If you have followed along with this guide so far, your website is optimized both onsite and off. The effort you’ve put in so far alone should yield substantial results, if not now then steadily in the future.
Keep in mind that altering any aspect of your SEO campaigns may not produce immediate results. Those results may not reveal themselves tomorrow or in three or five days.
The fact is, Google’s algorithm works when it wants to and you’ll have to be patient. Google will crawl your newly improved web profile in due time.
In the meantime, you can go to Google Search Console and determine if there are any crawl errors as you wait for higher rankings.
All of the audit steps explained so far have delved into the non-technical aspects of search engine optimization. Anyone can do them, regardless of technical capabilities, in most cases.
To be thorough, it becomes important to crank open the hood and take a look at the engine. We’re referring to those aspects of your website that keep it online and consistently live for your customers to visit.
These include other back-end site details, coding issues, server malfunctions, and all those other behind-the-scenes factors that could hold your rankings back or cause them to drop entirely.
Every effort will be made to ensure that these steps are easy to follow for anyone, even if you’re not a coder or otherwise not technically proficient. You’ll also learn about a few tools that will make analyzing the more technical aspects of your web presence a simple and easy affair.
Oh, boy! An entire book could be written about the SEO technique collectively known as “backlinking” and how much turmoil the practice has caused in the world of SEO. Backlinking used to be the go-to way to gain more prominent rankings in the SERPs. That is, until black-hat scammers began to game the system and thus ruined backlinking for the rest of us.
Instead of gaining links slowly and organically over time, as Google intended, black-hatters bought links by the thousands, for pennies on the dollar, and thus raked in the immense monetary rewards.
So many links were purchased and so many rankings gained fraudulently that Google’s SERPs became a cesspool of garbage. Top rankings were mostly scams, and Google was helpless to stop it. Until the day they released Penguin, the moniker given to the search engine’s most infamous algorithm update.
The day after the update occurred, which made backlinks largely obsolete, many webmasters who relied on backlinks found their rankings in the toilet, or purged from the search engine rankings entirely (also referred to as being “Sandboxed”).
By now you know my infamous history with backlinking and how the practice nearly caused me to fail at the very business I love.
You are also aware that I now treat failure as a lesson and, therefore, in my business, we don’t do any type of backlinking.
Some SEO professionals may decide to engage in processes like guest posting, which are currently seen as white-hat techniques. But I don’t recommend backlinking of any kind. I’ve been burned too many times and I’d hate to see the same thing happen to you.
We see too many impressive results from other, non-risky SEO methods to take the chance. Backlinks are too often faked, and Google is all too wary of them, so it’s best to disavow the practice of backlinking altogether. That’s just my opinion and, for my clients and business, the advice works well.
