Search Engine Optimization – A Different Perspective

These days it’s all too common to see companies offering Search Engine Optimisation services to businesses that promise results by building 1000′s of backlinks to your website. Using such services is likely to cause problems for your website rather than increasing your rank in the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Page).

I believe many people fail to look at SEO from Google’s perspective. Google’s aim is to rank websites for their relevance and quality of content for each and every search term. If your website is not going to benefit Google’s users for a specific key term that you’re targeting then Google simply won’t rank your website where you would like it to be.

A couple of SEO techniques that may have worked in the past but have little value now if any at all are:

Meta Tags

In the early days of search engines and SEO meta tags were a very easy way to rank higher for any amount of keywords. As you can imagine it wasn’t long until the popular search engines started to notice that websites were ranking high for keywords that were nothing to do with the content on their website. Taking Google as an example this means that their visitors were getting non-relevant results for their search queries. These days it’s known that Google doesn’t pay any attention to your websites meta tags for this very reason.

Directory Submission

Don’t get me wrong some directories may hold some value to your website as far as SEO and direct traffic goes, for example Yahoo’s directory and DMOZ may hold some value but unfortunately the truth is that 99% of directories do not add any value to Google or their own visitors so that will also reflect on the websites listed in these types of directory. I see many people/companies offering directory submission services which include submitting your website to hundreds and sometimes thousands of directories while promising that you will see results from this. My advice would be to run away from such services because:

1) If one day you have 100 incoming links and the next you have 1100 the search engines are going to know that you’re unnaturally trying to rank higher in the search engines while may result in your website being penalized.

2) I can’t even list 100 generic directories that are likely to benefit your site so the quality of the directories included with such services is likely to be very bad.

Note: If you submit your website to relevant directories then you may generate direct traffic as a result which is certainly worth it but in most cases don’t expect an improvement in your websites rank in the SERPs.

Reciprocal Link Building

A reciprocal link is where 2 websites exchange links. Much like Meta Tags this used to be a fantastic way to improve your websites rank in the search engines but these days it’s unlikely to be of any value because it doesn’t show the search engines anything about the quality of your websites content.

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