One of the great stories of the Second World War is that of the work done at Bletchley Park, which is situated in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, England. Bletchley Park was the site of the United Kingdom government’s main center for decryption activity. The UK Government Code and Cypher School was established there.
Some of its most important decryption work led to the decoding of the German Lorenz and Enigma codes. Code breaking is not a one-off-crack-it-once-crack-it-forever activity. As the Germans modified their codes so the British code breakers had to modify their decryptions. In a way, there is a very neat parallel to be drawn with search engine optimization (SEO) work.
SEO experts work to decrypt their own codes, that of the search engines. This allows them to produce content that contributes to the optimization of websites. However, things change constantly. What was good SEO practice last year may be less effective today. What is good today, may be ineffective next week. Verticalresponse.com puts it well:
When Google’s so-called Panda update dropped in 2011, it turned the world of search on its head: quality, not keywords, would dominate from here on out and content would be king. Now Google has updated its algorithms again…Panda 2.0…and every marketer and small business needs to adapt once more…
The challenge, of course, is that Google does not tell us precisely what these changes are. Here are a few tips to help you hit the spot with your SEO.
The Reader Rules
Content is king, and always will be king; however it is the reader that rules. Your first thought, says finallymakeit-online.com, should always be for the reader:
First and foremost well-written, meaningful, original, interesting and reader friendly content is important, it has to be something people will want to read and your personality should shine through…. readers should want to share your article and the article…should at least be a minimum of 300 words.
The starting point is to ask yourself what you are trying to do with your content. Your answer should be along the lines that you are trying to build customer loyalty. How do you do that? You do it with high quality content.
There may well have been a time when poor quality high quantity content were churned out by some SEO experts (and I use the word experts advisedly, here). Marketers have always known the importance played by high quality, informative, relevant content in helping to secure brand loyalty.
A well written article, newsletter or blog that readers find useful will help to raise your company’s profile in the minds of customers as experts in the field. High quality content helps secure your company’s position as an organization that can be trusted: an organization that can be turned to for advice. If your content is written purely as a sales pitch it is highly likely to have a negative effect on the image you portray.
I think I know what you’re thinking here. If you write for your customers, aren’t you ignoring the requirements of the search engines? The answer is no, quite the contrary. The recent changes that Google has made to its algorithms means that quality content and the reader experience are very high in the hierarchy of things that Google is looking for.
Get those things right and you enter a very welcome virtuous circle. The quality content you produce should improve your search ranking. This gives your brand more exposure. The more exposure you get the more likely it is that potential customers will find you. This in turn will give you more exposure, which in turn should attract more customers… and so it goes on and on.
Don’t Rest on Your Laurels
Just going back to Bletchley Park for a moment, the decoders working there in World War Two knew that their work would never be finished as long as the war lasted. SEO work is very similar. It is a constantly changing world. As Johngary explains, SEO is a marathon not a sprint.
If you have some work done on the fabric of your building, you expect that it’s going to last a good few years…SEO is not like that. You have to view SEO as an ongoing project and not something you do once and leave alone.
The obvious question is just how do you keep on top of things. The simply answer is that it takes a bit of an investment either of time, money or both. You can employ experts; people whose jobs are involved in keeping up to date with all things regarding SEO. But even they can’t guarantee to get you to the top of the search engine results pages.
An alternative is to choose someone in your company (it could be you) who will become a SEO student. Whoever takes on the role will need the time to do the job, but if you are serious about how you use SEO as a marketing tool the investment will pay dividends in the long run.
Keywords
Are keywords still important? The short answer is yes they are. You need to remember that search engines began their lives as tools for academics to search through masses of text. Search engines, therefore, have always had, still have and are likely to keep an affinity for text. It is unlikely that keywords are going to lose significance anytime shortly. Keyword stuffing on the other hand is something to be avoided.
Is there an ideal keyword density? The truth is that an article should flow naturally and read as though it has been written by an expert. The use of language should be accurate and should have a register that is appropriate for the subject matter that is being spoken about. All subjects have a language that people who are experts in that subject are able to use accurately. That is what search engines are looking for. Thus Alanna Brown offers this advice,
Simply incorporate major keywords and long tail keywords as they come naturally and you should do fine. They should flow seamlessly and never stand out to the reader.
The word to be emphasized in the above quotation is “naturally”.
In conclusion, it is worth reiterating the point that SEO is not an activity that is a one off event. Just like code breaking. It is something that constantly has to be worked at.