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How to Fight SEO Sandbox or SEO Slowdown Effect?

Sandbox effect or slowdown happens often when webmasters work on the SEO of their sites. Positions don’t grow, traffic flow from the search engines doesn’t increase despite all the efforts. It’s almost like the SEO process hits the wall. Often even increasing the spending budget doesn’t help.

The first growth in the beginning can be easy and rapid. Then it slows down or stops. In a very competitive niches further SEO advancement to the top can become very difficult.

In order to get SEO of your site to start making progress again, you will need a breath of fresh air. Today I will talk about what I mean by this breath of fresh air. Get your coffee and let’s get going, we have ton of information to cover.

The most important is to not get discouraged. Slowing down – is a normal thing that happens to everyone. You do not need to spend more money in order to overcome this slowness.

Combination of SEO strategy

The strategy that SEO professionals use can be combined. I like combining different SEO strategy and change combinations every month. One month is enough in order to use a certain strategy in full

Let’s take a look at the combinations I use most frequently. After the combination “paid article submissions + purchasing links in paid blogs + paid directories” is done, the immediate “SEO via press release + exchanging links + social network submissions”. Then moving onto “paid product or service review submissions to the livejournal groups + paid submission of the topics on certain niche forums + free article submissions”.

I usually use three SEO strategy in each combination. Repeating the first combination after two months also gives a good effect.

Remember, if you purchased links that require you to pay each months so they don’t get removed, you will have to keep paying for them while using different SEO strategy in combinations.

I noticed that applying SEO strategy in combinations and changing the order will reduce the dependency of your SEO progress from the changes of the search engine algorithms. This can be explained by the fact that the search engine algorithms reduce effects from some SEO strategy when increasing effects from other SEO strategy. When you use SEO strategy in combinations it results in increase in different inbound links from various resources.

As a result site receives various inbound links, which are changing their origins monthly. It’s like instead of eating roman noodles you go to Mexican, Italian, Japanese, and other restaurants, and trying something different every time.

Increasing the list of SEO strategy

In today’s SEO there are about 10 main SEO strategy, plus few additional SEO strategy to compliment the main 10. It’s impossible to use all approaches at 100%. You probably have a method or two that you would like to use or already using. The classical setup is the: purchased links, paid and free article submission, purchasing links in the blogs via contacting the webmasters, registering in the catalogs. When doing SEO without any money to spend (free SEO), webmasters usually mass comment blogs, forums, free article catalogs, and so on.

Think about it, the choices are limited. In order to overcome the slowdown or the sandbox effect you will need to increase the list of SEO strategy you have. That same article SEO optimization can easily be transformed into SEO optimization via press-releases. Press-release catalogs have much higher quality than the article catalogs, and on top of that they get indexed by search engines much faster.

Adding your site to the site catalogs can be expanded with adding bulletins with the link to your site to online bulletin boards. This approach is best for construction, transportation technical, or industrial types of websites. This method is also good for the sites specializing in various services, such as cleaning, or catering, and so on. Take a look at the inbound links to the leading sides in those industries and you will see many inbound links from online bulletin boards.

You can find the bulletin boards via entering the following into the search engine you like:

• bulletin board
• construction bulletin board
• cleaning service bulletin board

Commenting in blogs with goal of receiving a link is the least effective method from all I use. Commenting on blogs can be spiced up by participating in the Q&A service blogs or boards. Of course you have to reply with intelligent and quality answers to help people, and place your link to your site only where it’s not against the accepted policy. If you for some reason ignore their rules and policies, you will get kicked out.

To find these Q&A services you will need to type in the following into the search engine of your choice:

• Questions and Answers

It’s always possible to find a method that you are not using. Learning those methods will result not only in your SEO optimization, but also will increase your SEO knowledge and skills.

Changing priorities

Changing priorities when increasing the link mass will let you refresh your SEO process.

For example, when purchasing links instead of the “buy few expensive ones” you can change the strategy to “buy many cheap links” and vice verse.

Also when working on paid article submission, try to differentiate with quality increase in mind. For instance instead of submitting your article with links to many average sites, try submitting to higher quality sites from yahoo and dmoz.org catalogs.

Remember that the change in priorities should happen gradually, not all at once. For example, some of the links you purchase are going to fall off (sites fall out of the index, server not available, various glitches with indexing, improper placement of code, link price increase, and so on). Instead of the links that fell off, you will need to get more links depending on your priorities.

Changing link anchors

So, what are you talking about here? Link anchor is the text of the link. Changing the link anchors from time to time can be very useful for your SEO strategy. These can be very different, since when creating link anchors everyone has their own preferences.

Your existing link anchor creating system can be replaced with following: remove or change the text around your link, place the actual address as link anchor and place the keywords before and after the anchor/link, make the entire sentence an anchor, or vice verse. This all depends on how you create links, on your personal SEO strategy.

As in the previous step, changing link text has to happen gradually. Sudden changes can negatively impact your SEO progress. I recommend dividing links into 5-10 groups and change link anchors by groups, for example changing one group per week. Very important – you have to monitor the dynamics of your position when changing link anchors. Monitoring is very important in SEO strategy of any kind.

Try to feel the connection between your SEO strategy and the growth of your positions and changes in the measurements of the site – this will always come handy in the future. You will be able to know which SEO strategy to use and which ones are more effective in a given situation. To top this off you will be able to save your energy, time and budget by being efficient in your SEO strategy implementation. I personally love this feeling, very much.

SEO optimization of target pages

Often one of the reasons of the sandbox or slowdown effect is the insufficient optimization of the target page for the needed keyword request.

This is easy to check. Type in the needed search request into the search engine. Click on every site in the top 10 results, one by one. Then look at the density of this keyword you searched by in the text, title meta tags, descriptions, keywords, in those top 10 sites. If your site’s keyword density is less than of those top guys, then you need to get your act together and increase your keyword density for this request to match these bad boys. Don’t overdo it, keep it reasonable.

The easiest way to do this is to add additional text to the page. Search engines love when pages have lots of text plus you can enter needed search requests without the risk of reducing the readability. Make sure your text is not just silly repetition of keywords.

In order to check the keyword density on any given web page, you can use many tricks (for example this one) press CTRL+F.

In order to check meta tags, you will need to open the source code of the page. In FireFox you can see this by pressing CTRL+U on your keyboard or by entering into the menu “View – Page Source“. In Internet Explorer you can see it by pressing “Page – View Source“, in Opera – “View – Source Code“.

Internal links

Besides your external incoming links, don’t forget about your internal links – they are also counted by search engines. A good effect can be achieved by placing several links from the oldest pages of your site. The links are even stronger if those are the pages that are in the top results for a keywords similar to the one you are trying to optimize on this new page. If I confused you, write in the comments and I will do my best to clarify it for you.

In the text of these links you will need to use a keyword request, that you are targeting in your SEO strategy. For the internal links I use links with the text in the form of the needed keyword without any text around the links themselves.

Google likes links from the texts of the pages. Google likes the “blow through” links (when the link is placed on all pages of the site, usually it’s a sidebar or a footer).

Strive to get trusted links

Trusted links (links from sites respected by the search engines, high PR, high TrustRank, high Alexa rating, high SERPs, these are usually indicators) are very useful and can bring a significant contribution in your fight with sandbox or slowdown effect in your SEO strategy.

One of the fastest ways to receive trusted links – is to pay for your article submission to the trusted high PR article submission site. The older the site, the more its traffic, the higher his PR, and the more pages are indexed the more often it is renewed, the faster the links will be indexed – the better. I know this came out to be a bit longer than all of expected, but try to grasp it, this is not an opinion, this is a fact proven by practice.

Keep in mind, there is a way to get trusted links for free. In order to do this, you will need to write something interesting or useful. I remember long time ago, my young and fragile site I was trying to SEO advance received a trusted link from a very strong domain. The tears of joy were running in a waterfall over my unshaven face…

Once I set myself a goal to get a direct link from one of my favorite blog with PR7. I created a beautiful (in my opinion) wallpaper for the desktop and they published it in their monthly collection on the blog. Back then I was playing with my creative side here and there, so that helped a lot.

We can spend hours listing different ways of getting trusted links, but we will not. Instead, we will remember that the main idea here is to display some unique creative ability and really want to make something happen.

Exchanging Links

This approach is very often gets forgotten. Some SEO boys spread rumors that a site can be banned if caught exchanging links. If you are exchanging links with hundreds or thousands of site, yes you will most likely get banned. But those kind of exchanges are for either silly or the confused (without a cure) types, so we will assume those are not us and continue with the program. Usually exchanging links with 30-40 sites with the similar topic as your site will be just fine.

In order to find sites for exchanging links, I recommend visiting dmoz.org and finding your section. For example if your site is about dog food, then find a section about dog food and write to all the sites in that section offering to exchange links. Keep in mind the higher PR and Alexa rank of your site – the more people will want to exchange links with you.

Exchanging links – is one of the best ways of getting trusted (respected by search engines) links.

I lived through the old school times, when exchanging links used to be very effective and popular. I have to confess that this SEO strategy is still working just fine today. Many SEO wizards online are claiming that this method doesn’t work anymore. They are wrong, ignore those bad boys.

At the end I would like to top this little short post with a bonus advice -

Always know what your competition is doing.

Although this doesn’t directly relate to combating a sandbox or a slowdown effect in your SEO strategy, knowing what your competition is doing in their SEO strategy can help you come up with ideas for your site. You can always find something very tasty there as well. Be that sneaky sneaky that you always wanted to be.

One more advice for you – In order to overcome the slowdown effect in your SEO strategy don’t forget to develop the site itself, making it interesting and useful for others. Don’t get obsessed with it’s positions in SERP an PR.

The end result or a goal of every webmaster should be creating a resource that people will not only add into RSS immediately but will remember its address and regularly come back and send link to their friends to come see this wonderful site.

If you don’t put in effort to make your site interesting and useful – someone else will fulfil this with their site. Competition is growing daily. Your potential visitors and clients will leave to another site.

Even if your site will have many inbound links, but the visitors will be leaving it – there will be no point in your SEO strategy.

If instead of the quality posts you offer your readers a rewritten information (I am not even talking about copy+paste stuff) – trust me, at the end you will have nothing. Whatever you put in – that’s what you get. No surprises here, it’s life.

Beck @ ProfitSEO.com

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