Key Treadmill Article of the Day

 

Why search engine optimisation is doomed … and quality content is the best strategy for your website
Author : Chris Mole
If you have a website sooner or later youll get interested in search engine optimisation. Its the art (or is it a science?) of tweaking your website copy and links so your site ranks higher in the search engines.

There are many professional search engine optimisation firms (commonly known as SEOs) who will charge you substantial amounts of money to improve your websites rankings for certain search terms.

Its tempting to go down the SEO track particularly when you find your precious site languishing far far down the rankings on Google.

But one of the worlds top Web marketing experts Ken Evoy has written a new report predicting the imminent demise of the SEO industry and recommending an alternative more reliable method of achieving a top search engine ranking.

Evoy argues search engines are getting smarter and smarter at recognising sites that have been SEOd.

The engines are constantly getting more sophisticated to avoid some of the unethical SEO practices being used to trick them into giving a site a good ranking.

So SEO experts are on a continual treadmill to keep up.

Initially SEO revolved mainly around keywords. Now it seems to centre around building inbound links to the site to get a higher page rank on Google.

But Evoy believes website owners are wasting their time and money by becoming too focused on either of these SEO techniques.

They would be better off he argues simply adding more and more quality content to their websites to provide visitors with what they really want on the Web information.

To quote Evoy: Make your content so good that others will want to link to you.

He adds a little honest push-start by a solid simple inbound link programme is a good idea but this doesnt have to become an all-consuming pre-occupation.

All you need are a few popular sites in your market sector linking to you.
There are several ways to achieve this including contacting the owners of sites you would like linking to you and asking if they want to exchange links.

Evoys company Sitesell.com has an excellent free link exchange service which I have found very satisfactory for gaining links to my own sites.

Once you have a few quality links to your site thats enough according to Evoy.
From then on concentrate on adding more and more content to your site.

There is an important place for keywords on these new content pages. It helps to focus each page on one or two keywords (actually its better to use key phrases because these are what Web searchers typically use) sprinkle these keywords and phrases throughout your page.

You can find the best keywords by using a service called Wordtracker. This is particularly useful because it saves you from simply guessing which words and phrases people are searching on and gives you the actual search terms being used and how much competition there is for these terms.

I wont go too much into keyword analysis here. Suffice it to say if you follow Evoys advice youll focus mainly on writing content-filled pages that are of genuine value to your prospective customers or clients.

As the search engines see the content on your site continually changing theyll return more often. Theyll spider new content on your pages faster and faster. This is good news and helps your search engine rankings.

The only downside of Evoys approach is that it does take time and commitment to keep adding content to your website. It may seem easier to pay an SEO expert.

But consider this. Even if you do achieve a good ranking in the search engines through SEO if a visitor arrives and finds mediocre content whats the use. Theyll simply click away.
For most small businesses with limited financial resources the key to getting your website noticed in the search engines is a slow steady approach of adding more and more pages with great relevant content for your marketplace.

Then you can forget about SEO and every other trick.

Focus on building content and everything else will take care of itself.

About the Author

Chris Mole is a freelance website copywriter based near Christchurch New Zealand. He has more than 20 years experience writing for print radio and Web media and now specialises in writing truly persuasive sales copy for small businesses.

Website: www.web-words.co.nz
Email: chris@web-words.co.nz