Play Region

If you have a website, sooner or later you’ll get interested in
search engine optimisation. It’s the art (or is it a science?)
of tweaking your website copy and links, so your site ranks
higher in the search engines.

There are many professional search engine optimisation firms
(commonly known as SEOs) who will charge you substantial amounts
of money to improve your website’s rankings for certain search
terms.

It’s tempting to go down the SEO track, particularly when you
find your precious site languishing far, far down the rankings
on Google.

But one of the world’s top Web marketing experts, Ken Evoy, has
written a new report predicting the imminent demise of the SEO
industry - and recommending an alternative, more reliable method
of achieving a top search engine ranking.

Evoy argues search engines are getting smarter and smarter at
recognising sites that have been “SEO’d”.

The engines are constantly getting more sophisticated, to avoid
some of the unethical SEO practices being used to trick them
into giving a site a good ranking.

So SEO experts are on a continual treadmill to keep up.

Initially, SEO revolved mainly around keywords. Now, it seems to
centre around building inbound links to the site, to get a
higher ‘page rank’ on Google.

But Evoy believes website owners are wasting their time and
money by becoming too focused on either of these SEO techniques.

They would be better off, he argues, simply adding more and more
quality content to their websites, to provide visitors with what
they really want on the Web - information.

To quote Evoy: “Make your content so good that others will want
to link to you.”

He adds, a little honest push-start by a solid, simple inbound
link programme is a good idea but this doesn’t have to become an
all-consuming pre-occupation.

All you need are a few popular sites, in your market sector,
linking to you. There are several ways to achieve this,
including contacting the owners of sites you would like linking
to you, and asking if they want to exchange links.

Evoy’s company, Sitesell.com, has an excellent, free link
exchange service, which I have found very satisfactory for
gaining links to my own sites.

Once you have a few quality links to your site, that’s enough,
according to Evoy. From then on, concentrate on adding more and
more content to your site.

There is an important place for keywords on these new content
pages. It helps to focus each page on one or two keywords
(actually, it’s better to use key phrases, because these are
what Web searchers typically use) sprinkle these keywords and
phrases throughout your page.

You can find the best keywords by using a service called
Wordtracker. This is particularly useful because it saves you
from simply guessing which words and phrases people are
searching on, and gives you the actual search terms being used -
and how much competition there is for these terms.

I won’t go too much into keyword analysis here. Suffice it to
say, if you follow Evoy’s advice, you’ll focus mainly on writing
content-filled pages that are of genuine value to your
prospective customers or clients.

As the search engines see the content on your site continually
changing, they’ll return more often. They’ll spider new content
on your pages faster and faster. This is good news and helps
your search engine rankings.

The only downside of Evoy’s approach is that it does take time
and commitment to keep adding content to your website. It may
seem easier to pay an SEO expert.

But consider this. Even if you do achieve a good ranking in the
search engines through SEO, if a visitor arrives and finds
mediocre content, what’s the use. They’ll simply click away. For
most small businesses, with limited financial resources, the key
to getting your website noticed in the search engines is a slow,
steady approach of adding more and more pages with great,
relevant content for your marketplace.

Then you can forget about SEO and every other trick.

Focus on building content and everything else will take care of
itself.