People love to talk about SEO, especially business owners. It’s become a buzz topic and many of the folks (especially small business owners) that catch wind of it will do the minimum that they’re aware of – which often consists of stuffing their website full of keywords.
I’ve had many conversations with business owners that tell me that they’ve optimized their website and they handle their own SEO. This brings a cringe because more often than not their idea of SEO is centered on website content and keywords – nothing more.
They’re often blinding by the pride of seeing their website appear in the search results, even if it’s not at the top. I hear “There’s only a little way to go, just need to tweak my site content a little more”. Too much emphasis is being placed on website content itself as a ranking factor and it’s not – at all. Website content as a whole does not determine placement in search results.
There is so much more to site rank. The content within a website is merely there to establish relevancy. Relevancy in content is the doorway into the SERPS but it’s not a fast-pass to the finish line. It’s rare that you can optimize a site and get top rank. If that happens, you’ve probably found a local or regional phrase with no competition or a completely irrelevant keyword – or both.
There are hundreds of variables that are considered during the milliseconds between hitting enter on a search query and the posted results. Google has to ask a lot of questions to determine who, of the millions of pages in most categories, are the most relevant and in what order of relevancy to file them for a specific phrase. Of those hundreds of factors, there are several that carry a bulk of the weight.
How much emphasis is placed on each is going to vary with every update made to algorithms which tends to happen almost daily (especially with Google). Because of the weight put on so many different factors, it’s easy to see that website content – while important – does not carry the weight of your SEO and should not be your primary concern as a ranking factor.
Yes, you can gain some rank by optimizing your site and it needs to be done but don’t do the victory dance yet. I hear the question of “I’ve optimized the site, so I’m done and we just wait now, right?” Absolutely not. On page optimization is only the first step and it’s your means to establish relevancy alone. This is how you enter the race against the competition and you start engaging your target audience for specific search phrases. From here, you need to start thinking about the other ranking factors. Link building and social engagement or social sharing is going to be the big fish that feeds your SEO hunger and start bringing in results.
To Your Success,
Joerg Weishaupt
P.s. Get more information on social media and marketing in my free primer "Building A Successful Marketing Strategy". Sign up for your free copy today.
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Joerg Weishaupt is a 48 year old entrepreneur, software architect, search engine optimization and social media expert. Joerg has been building a lot of profitable Internet businesses since he put his first website online in 1995. He is also one of the founders and partners of Social Media Science LLC, where he launched a content syndication network called SYNND.
Joerg resides in a small, quiet community about 100 miles outside of Munich, Germany. If you ever seek to find him, look for where the cows gather.
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