Why You Need To Take A Holistic View Of Your SEO Strategy

by Carl Fraser
Totally Commerce Ltd

Since the early days of the internet, companies have unsurprisingly wanted to get good ratings in search. During the infancy of the search engines, there were many easy techniques you could implement to your site to assist with your search positions. However, as search engines developed, most of these tricks were no longer sucesful, and, even in some cases, had a negative effect on search engine positions, or meant that sites were banned completely. With search engines now more complex than they have ever been, what is this likely to mean for the procedures companies use to maintain and improve their search engine positions?

With Google still King of the search engines, many companies provide a multitude of techniques that claim to obtain top rankings for specific keywords. Several years ago, this could be achieved via mainly changes to the layout of your site. More recently, the Google algorithm became very heavily dependent on the popularity of your site, so a great deal of SEO companies concentrated their efforts almost purely on building links. This meant that lots of websites with little or no quality content could get very high ratings purely by having purchased a great deal of backlinks to their site.

However, the recent Google update (nicknamed 'Panda') has put the focus squarely back on the website quality, meaning backlinking alone is very unlikely to achieve results in the ling term. The quote that "if visitors like your site, Google likes your site too" is now more true that it ever was.

Linkbuilding is undoubtedly still important, but it can no longer be seen with a 'set it up and forget about it' approach. Backlinks should be valid to the content on your site and should come from high-quality sites themselves. Ideally links should be made by genuine visitors to your site who are telling everyone how good your site is! Generating backlinks with mass-submission software is unlikely to reap rewards in the long-term.

Now, more than ever, businesses need to take a holistic view of their search engine positions. No single tactic is likely to be successful in the long term. Instead, you should have a structured plan to provide more, quality content on your site as well as continue to encourage visitors to link back to it.

In a recent case, Google penalised several companies who purchased links purely for the purposes of getting good rankings. While backlinks are still important, never more has it been more essential that these are good quality links and relevant to your own site.

The exact Google algorithm remains a closely guarded secret, but certainly the company themself are more keen than ever before to furnish users with the information they're looking for as quickly as possible, and low-quality websites that provide very little in the way of content are being targeted heavily at the present time.

Carl Fraser is Managing Director of Totally Commerce Ltd, owners of http://www.TotallyShoes.co.uk - Retailers of leading brand footwear in the UK. Totally Commerce Ltd also operate several other websites in different business areas.

Article submitted Monday, April 04, 2011 & read 19 times.

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