SEO is dead. SEO is pointless. Quality content is all that matters. SEO is the most important thing a site owner can do? Which of these claims is true?
Is SEO Worth The Effort?
It’s often said that change is a type of death: that which once was is no more. SEO pundits take this quite literally; they pronounce every change to Google’s algorithms a harbinger of the death of SEO. Then there are the SEOs who refuse to acknowledge that anything has changed at all, asserting that Matt Cutts is a flimflam artist and that the same old tricks work just as well as ever—you’ll usually find them on black hat SEO forums peddling The Secret To Ranking, a secret they discovered and to which the extremely smart people at Google remain oblivious, a fascinating combination of the Dunning-Kruger effect and plain-old snake-oil salesmanship.
Amidst all this hue and cry sits the confused business site owner or blogger, who has to separate the truth from the lies to discover what exactly she needs to do if her site is to have a fighting chance in the SERPS. It’s no wonder a good number don’t bother at all and sad that a portion will be bamboozled into paying for the services of an SEO artiste who couldn’t rank his toy soldiers.
So, if we’re to dismiss the Cassandras and the Dolos’s, what are we left with?
SEO matters because Google is neither as smart as it wants to be or thinks it is. It needs help and good SEO is all about helping Google crawl, understand, and contextualize content.
Make sure your site is readable by Google’s crawlers. Crawlability is a hugely important part of on-site search engine optimization. Without it, your content will not rank or even appear in the index. Sitemaps can be extremely helpful. Google wants to find your site available and fast: ensuring that you have decent web hosting (i.e. not the cheapest shared hosting) can have a significant impact on indexing and ranking.
Start with quality. That’s about as vague as it’s possible to be, but it removes from consideration a swathe of content that no reasonable person would consider to be of high quality. You can build a house on sand, and there are “tricks” that will help trash rank, but the best investment is useful, educational, entertaining content that you yourself would want to consume. What counts as quality depends on your audience, so get to know them and write, record, and video the content that will appeal to them.
Keywords matter. Google has a range of pattern-matching semantic technology that enables it to categorize content, but matching search queries to content keywords will increase the chances of your content ending up in the right pigeonhole and finding its way to the right audience. Concentrate on keywords in headings, meta descriptions, title tags, and body text. However, keywords are secondary to great content—don’t let an obsession with keywords blind you to the readability and quality of your content, which should always have priority.
Without quality, no one will share your content and that’s a major source of ranking signals for Google. Whether or not they are used directly as a signal, social media shares help gain a larger audience and will generate more backlinks. Don’t skimp on outreach. Building relationships with influential sharers is crucial if your content is to break through to a wider audience.
There’s a lot more to search engine optimization than this, but once the fundamentals are in place, the rest will follow more easily. Concentrate on content quality, social media outreach and sharing, keyword optimization (with restraint), and crawlability.
Amidst all this hue and cry sits the confused business site owner or blogger, who has to separate the truth from the lies to discover what exactly she needs to do if her site is to have a fighting chance in the SERPS. It’s no wonder a good number don’t bother at all and sad that a portion will be bamboozled into paying for the services of an SEO artiste who couldn’t rank his toy soldiers.
So, if we’re to dismiss the Cassandras and the Dolos’s, what are we left with?
SEO matters because Google is neither as smart as it wants to be or thinks it is. It needs help and good SEO is all about helping Google crawl, understand, and contextualize content.
Make sure your site is readable by Google’s crawlers. Crawlability is a hugely important part of on-site search engine optimization. Without it, your content will not rank or even appear in the index. Sitemaps can be extremely helpful. Google wants to find your site available and fast: ensuring that you have decent web hosting (i.e. not the cheapest shared hosting) can have a significant impact on indexing and ranking.
Start with quality. That’s about as vague as it’s possible to be, but it removes from consideration a swathe of content that no reasonable person would consider to be of high quality. You can build a house on sand, and there are “tricks” that will help trash rank, but the best investment is useful, educational, entertaining content that you yourself would want to consume. What counts as quality depends on your audience, so get to know them and write, record, and video the content that will appeal to them.
Keywords matter. Google has a range of pattern-matching semantic technology that enables it to categorize content, but matching search queries to content keywords will increase the chances of your content ending up in the right pigeonhole and finding its way to the right audience. Concentrate on keywords in headings, meta descriptions, title tags, and body text. However, keywords are secondary to great content—don’t let an obsession with keywords blind you to the readability and quality of your content, which should always have priority.
Without quality, no one will share your content and that’s a major source of ranking signals for Google. Whether or not they are used directly as a signal, social media shares help gain a larger audience and will generate more backlinks. Don’t skimp on outreach. Building relationships with influential sharers is crucial if your content is to break through to a wider audience.
There’s a lot more to search engine optimization than this, but once the fundamentals are in place, the rest will follow more easily. Concentrate on content quality, social media outreach and sharing, keyword optimization (with restraint), and crawlability.
About Graeme Caldwell -- Graeme works as an inbound marketer for Nexcess, a leading provider of Magento and WordPress hosting. Follow Nexcess on Twitter at @nexcess, Like them on Facebook and check out their tech/hosting blog, Nexcess blog.
Sign up here with your email to get Updates from GoWriteUp
ConversionConversion EmoticonEmoticon