Save Your Niche Sites with These SEO Methods for 2011

You probably already know about the recent Google updates and that they confirmed their intention to crack down even more on web spam over the coming months.

You might not think your sites will be seen as spam but you might be surprised to know that some sites with over 1,000 pages and plenty of links have lost rankings recently.

The main reasons appear to be page quality but also the value that the site provides to visitors in the eyes of the search engine algorithms.

So what can you do to safeguard your sites this year?

SEO is now not simply about optimizing your content and building backlinks, you need to be looking for ways to add value for your sites visitors and that's turning into more than just good quality content although that's still important.

Visitor interaction seems to be becoming a more important measure of the value a site provides and it seems in my experience that it helps to have integration with sites like Facebook and Twitter for starters.

It's fairly easy to set that up and automate it if you're using Wordpress.

I also recently had an email from the Adwords team about an old site where I had "review stars" but users couldn't actually influence the ratings, they also hinted that they didn't like the sites I was linking to for a couple of CB products.

After re-doing the reviews in another style and changing my promotions it was given the all clear again - PHEW!!

So far implementing these sort of ideas seems to be working very well for my sites but I'd be interested to hear others experiences with rankings and any associated problems or solutions recently.

Always wise to future proof sites as much as possible.