Search Engine Optimization is a curious thing for most folks. It conjures up thoughts of powerful search formulas, convoluted algorithms, and beating the search engines at their own game. But here’s the comforting news: SEO doesn’t have to be a confusing matter.
Take this story from a real estate agent client who hired an SEO provider to increase her traffic and search engine ranking.
Our estate agent client was promised top positioning on all major search engines for a mere $200 a month – an unusually low price. After an uneventful four month period with no traffic increase to her website, she requested a status report from the SEO marketing firm. Within that four month period, only 5 incoming links had been placed (a good rule of thumb is to shoot for 10-15 links a week). To make matters worse, her site was being paired with websites completely unrelated to her industry: a cookie manufacturer’s site, two limousine company websites, a fabric manufacturer, and a ballroom dancing site.
After requesting more information about why her incoming links were so unrelated to her real estate industry, she received the following response:
“It is not done to get you traffic from people visiting these websites. It is not there to tell the search engines where you are located or what it is that you do. All of that has to do with your keywords and phrases. It does not matter that the site does not do the same thing you do or that the PR (page rank) is different from yours. It is done to make the search engines return to your site more; that is the plan. It is truly as simple as that.”
While it isn’t truly as simple as that, it is still easy to get quantifiable results from an SEO campaign. Our SEO guru, Toby, says that there are a few basic truths that everyone should be aware of when it comes to SEO marketing. One is that search engines act as a school counselor, in order to be one of the “cool kids”, you need to have inbound links to your website from similarly related industries. Not only do these links give search engines a barometer of a site’s popularity, they aid in determining the topic and relevance of a site in relation to its targeted keywords.
Creating backlinks to dubious websites in unrelated industries, such as a cookie manufacturer linking to a real estate site, is a perfect way to cast yourself as the “bad kid”. And once you’re tagged by the search engines as a bad cookie? Well, good luck moving over to the good side.
To make sure you’re receiving truly unparalleled SEO results, make sure you’re playing on the right team by checking your detailed SEO monthly reports for the following:
- SERP(*) results showing all targeted keywords and their page rank on each search engine.
- Requested Links – Marketing Colab typically goes after 10-15 links per week on average. Gaining more than this usually tips of search engines and is viewed as “un-natural”.
- Active Links – This list should grow over time.
- Links should all be related in some way to your industry.
- Number of monthly visitors – These numbers should also be growing consistenly over time.
- The paths from which your website traffic is coming.
With a little know-how and the right tools, SEO doesn’t have to be a small business’s marketing nightmare. It can be as simple as finding the right links.
* Taken from Wikipedia- A search engine results page (SERP), is the listing of web pages returned by a search engine in response to a keyword query. The results normally include a list of web pages with titles, a link to the page, and a short description showing where the keywords have matched content within the page. A SERP may refer to a single page of links returned, or to the set of all links returned for a search query).
