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Nov 19 in Search Optimisation
Written by: Harris
Small business owners can spend countless hours and enormous sums on Search Engine Optimisation in an effort to drive organic Search Engine Traffic to their sites.
The problem is that even the experts can’t agree on how exactly the Search Engines rank individual pages. To add to the problem Search Engines are constantly changing their algorithms to produce better results and to weed out any spamming.
Furthermore the Internet landscape and user search habits are changing, and the Engines are adapting to those changes.
Finally, we should keep in mind that the Search Engines are operated by some of the biggest companies in the world, engineered by the brightest minds, and are determined to provide the best possible links to their users to protect their brand name.
Google makes no money from organic searches, but without relevant, high quality organic search results, nobody would use the search engine. The company’s future depends on the relevancy of their search results. So we can be certain that Google, Bing (and any others) will go to every effort to find the best possible content. They will not be easily fooled with simple tricks used by SEO marketing firms.
Most leading SEO firms no longer even practice Black Hat techniques, choosing instead to focus on content, link building, etc.
In the long run the best strategy for getting to the top of the search engines is to ensure that your website has relevant, good quality content, that is crawl-able by search engine spiders.
By focusing on the content rather than SEO techniques, the website will offer more value to your users, and as a result will also rank better in the Search Engines.
SEO that Matters
If Search Engines were infallible at choosing the best links, what markers would they look for? That’s what we should be providing if we want long term rankings.
SEO That Matter Most:
- Get one way, inbound links from high value sites with related content
- Reciprocal links are easy to spot and probably pass little or no rank value.
- Inbound links from websites with unrelated content are less valuable (why would a pet shop website link to a mobile phone reseller!?)
- Inbound links from authoritative websites pass high value (we can presumably trust a link from a government site, so Google probably does too)
- Ensure that the website is crawl-able.
- Make sure there are no errors in robots.txt files and sitemaps.
- Provide rich content relevant to the search phrases you want to target.
- If you want to be found for “flea control products” make sure that the content of your landing page contains those terms.
- Make sure that you have links to internal & external pages (preferably on authoritative websites) with related content (because that is what you would expect of a well written article – it should not be a dead-end)
- Include related images
- Include lists & tables where appropriate
- Include links to video & other media
- Put simply, create a landing page you would want to land on if you were researching the subject matter.
- Use META descriptions because Google uses this description on the results page.
- Use Title tags because these are used by the browser for bookmarking and as the Tag title.
Tags:
algorithms, black hat, business strategies, google, inbound links, marketing firms, reciprocal links, relevancy, search engine optimisation, search engine spiders, search engine traffic, search engines, Search Optimisation, seo, seo techniques, small business owners, user search, website design
About the author
I have been in the Internet industry since 1994, when I was one of the directors and owners of Cyberloom Pty Ltd - an early ISP based in Sydney, NSW. Cyberloom was sold in 2001. That's when I started X Pty Ltd as a website development company. xEcommerce.com.au is now my primary focus. xEcommerce.com.au builds small business sites on two platforms - Magento & Wordpress. One day I would like to operate the business from the Greek Island of Meganisi - and why not? The Internet is everywhere! ;)
