As you know the first Penguin update in April,2012 affected a lot of sites including those who had been using ethical SEO rather than spamming the web.I also found one of my key eCommerce website affected by the update.I was totally frustrated as my sales declined dramatically.After three months from update I thought to give a try with paid advertising and started with Buysellads and Google adwords.Fortunately both of them worked for me and still they are working for me well to get sales.We often overlook them as we think they are costly.Yes adwords can be bit expensive for anybody who dont know how to use it.But If you know how to increase your quality score you can get you ads running at the least cost. I still do SEO for some of my other sites and I have a good ranking for numerous keywords.For on site SEO you can follow the guidelines mentioned by Google in their free "SEO starter guide" and for the backlinking purpose you need to concentrate on backlink acquisition rather than building them.Still I have found guest blogging,video reviews,Twitter retweet,facebook share,press release and local citations work fine to increase ranking and you can do blog commenting,social bookmarking like things only on relevant places in order to maintain your ranking. The sweet thing of today's SEO is that you can rank for your targeted keywords very fast even in a month for medium competitive keywords which we even couldn't imagine before three to six month in pre-penguin era.
I've read recently that Google is taking a lot of the SEO juice away from press releases and they recommend using no follow links within them. Have you found that to be the case yet?
Yes, you can still get good rankings, my site is an example! You just have to play by the rules. Penguin actually made it MORE FAIR, because now EVERYONE has a chance. Just stay white hat and you'll be cool.
Many thanks for that! Penguin has made it difficult for me to be honest! Hopefully I can work around it soon!
You seem to have a great idea of what you are doing. The only thing I can add would be to rank a webpage where you have experienced success in Googleads. That way you can soak up the traffic for the cost of ranking a page. Might save you a bit of money. Good luck!
At moment I am currently testing an outsourced SEO company and the plan is to have this ongoing SEO every month. Keep an eye on the PR rankings and get your links out there like directories , social media, bookmarking, pr web and so forth. Stay white hat and provide high quality content.
All I can say about Penguin update is really amazing it's helps users to be on track while searching there niches and for the bloggers its neutralize those using blackhats and they force them post fresh articles..
