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

by premasagar

Article by Carl Fraser

Ever since the launch of the first search engines, companies have not surprisingly wanted to get good ratings in search. During the infancy of the search engines, there were many easy techniques that you could implement to your site which would assist with your search positions. However, as search engines developed, most of these tricks no longer worked, and, even in some cases, had a negative effect on ratings, or meant that sites were banned totally. Now that search engines are more sophisticated than ever, what is this likely to mean for the strategies companies implement to maintain and improve their search engine ratings?

With the mighty Google dominating the search industry, many companies offer a multitude of techniques claiming to obtain top rankings for particular keywords. Several years ago, this could be achieved via mainly changes to the layout of your site. More recently, the Google algorithm has become very heavily dependent on the popularity of your site, so a great deal of Search Engine Optimisation companies focused their resources almost purely on building links. This meant that many sites with little or no quality content could get very high rankings purely by having bought lots of backlinks to their site.

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

Building links is undoubtedly still important, but it can no longer be viewed with a 'set it up and forget about it' approach. The links should be relevant 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 links with mass-submission software is unlikely to reap rewards in the long-term.

It seems that now, mo! re than ever, businesses need to take a holistic view of their search engine strategy. No single tactic is likely to be successful in the long term. Instead, you need a structured plan to provide more, quality content on your site as well as continue to encourage people to link back to it.

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

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

About the Author

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.

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