24 May Keeping up with SEO Techniques

We all live by the Google god whether we know it or not. Even if you’ve never thought about Facebook marketing or Twitter marketing in terms of how it will effect your website’s ranking, Google is the place which will birth the vast majority of your search engine traffic. So even if you make no effort at SEO, you still lie awake at night wondering if the Google god will honor you and place your website higher above the others, preferably on the first page, preferably in the number one spot.
Making a Smart Choice in SEO Strategy
But in order to have any chance of making a ranking, some effort has to be put into SEO. A few years ago SEO basically meant spamming a page with links and keywords. This angered the Google god, and now the art has become far more subtle, and continues to become so with every Google algorithm update. Now perhaps more than god, Google is more of the wizard behind the curtain. That makes you Dorothy. I’m the Tin Man. It would take an artificial intelligence greater than that which can win at Jeopardy to create something which could perfectly judge the intent of a webpage. SEO will always have a place. But as the algorithms become more sophisticated, and certain practices become devalued, SEO becomes more about creating quality content that fits a niche rather than strategies which “fool” a search engine algorithm.
This will mean you need to make a careful choice in picking who does your SEO work. Here are some of the important SEO aspects of a site to pay attention to today:
1. Work On Page Load Speed
2. Eliminate Duplicates
3. Teach Someone Something
4. Structure Your Site
5. When Local Go Local
None of the above include anything about links, keyword placement, or article seeding. These practices will still have a place in tomorrow’s SEO practices in some form, but they are fading as the bread and butter of the practice. What the above methods indicate is that algorithm development aims to be able to tell the kind of content you are placing on your site. And its not too hard to figure out how this is done. Page speed and duplicates are obvious. Since the earliest DOS systems there have been basic commands to measure speed and tell if something is a duplicate of another. The process has just been refined as computers are taught a tiny bit to understand “similarity” (your dog is still better at it). But 3, 4 and 5 point the way to greater sophistication. Language that tends toward selling has a certain type of structure, full of “calls to action” and lots of exciting verbs. An instructional page on a website will have a plain language, longer sentences and more sentences using a form of “to be.” So in being able to differentiate these subtleties, it’s important that content written for your website have an aim toward satisfying these new priorities.
For more information about these practices see this post here: http://www.portent.com/blog/seo/5-seo-strategies-we-swear-arent-going-anywhere.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+conversationmarketing%2FMRJI+%28The+Portent+Blog%3A+Conversation+Marketing%29