The Penguin update sent a strong message that not knowing SEO basics is going to be dangerous in the future. You have to have the basics down or you could be at risk. Penguin is a signal from Google that these updates are going to continue at a rapid pace and they don’t care what color your hat is, it’s all about relevance.

Understand your link profile

The biggest risk factors are a combination of lots of low quality links with targeted anchor text.

Learn what makes a good link

Come from respected brands, sites, people and organizations

Exist on pages that lots of other sites link to

Provide value to the user

Map out your crawl path

There are few bigger wins in SEO than getting content that wasn’t previously being indexed out there working for you.

Know about every page type and no index the low value ones

If you don’t understand the structure of your website you don’t know what *could* be wrong

Almost never change your URLs

It’s extremely common to change URLs, reasons like new design, new content management systems, new software, and new apps

Setup SEO monitoring

Watch for traffic drops with Google Analytics custom alerts

Monitor your uptime with services

Monitor what pages you no index with Meta tags or robots.txt (you would be shocked how often this happens)

 Embrace inbound marketing

Dedicate yourself to improving your website for your users and they will reward you