Negative link alert for pet websites

Negative link alert for pet websites

The other day, David Beart from PetYak.com alerted me to a growing problem where bad links are seriously hurting pet websites with poor rankings and traffic in Google, Bing and other search engines. He said, “I found out the hard way that my website had 54,000 bogus links pointing to it, and I got penalized. Several hacked sites from Russia and Poland, and from.info and .net sites using cloaking, are hitting all types of verticals (including the pet industry).”

But before I explain bad links, let’s back up a bit.

Google is always trying to give searchers the best possible results. Throughout each year, Google updates their search algorithms (formulas) to clamp down on entities trying to hack the system.

Google’s latest update, Penguin 2.0, is clamping down on bogus inbound links/negative SEO. QUALITY inbound links from legitimate websites/companies… especially links to internal pages of your website, using anchor text such as “See their complete selection of dog treats” (not a real ink) — are fine. However, hackers are flooding unsuspecting pet websites (and other industry websites) with bogus text links from “fake” referral pages, and Google sees those links as “unnatural.”

When this happens, Google can slap your site with a penalty, which can kill its traffic. This is something you need to know about and address with your pet website now. Here’s how.

How to make sure your pet web design professional has your back

How to make sure your pet web design professional has your back

There’s nothing more tragic than updating your pet website or launching a new site and it’s not designed for SEO (search engine optimization) OR for the best visitor experience.

I’ve heard horror stories about pet businesses working with a web designer who creates “very nice looking sites,” but who didn’t know a thing about SEO. In fact, in a couple of cases over the past few years, web designers have ignored the SEO tags I had written for a client, and therefore completely missed the boat in helping the site generate great Google results. Recently a graphic designer wiped out all the previous SEO content during a site update, and the client lost rankings, traffic and sales as a result — costing her serious revenue. Yikes!

A key component of your website’s success is a pet web design professional who knows how to follow SEO best practices. Here are three ways to make sure your designer has your back.

PetCopywriter pet content marketing

Content Marketing Will Be A Huge Pet Industry Trend for 2013

PetCopywriter pet content marketingIt looks like 2013 will be a pivotal year in which content marketing is a “must” strategy for pet and veterinary companies, whether you’re marketing pet products or your business is a pet or veterinary industry supplier.

According to B2B Content Marketing: 2013 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends,* which surveyed more than 1,400 North American business-to-business service and supply companies of various sizes and industries, marketers are counting on content marketing to help them achieve their major business goals.

They’re recognizing that a competitive marketing strategy must include a steady stream of highly useful content to boost brand awareness, customer acquisitions, lead generation, customer retention, loyalty, competitive positioning and more… while also increasing website traffic.

To illustrate this point, here are just a few statistics from the report:

Petcopywriter.com uses Wordle to help with web content that works

The Wordle Test for Pet Web Content That Works

Recently a colleague made me aware of a really fun little online tool called Wordle. The Wordle website describes itself as “generating ‘word clouds’ from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.”

Now, what makes Wordle an excellent tool for your pet website content (especially blogs) — is you can see if your content is using words that focus on what your customers need, or if the words are all about you.

Too many websites talk about how great they are or how fantastic their products are. Ideally, your pet website content should always be about the solutions your prospects or customers are seeking.

And don’t forget to include those keywords that match what people are using in Google and other search engines to find you.

Here’s how Wordle can help you determine how you’re doing along those lines.