If you are wondering whether or not it is still possible to get traffic to your web site using search engine optimization, I have to tell you, the short answer is yes.
While it’s true that things seem to always be changing and Google keeps throwing out update after update, like Pandas and Penguins (I’m sure Bears and Gators are coming soon), the real basics of search engine optimization never really go out of style.
Why SEO Is Still Important
Let’s look at it from the search engine companies point of view. They make money via advertising.
In order to do that, they need people to come to their sites and perform searches.
For that to happen, and to keep those people coming back, they need to quickly deliver the relevant and helpful results that these people are looking for in the first place.
So, while it seems as if the search engines might hate us, they are just trying to find the best way to deliver the best results to their true customer, the person performing the keyword searches.
While there are hundreds of factors, all with a different importance level, in determining the rankings in the search engines (and all of us are just guessing as to exactly what they really are), it really boils down to two criteria – the information on the page itself, and the relevant, high quality links pointing to that page.
Google Updates Hit Old SEO Approach
You see, one of the big, recent changes to search engine rankings that really hurt a lot of SEO people, was that the search engines were weeding out the high volume, low quality links people were getting to their sites.
This meant the engines were figuring out blog networks and shutting them down by penalizing the sites they were linking to.
It also meant figuring out the low quality links coming from link building software like SE Nuke.
They are also penalized for over optimization.
This meant if a site was getting 10,000 links pointing to a page and 99% of those links had the exact anchor text of the keyword you were trying to rank for, the engines were penalizing that page in the rankings.
The search engines figured that there was no way that could happen naturally so you must be gaming the system.
But this doesn’t mean all is lost. You still can get SEO traffic to your web site by following some simple rules.
How SEO Works Today
Let’s look at some of those things you can do on your page to help make the search engines sit up and take notice.
First, make sure your keyword is in the title and the meta description for the page. Yes, this still matters and it’s easy to do so don’t neglect this simple step.
Second, make sure the keyword phrase is in an H1 header.
Third, be sure and interlink your content. When you add an article to your site, be sure and include links to other relevant content on your site. This site structure is important to what the engines think of your site.
One simple way to think of this structure is like this. You can link your home page to page one with the keyword you are using on page one. Then link page one to page two with the keyword you are using on page two. Finally, link page two to page three with the keyword you are using on page three and on page three link back to the home page with the main keyword for your home page in the link anchor text.
Fourth, add video to your page. It doesn’t have to be your own video, it can just be a relevant video you’ve gotten off of You Tube or Meta Cafe or any other video site.
As far as links go, forget about trying to get more links than the other sites and go after relevant, high quality links and alter the anchor text of your links so it looks natural.
Nowadays, a site with good site structure and a few high quality relevant links pointing to it, can outrank a site with thousands of low quality links from irrelevant sites.
So to answer the question, “Is it still possible to get SEO traffic to your website?”, yes, it most certainly is!. It’s just a slightly different game now but one with more opportunities! Get more SEO insights here.