29 1 / 2012
A Comprehensible Overview of How SEO Works
On the web you will find thousands of articles and books how on how SEO works, this not another of those article.
I want to look at SEO from a fresh point of view, and it will show you, that, SEO is something which can be done by anyone who has some creative flair and devoted at achieving set goal(s).
Google uses over 200 signals to rank your website and pages. Thus, we generally divide SEO into two parts. First you have the onsite optimisation. Secondly you have offsite link building strategy. Some companies offload the link building side of SEO to agencies, which can be a time consuming task. Link building involves lots of research and outreach to strategic key-holders, which sometimes doesn’t work out well.
With the (quite recent and ongoing) Panda update to its algorithm the SEO game has changed significantly. It’s my personal opinion that Panda update is great for consumers for finding information, and business that are genuine. As with any update nothing is perfect and Panda has its flaws. But, regardless it has become much harder to game the system and get ranked higher in Google. Now, it’s not just about having millions of backlinks, but how many of those are coming from authoritative domains, and from diverse sources, and how they are linking back to you i.e. the anchor text.
SEOmoz has great free guide on how to get started on SEO. I highly recommend it for beginners (http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo). So, I’ve got my meta title, meta description, content of the page, and I even put some long tail and short tail keywords my customers search on Google into my content, but why am not ranked higher? Well, as I said before onsite optimisation plays a role in the ranking algorithm i.e. you need to get it right. But, it’s the backlinks which are your knight in shining armour! The more backlinks you have from authoritative domains, the better. Also, diverse linking from your customers plays a great role in getting you highly ranked. When people start to link back to you Google notices this and, thus, thinks the content/website is highly relevant to the people who are searching for those particular short/long tail keywords. For example we want to be ranked for SEO in Hatfield (UK), so we create a great website with great content and we’ve done onsite optimisation, but why aren’t we ranked top for when people search for “SEO in Hatfield” or “web development in Hatfield” in Google.co.uk? That’s because we don’t have enough backlinks yet, when compared to the first website you see when searching for those keywords in Google.
Now you may be thinking if this is so easy, why can’t I create few website and link back to my own website to get ranked high in Google? Well, if you do that Google will figure it out (C Blocks) and demote you for spamming. The more diverse your backlinks are the better. That’s why you need to encourage your customers to link back to your website i.e. using social media or through your blog.
SEO of is two things, onsite optimisation and having great backlinks. There is no magic involved in between! Now you can do those things by yourself for free, but sometimes you don’t have the time or resource to do so, and that’s where we come in. SEO is a long term investment, you are not going to get results within weeks, but within months you will see your organic visitors are rising and that’s what you need the most in long term, and not running PPC (pay per click) campaigns.
P.S. I’d love to hear what you guys think, so comment away!
