SEO – not the dark art everyone thinks it is
05.08.14SEO is about improving your visibility in the search engines to generate more traffic to your site and increase sales, but this isn’t the dark art everyone thinks it is; It’s just about common sense and hard work. Give the user what they are looking for, after all that’s all Google is looking to achieve; good quality, relevant content for any given search.
There are certain rules/criteria you should follow but this needn’t be complicated. Write good content about your subject; write for the user NOT the search engine, at the end of the day if the copy is too spammy the users will leave the page anyway. Make the copy concise about the subject on that page, don’t try and talk about too many different things otherwise you will give a mixed message to both the user and the search engine.
Once you have your subject, make sure your on-page elements reflect the subject matter starting with the most important, such as the “Title” tag, meta description, on-page heading, alt tags and page name. This way the search engines will have a clear idea on what your page is about.
Once you have your page, the hard work begins; you need to get recommendations (links) for it to show Google that it can trust you as a source of content enough to rank you above everyone else in its search engine.
Over the years this practice has changed so much as Google try to stop ‘spammers’ finding the loop holes and exploiting them to find a quick fix to the top of the rankings. Fortunately over time Google have become very aware of these practices and underhand spammy techniques are quickly found out and the culprit sites penalised.
A good quality link is like a recommendation, this is why links via social media platforms have become very important in recent years; Google sees these as more credible as they are shared naturally by real people who choose to share them, not manufactured, flat links built in a low quality directory sometimes even in a different country. The more recommendations (links) that are accumulated over time will raise the authority of your site giving it a better chance of pages ranking highly withinthe search engines; and let’s face it if you have good content, it WILL be shared. This in turn will be re-shared many times not only raising the authority of your site very quickly, but also enticing those users to visit your site and ultimately to make a purchase.
It is no coincidence that the more established so called high street brands such as Amazon, eBay, John Lewis, Next, Debenhams, etc rank highly for the majority of their terms. They have built up good authority over a long period of time and Google trusts their brand.
So SEO isn’t the dark art people think it is. It’s about the core elements of any good business; creating a good product and hard work! Create good content and promote that content so you raise your authority through good quality recommendations (links)……….Easy!!