The most important spect of your SEO is your website and making sure it is easy to navigate for both search engine robots and end users. Even with the advanced technology utilized by search engines, they still need help understanding your website. SEO is what helps guide search engines on your website so that they know what each page is about and why users would want to look at it.
We frequently hear this argument…
“Why would someone or a company build such a network that requires constant updating in order to be found online? Any website, framework, or code should be able to be indexed by all search engines…I shouldn’t need special services to make it happen.”
But…here’s a scenario for all of you…
Let’s say you post a picture on your website. As a human, you know it’s a picture of a black dog playing fetch in a park. However, to a search engine it’s just a picture with a title. By using SEO, you can tell the search engine exactly what is in the picture so that users can find it when searching online. Understanding this process allows you to build, format, and annotate your content so that search engines can index it. Without proper SEO, your website is essentially invisible to search engines.
Search Engine Technology
All of the major search engines use the same parameters. The search engine bots (automated) crawl the Internet, follow links, and read content before storing the indexed information in databases. Artificial intelligence is the basis for the crawling, but it is not all-powerful. There are numerous limitations that can cause problems if proper SEO is not performed on your content.
Content Indexing Problems
- Forms: Search engines aren’t good at completing online forms (such as a login), and thus any content contained behind them may remain hidden.
- Original content: Creating duplicate pages hurts your rankings because search engines want original content.
- Robots.txt blocks: Errors in a crawling directives (robots.txt) may lead to a page ranking of zero.
- Poor link structures: If a website’s link structure isn’t setup properly, search engine can deem the content as unimportant for users.
- Images, audio & video: Proper tagging and descriptions are needed for search engines to properly read these types of content.
- Matching content to searches: having proper SEO allows for the right content to be displayed for the corresponding searches.
Make sure your content eventually gets seen
Marketing your content properly and effectively is another aspect of SEO. Search engines themselves don’t have formulas to gauge the quality of content on the Internet. However, they rely on relevance and importance when displaying search results. Those metrics are measured by what people do with the content. In other words, you have to get the content shared and talked about to make it effective.
There are an average of ten positions on any given search results page. The results are ordered by rank…the higher your website ranks, the better you attract users. Websites in positions 1, 2, and 3 receive substantially more traffic than results down the page. Once you move off of page 1, the traffic goes down considerably again. No matter how search engine marketing and technology may change in the future, websites and business will always compete to be in the top position so their brand is visible to as many users as possible.
SEO Parameters & Standards Are Constantly Changing
Since the mid-1990s when search marketing began, everything has changed. Back then you focused on manual submission, keyword stuffing, and other tactics that are now against search engine guidelines. The changing landscape of SEO not only requires constant monitoring, but it also requires businesses to update their websites on a more consistent basis and an evolving SEO strategy. While some things are uncertain, one thing that is certain is the change for the search world is always constant. For this reason, search engine marketing should be the number one priority for your business’s website.
Don’t let tactics from earlier years hurt your SEO today.
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