Avoiding Google penalties for your website is easy, provided that you focus on high-quality content and organic SEO techniques. Follow these proven tips:
- Do not overuse keywords. While a keyword-based SEO approach is recommended, the keywords you use should appear naturally. High keyword densities are no longer as important as they used to be, and can even damage your site’s ranking.
- Fix broken links on your website. Unless you establish a routine for doing this, there will always be some broken links on your website.
- Do not scrap content from your competitors. When curating content, simply provide a link to the source. Google will love you for it, as will your visitors.
- Do not buy links or take part in link exchanges. Instead, use your budget to create high-quality content that will improve your SEO organically.
- Do not use automated scripts to generate content. This is neither ethical nor reliable. If you do it, Google will penalize you it this sooner or later.
- Use “nofollow” tags when linking to websites of doubtful quality and authenticity. Ideally, you should not link at all to such websites.
- Use keywords in meta tags and page titles. It’s all right to have at least one keyword from your keyword list in meta tags and page titles.
- Make sure you don’t have duplicate content on your website. Check and double-check old pages. Duplicate content is awful for SEO.
- Get a good web hosting provider. This is the only way to maintain a high uptime, deal with traffic spikes, and have your web pages load up in seconds.
- Do not place ads in the middle of your content. That makes it hard for visitors to differentiate between the content and the ads. Always have in mind the visitor experience: visitors should be able to browse your content without being bothered by ads.
- Do not sell ads on a new website before you publish on it at least some useful content. If your only goal is to sell ads, you will get penalized. Websites without good content don’t survive for long.
But above all else, write for people and not for machines, and seek to improve your website all the time. Do this and Google will reward you.