By making a few tweaks and following a few principles for your blog, you can not only get more traffic, but survive the dreaded Google updates to their algorithm.

Google has passed many significant algorithm updates in recent years to reward quality sites and penalize low quality ones. Black hat strategies are no longer going to work very well and will probably get you banned if you continue them.

It is believed that Google now has a quality score for every website and gives more ranking power to the ones that are of higher quality and penalizes the ones with lower quality.

Avoid getting penalized and apply these strategies for increased traffic and site quality.

1. Establish Social Presence

Social Media is now one of the top ways to show Google that your site has great content and is valued by a lot of people.

Utilizing mostly Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ can help boost your rankings online. These are the “Big 3″ social networks and there are thousands of others, but they aren’t recognized near as much as these.

Google Authorship is also very important these days for your social presence and Google page rank, so be sure and set that up right away.

2. Improve User Experience

These Google updates that keep coming out have shown that more than ever, it is about the user experience and not about the search engines. You need to focus on making your site user-friendly and not just search-engine-friendly.

You want people to spend some time going through your site because that will encourage more interest and sales. If you don’t make your site user-friendly, people will see that right away and click the “back” arrow and move on without showing any interest in your pages or content.

Content is still king. The best way to improve user experience is to write compelling, valuable content that answers peoples’ questions, solves peoples’ problems, and informs them on topics they are interested in. The better the quality of your content, the longer people will stick around to read it.

Don’t base all of your content on trying to rank for keywords. A lot of people will tell you to wear out Google’s keyword tool and find keywords that have low competition and high search volume. This is not always the best advice because it might end up driving away some of your target audience because they will quickly realize that you are more worried about ranking for the big keywords, than creating a following and connecting with people.

Utilize Google Analytics to view your site’s statistics and figure out what you need to change to improve user experience. Go through your pages on your site and make sure all of them are of high quality and if not, tweak them until they are. Your audience will appreciate this, trust me.

Also make sure and have social sharing buttons as well as bookmarking on your site to further improve user experience and help them get the word out about your site.

 Go On To Part 2