By admin • Apr 18th, 2008 • Category: Web design
I remember way back in the olden days, when SEO
was in its infancy. Pretty much anyone who could find half an hour
would be able to get their website into the top five, without the
slightest problem. All you had to do was put a few keywords on your site
and press ‘submit’ to send your site to the major search engines. The
only trouble was that a few things changed
- Many more companies put up their own sites
- Major search engines changes their policy on automatic submissions
- Keywords needed page copy to match
- Search engines became wise to overuse of keywords
The late 90’s and beyond
After the early years, web developers started
using tricks such as doorway pages, mirror sites and a host of other
techniques in an attempt to overcome search engine rankings – many of
these were no more than what we see today, with terms such as
‘backlinks’ replacing older SEO concepts like FFA (free for all sites
which resulted in an avalanche of unwanted emails).
It wasn’t long before the advantages to be gained
by using new techniques actually meant that eventually sites would be
de-listed or simply fall off the rankings. The people in the know
realised that Google was now taking off and humoured those still using
alternative sites as a yardstick of success.
I remember a client in 2002 who called me on a
Sunday to comment that his website was number 4 on Freeserve. I thanked
him most courteously for letting me know and was flabbergasted at his
response. He wasn’t a happy man. Despite me achieving position 1 on
every other search engine for his product, he berated me for only being
in position 4 on one of the minor search engines.
I laughed a little louder when he said that another
company could do much better (because they would say that wouldn’t
they). Politely suggesting that he may be wiser to use their services, I
carried on driving and didn’t think anything else of it until 6-months
later when he called again.
This time, all of his rankings had pretty much
disappeared and he pleaded with me to start working for him again. He
offered my 400% more for doing the work, yet I declined his kind offer
on the grounds that working with clients is about trust and this had now
well and truly evaporated. Back to the issues, things
have moved on immeasurably today and even with individuals setting up
specialist SEO companies, things aren’t yet where they should be.
To be or not to be
The main problem today doesn’t stem from lack
of knowledge, simply the inability of SEO companies and their smaller
clients to realise that the world is no longer a level playing field.
In years gone by the website was the domain of the
smaller company, who without expensive premises on the high street,
could easily masquerade as an industry giant, when the
client base was either purely online or geographically so far away that
it didn’t matter how salubrious their business premises were. In those
days, what mattered was the quality of your website as getting up the
rankings was very easy.
Nowadays, unless you have unlimited web budgets to
commit to pay per click advertising, it is difficult to gain high
rankings with your moderately sized site unless you are a niche market
player or, can make good use of skilful copywriting.
The essence here is that clever copywriting is
extremely important as often it has to tie in with what you want to say,
the keywords you use and it has to look attractive on the site in order
to make site visitors want to engage with you on a business level.
The bottom line is that whilst SEO is king today,
you need to ensure that you either have an excellent understanding of
the ancillary factors which lead to good search engine rankings, or
craft your copy so well, that you could equally forge a living as a
Booker Prize winner. Good luck.
No comments:
Post a Comment