SEO or Search Engine Optimization has changed dramatically in the past few years. The reason is that Google has gotten wiser and is requiring websites to follow three basic rules. Following is an outline of the 3 Modern SEO Secrets.
In 2008, you could optimize a page, rely on getting backlinks to that page, and find your website at the top of most keyword results.
Flash forward to today. In order to get a website ranked today, you need three things:
1. Content
2. Quality Links
3. Interactions
Content
It’s a fact – there are no good rankings without content. It’s a hard truth to learn, yet that truth is valid. You must have content on a website in order to have even a slight chance of getting ranked for a single key phrase.
So build a multitude of quality content on your website now and then keep adding to it. What is the key? Make sure the content is optimized for high-ranked keywords that are actually searched for and have little competition.
The best way to build content in my opinion is a Blog. Create blog entries that deal with the keywords. Something like “10 Best Ways to [keyword]” or “Without [keyword], You Are Missing the Boat.” There are many articles on the Internet about content, so I won’t go into great deal; suffice it to say you need content in abundance to give your website a chance of getting ranked.
Quality Links
Google has always relied on incoming links to a website to determine if a page is relevant to a specific keyword search. In the early days of Google, you could optimize a page, create incoming links via blog comments, get listed in directories, and get ranked. In the very early days, you could participate in a link farm to get ranked. Google caught on to this and put a stop to it.
So links still play an important part, but now the important question is – are they QUALITY links? Quality links are basically links from quality sites that are related to your keywords. Google doesn’t want to see links from a plumber’s website directed to an accountant’s site. That doesn’t make sense. So Google will actually penalize that link and not reward it.
So how do you find quality links? The best way that we’ve found is to syndicate content to other blogs and make sure they point back to our websites with the keyword as the anchor. Article Directories are really great places to make this happen.
Another way to get quality links is to post comments on other related blogs. Just make sure that they are not “Nofollow” blogs. What is a “nofollow”? It’s a tag that’s embedded inside the anchor tag that tells the search engines not to follow the link. So you’ll want to look for blogs that have disabled the “nofollow” tag.
These are just a few techniques to get quality links pointing back to your site. Just know that quality incoming links are very important for your modern SEO strategy.
Interactions
The third key factor to getting linked is Interactions. Interactions are what is happening on your website – how often it’s updated, how often blogs are updated and even receive comments, how many links are added per day to the site, etc.
These are all very important because Google is actually rewarding these Interactions because it’s the best way for it to see if a site is popular. More interactions is equivalent to more popular and therefore more relevant to the search.
How do you get more interactions? Start blogging. Get involved on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Promote your blog and balance your link building strategy as listed above. Make it all look as organic as possible. Make it look as if you are actually participating on the Internet. It’s what Google wants to see and it’s what people who are surfing want to see.
SEO isn’t rocket science; however, it does take a little thought and a LOT of work if you want to do it right. If you combine all three key factors of modern SEO, which is content, quality links, and interactions, you will be sure to rise to the very top of the search engines!
Chris Hunter is an expert in web design and Search Engine Marketing and runs a blog about Internet Marketing techniques. You can also go to his website that is all about Houston SEO.
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