Whether you do your own Search Engine Optimisation, have in house experts or outsource it to agencies from some local, or far flung part of the world, you could be forgiven for not knowing which way to turn right now.

Since Google's Panda and Penguin updates have been rolled out over the last 18 months or so, some websites have seen their rankings drop significantly, whereas others have started to enjoy new found success.

Website owners have been left bewildered and unsure what to do next for fear of making things worse and link builders have seen their business drop as people worry about incurring Penguin related penalties.

What are Panda and Penguin?

Without going into too much detail, as so much has already been written, Panda penalises sites for on page factors - things like duplicate content, over optimised content, etc.

On the other hand Penguin was all about off site factors such as unnatural links and over reliance on too many links with your target keywords as the anchor text.

For example, if you had a site about dog walking and all of your links used the anchor text 'dog walking' then you probably got hit by Penguin.

This in turn has led to more worries about negative SEO - harming a competitors site by overloading them with links all targeting the same keyword, resulting in an unnatural link warning and a drop in rankings.

The good news is that if you got hit by Penguin it doesn't mean your site has been de-indexed. It just means you will have experienced a drop in rankings that it's possible to recover from.

What can you do?

How can you recover? Well for a start, adding new, relevant content to your site will help (yes I know that's Panda not Penguin related but bear with me). The more content your site has on a subject, the more relevant incoming links on that topic will appear. Not just content written about your main keyword, but content written about supporting keywords too. Building on my earlier example, you could have articles about how often to walk your dog, how far to take your dog for walks, whether the size of the dog makes a difference, etc. (for the record, I don't own a dog or know a great deal about walking them, it's just an example!).

Interlink your articles where it makes sense to do so.
Use strong anchor text when interlinking between content on your site.
Don't be afraid to link out to other related sites in your niche. Don't think of this as sending your traffic away. Think of it as adding value for your visitors.
Don't stop building /acquiring links but vary the anchor text that is used in them and get quality links from good sources as well as links from diverse sources.
Engage with your visitors using social networking.

Think outside the box

Don't just think about getting your traffic from search engines but look to other ways of bringing visitors to your website(s) and making sure that you provide them with enough value so they stick around when they first find your site and come back for more once they have.

If all of the above sounds like it's too complicated, or too much hard work, or you simply don't have the time to devote to doing all of that, then enlist the help of an expert to manage your search engine optimisation campaigns for you. Granta Network Solutions can provide you with help, advice and solutions not only for your SEO campaigns but local search campaigns, traffic building strategies, web hosting and other internet related services.