red line) all of our monitored phrases ranked down

For promoting our webservices we use mostly white hat SEO, so the question appears: WHY?

Sometimes we outsource some of  recurrent work (for example adding to directories or article marketing), but it shouldn’t harm us…

One more thing, before I share with you this information – down ranking may be done by algorithm or by Google quality people…

Top 10 reasons, why your site may be downranked in SERPs

1)      Too fast link amount increasing

2)      Too fast link amount decreasing

3)      Exchanging links with other sites

4)      Keyword stuffing on your site (in text, in links, in tags, in meta tags)

5)      DC – Duplicate Content on your site

6)      Harmful links on your site

7)      Harmful links providing to your site

8)      Participation in links farm

9)      NEW! Participation in contents farm

10)  Selling/buying links

My colleague add 2 more points to this list:

11)  Google changed algorithm, and your site isn’t here any more

12)  Something else, what Big Brother Google consider BAD

You can read also Google Penguin attacked – 50 types of links to strengthen your website

If you know some more reasons, why your site may be downranked, don’t hesitate and share your knowledge with us.

After investigation, we came to conclusion, that in our case, only one point (from top ten) is common to 2 sites and potential reason for penalty by Google – keyword stuffing.

Unfortunately, the keywords we are “monitoring” are very competitive – something like mortgage or loans, but for Polish market. Due this competition, our articles has been written by very good specialist in this area and are “SEO mastered” by SEO writers.

But our articles are written for our readers, and must have these keywords inside…

Maybe we have also to much titles and links concerned on some keywords? We aren’t sure, about it, because some our other sites (and not only our) has even more keywords on site, and are high ranked by Google…

Summarizing – no risk, no fun

Do you have any experience with down ranking your pages in SERPs?