Why Develop a Sustainable Search Marketing Plan?
Because you CAN!
If you have great products and/or services, decent writing skills, an understanding of the fundamentals of building a search friendly page, you CAN compete on the web against larger companies.
Prior to 10 years ago, if you had a website it would probably be indexed and rank pretty well. As the number of sites on the web increased in each industry, and the competition for keywords grew, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was born.
SEO has until recently either been “black hat SEO”, where the practitioner “tricks” the search engines into ranking a site for a particular keyword or phrase, or “white hat SEO” where the practitioner does his or her level best to understand the search engine “algorithms” (system of determining relevance of a site for certain search terms) and adjust the site content and structure accordingly. This was a big budget item, and out of reach of most small business owners to gamble with.
Black hat SEO often had great short term results, but in the long term could get you banned. White hat SEO was clearly the way to go, however it was a moving target with the search engines changing their algorithms constantly, which meant constantly reworking site optimization, content and structure according to the latest findings - which were educated guesses at best. We did our share of gambling, that’s for sure!
Now there’s good news for the small business owner, for whom this is all smoke and mirrors and creates a huge vulnerability for the uninitiated: You can stop chasing algorithms and develop a sustainable search marketing plan!
Search engines are trying hard to make judgments more like people than machines, since the searchers are, for the most part, humans. To that end, they have incorporated Latent Semantic Indexing into their algorithms, which only means that instead of looking for keyword density of a single term, the bot gathers up the prominent keywords and makes sure there are enough related words on the page to substantiate the claim your meta tags are mstaking that the content is about a particular term or topic. What this means to the web content writer is that you can stop keyword-stuffing your content (Please!) and write naturally about your topic.
This same trend toward “natural” patterns is also true for link development. Once upon a time, not so long ago, obtaining numerous links quickly was the name of the game, and controlling the link text so that enough of the links were using the high traffic key phrases to point to your site. Over time, it became more about quality and relevance of the sites linking back to you. Now Google, Yahoo and MSN have taken it one step further, the search engines prefer a site whose link building follows an organic pattern. The number of links from quality, relevant sites builds gradually, and the words used in the links to the site vary greatly, but are made up of related terms.
Links and content, that’s what it’s all about. Organic patterns, sustainability, building. Just do it, now is the time.
Cheers,
Carolyn & Dee
Phillips Business Solutions & KizmeTech