Keeping Up with the Trends - SEO
The title might be a little misleading but you can read my points. Sometimes keeping up with the trends can get you in trouble or not provide the desired results. As far as search engine optimization goes trends are often turned into filters by the major search engines.
A few months ago I did some consulting work for a Southern California company looking to increase there web presence. More specifically they wanted to increase their Google rankings through search engine optimization. Over the past five years so much has changed in the techniques and methods used to get a website quality search engine traffic and companies haven’t stayed up with the trends or were caught in the trends.
This specific company has been paying Google Adwords $45,000 per month in advertising. (ouch) You can see why they wanted to rank very badly in the natural search results. A handful of good rankings with some decent keywords could bringing them more traffic and they could in return substantially reduce their advertising budget. This is the single reason why SEO is so powerful. Most people don’t click the advertising results on the Google search pages, at least not compared to the natural search results.
Some of the old techniques used that don’t work as well anymore:
Reciprocal Links
Sure, a few of these here and there are no big deal but this should be a small part of your link building campaign. About 3-6 years ago everyone traded links with anyone and the person that traded more than the others was the one that ranked higher. This lead to poor quality search engine results but worked great for SEO while it lasted.
Off Topic / Paid Links
Trust me it’s easy for the major search engines to detect 90% or more of the paid links. Things like sitewide links, footer links and links under a “sponsors” area are all signs. Companies buying these links are wasting their money and time. These links won’t count and can even harm your trust in the search engines.
The best links for increasing your rankings are natural looking links. These are the type of links that Google and other search engines count as votes towards your website. It helps to have great content that people *might* link to but the best SEO’s in the world will go out of their way to find the links that look natural. These are the type of links that will stand the test of time and will always help your website in some way via it direct traffic or increasing your site’s trust in the search engines.
My single biggest SEO tip is to not get caught up in the “current trends” and go out and find links that are natural looking. What is a natural link? You can visit a few web pages yourself and analyze the different links on the pages to see which ones look natural and which ones don’t.