SEO Reminder - No Tricks.
Every few weeks I come across an article, website, blogger, or bump into one of my friends in the search engine marketing business and I’m reminded of something about SEO I take for granted. It seems obvious to link keywords, make sure that keywords are located in H1 tags, and that my navigation isn’t hidden by javascript. This week, I was reminded that with all the work we do for keywords, the two most important things search engines look for are traffic and links.
Why did this come up this week? I watched a site that had been high on page 1 on Google for a certain keyword, completely disappear. The site had always bothered me - it was poorly designed, keyword dense, and had little traffic - and didn’t deserve page 1 results. They were clearly doing some black hat SEO work and it finally caught up with them. Meanwhile, I’ve watched a site that patiently implemented it’s social media strategy climb steadily up from page 3 to page 1. No tricks, no black hat voodoo magic, just links and traffic - as supplied by a good social media strategy.
It wasn’t that I had forgotten these critically important elements of SEO, it’s just that sometimes you take for granted traffic and links while you focus on all the little tweaks you can do to your site and blog. Writing for SEO, internal links, tags - the list goes on, but these are all just ways to make sure your site is properly optimized so that as you build links and traffic, the search engines will favor your site. It’s tempting to go with a tortoise and hare metaphor, but frankly it doesn’t take that long to start reaping benefits (which makes the tortoise in the story not so accurate.)
As you focus on the numerous ways to optimize your blog or site for positive search engine rankings, don’t neglect your external strategy for driving in the two most important factors to being ranked highly - traffic and links.
Tags: Search Engine Visibility, SEO-rankings, SEO-Strategies, SEO-tools, Social Media Marketing
June 27th, 2008 at 8:18 am
I feel it inaccurate to claim traffic and links to be the most important aspect to a good SERP. Search engines sole objective is to generate a list of website that the users will find beneficial - if they don’t, they will not be a very good search engine.
I would say the most beneficial aspects to good SERPs are relevant, recent, good, clean content and age/reputability.
I’m not saying traffic and links are useless, they certainly are very beneficial - but take a look at some of the sites with great SERPs, it often comes from age/reputability and relevance.