Google continually releases new algorithm updates, from Hummingbird, to Google Panda, to Google Possum, to Google Penguin, to Google Pigeon, the animals are countless. For some reason, I don’t know why they like naming the algorithms after animals but they just do.

The last thing you want to do is worry about Google penalising you in the future when they update their algorithm. So how do you avoid this when you’re doing SEO? In this article, I’m going to share how to Google-proof your website.

Well, there’s two kinds of SEOs. There’s black hat and then there’s white hat. You can probably take a guess that Google likes white hat and they hate black hat.

Black hat is people who steal content, they’re scraping websites and they’re buying links. Just avoid doing all of those things.

On the flip side, white hat SEO is writing amazing content, creating an amazing website that has a great user experience and always puts the user first.

Now, let’s dig into the specifics:

1. Time On Site

the first thing you want to look at to improve and to make sure that your website isn’t going to get hit by any Google algorithm updates in the future, is to first look at your time on site.

Within your Google Analytics, it’ll show you your time on site. The closer you can get that number to, let’s say, two minutes/three minutes the better off you are.

If that number’s under a minute, it shows that most people don’t care to be on your website.

2. Bounce Rate

The second thing you need to look at and, again, this is within your Google Analytics, is your bounce rate. The lower that number, the better off you are.

If people are just coming to your website and bouncing off, especially within a few seconds, it tells search engines like Google that, hey, this page isn’t relevant. I didn’t find what I’m looking for, so you shouldn’t rank it anymore. You don’t want that.

So, if you continually decrease your bounce rate, and the way you do that is making sure you use large fonts, that way your content is easier to read. You make sure you focus on what the user is coming to your website for.

So, if you’re an e-commerce site, you showcase the product. If you’re a blog, don’t showcase your services or prodcts at the top, showcase your blog content.

Doing those simple tweaks will decrease bounce rate.

3. Put Users First

Last, but not least, this is the third thing you really need to focus on, is make sure you continually put the user first. I know I mentioned this, but I can’t emphasize it enough. You want to do this by going through your website and recorder, being like, what content pages should we update because they’re outdated?

Is our user experience better than our competition?

Can we do anything else to delight our users and make sure they want to come back and tell others about our site?

I know some of those things are really hard to measure but, if you just survey people and you talk to them, and you get their feedback, you can make your site more user friendly.

To conclude, when you do write amazing content, put user experience first and have quality backlinks, it’s very rare that your site will get penalised. That’s how you Google-proof your site. Have you Google-proofed yours?