Have you ever wondered how a search engine categorizes your search query to provide you with a ranking of the relevant websites? Understanding this method is the key to optimizing your website, and SEO is the best way to increase your websites relevance and visibility. But, then why do many believe SEO to be nothing more than a myth told by specialists to bamboozle and extort their clients?
Even when they are faced with the facts, naysayers refuse to believe that their businesses can be improved through SEO strategies. Here are a few reasons why SEO is not a myth, but an evolving strategy to increase your online marketing.
SEO is not a scam:
SEO is not a magic strategy that will immediately push your business site to the top rank. It takes time and patience and constant feedback and renewal to achieve the expected goals. Just because it takes longer, it does not mean that the whole SEO process is a scam.
Those who believe it to be a scam are probably clients who have been misinformed or cheated on by unethical marketers who promise the world but fail to deliver on the promise.
SEO is not a quick pass to easy glory. But, for small business owners competing against the giants of the respective industries, even the small things help to boost your brand and improve traffic to your website.
Google is not your personal marketer:
Google is a smart search engine that has machine learning capabilities, but it is not your marketing assistant. You cannot throw as many URLs as possible at it and expect a higher ranking. Google is a search engine that catalogs and ranks websites based on several factors and they have nothing to do with the optimization of your web page.
There is no magic involved in how a search engine like Google works. It only employs a highly complicated mathematical equation to search and categorize websites. The only way to improve the ranking of your business is by optimizing your web pages to improve user-experience and increase the ease at which the search engine crawlers can access and assimilate the content.
Is doing SEO once enough?
Asking if doing SEO once is enough is like asking if eating once is enough for your lifetime. Search engines are always upgrading their algorithm, and as a result, SEO tactics are ever-shifting and changing. As time passes old tactics, loose relevancy and newer tactics take its place.
As a small business, it is crucial to understand this detail as it is the key to achieving your goals in the future.
The decline in your web page traffic not only stem from changing algorithms but also from poor upkeep of your content, degradation of your links, and even the rise of fierce competition. To keep yourself above the rest, a constant monitoring of your websites will help. Not all businesses require a continuous renewal and rework, but having an eye on your traffic and that of your competition is always a good strategy.
Link Building:
In the olden days, during the height of shady SEO practices, the unethical marketers took advantage of the loopholes in the search engine algorithms and bumped up the websites by spamming the search engines and building black-hat links. The words of Google’s John Mueller about avoiding links have also caused distrust in the whole process of link building.
But, that is far from the truth because natural and organic link building is still a relevant factor that search engine algorithms use to rank the websites. The use of authority links and anchor texts help to validate your site’s content, and the presence of external links from distinguished sources help to improve your site’s visibility. Thus, a proper understanding of how links work and how they affect your website’s ranking is crucial for small businesses and others.
Google’s dual relationship with SEO:
Though Google encourages the use of SEP marketing skills to optimize your web pages, it also flags and penalizes sites that overdo it. This is mostly because the Google algorithm updates Panda and Penguin help to peruse the website’s content and trash the ones that take an aggressive approach to the use of keywords and tags, In other words, sites that overstuff their title tags and meta descriptions with keywords along with providing poor-quality content are trashed and penalized.
So, the best way to build a beneficial relationship between your small business and the search engine is through the use of white-hat SEO tactics and by avoiding quick and dirty tricks.
Is SEO trickery?
If you consider the best way to gain popularity and traffic is to put more keywords in your title tag, then SEO is nothing but a bag of tricks. These tricks are actually manipulative tactics used by certain marketers and do not define the practice as a whole. SEO is much more than stuffing your website with keywords and links. SEO works hand-in-hand with content marketing and online marketing to better every aspect of your site from its structure to its site navigation and load speed to its accessibility on all platforms and so on.
Real SEO takes time and effort and is not just a few tricks that you employ to get overnight results.
Effect of Social activity on SEO:
Though social media marketing is a different method of gaining traffic and coverage, it still ties in with your SEO plan. Having a social media page not only improves the chances of search engine discovery and site indexing but also the number of natural links and shares to your main website.
Google might not use social media activity as criteria for its algorithm, but that does not decrease the effectiveness of it. Small businesses stand to gain a lot by using social media as it increases the reach of your brand as well puts it in front of the right audience.
Conclusion:
Whatever may be your view on SEO, whether you believe it a myth or a valuable marketing tool, it is hard to play ignorant when faced with concrete proof on the success of SEO. All the non-believers out there will always try to find some way to discredit SEO strategies, but as the saying goes, ‘the proof is in the pudding’, the only way you can know for yourself is to apply proper SEO techniques to your own website.
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