Why Good SEO Matters
The Internet has become a driving force in our lives. The World Wide Web is used to help us communicate with one another, shop, pay our bills and more. The buzz phrase in this whole process? Search engine optimization, know simply to most people as SEO.
For a company to use good SEO they must determine what their customers (or potential customers) are looking for and effectively use the same words and phrases at a high enough rate to warrant a high placement in the search engine results. The benefits of SEO are undeniable. The closer your website is to the top of the search engine results, the higher the likelihood your site will be visited.
Of course, like everything else, there is a wrong way and a right way to practice good SEO. In the “old days” webmasters filled their metatags with clearly brainstormed words. Often the beginning of these pages were sloppy and web surfers would leave these poorly constructed pages as quickly as they came, annoyed that they had to weed through poor quality in order to find what they needed.
The Perils of Failing to Do SEO Well
Recently, search engines have gotten smarter, which means increased pressure on webmasters and other content providers to provide high quality content that uses the durable elements of SEO in a natural way that will keep web surfers from floating away onto someone else’s page. Many of the tricks that were once commonplace on the web are now referred to as “black hat” tactics and cause popular search engines such as Google and Bing to drop your site in their rankings.
One company to recently be taught a “black hat” lesson was JC Penny. In order to boost traffic on their website, JCPenney had links from unrelated content go to their website. In addition to having irrelevant links, other SEO taboos include link farms, cloaking, which involves adding text the same color as the background so search engines see it, but not human beings, and the use of doorway pages that quickly redirect users to an unrelated page or website.
When a website practices good SEO, these tricks aren’t necessary. It is much more effective to build your SEO campaign by providing quality content that uses keywords and phrases in a natural way. When users actually find what they are looking for by searching both you and the customer are able to reap the benefits of SEO.
One company that is a master at building the durable elements of SEO is Amazon.com. They are so effective, in fact, that they have made a major impact on the entire bookselling industry.
One blog illustrates just how successful Amazon.com is when it comes to search engine results of popular books. Taking a sample of 40 books and authors the blogger conducted a web search and noted the placement of Amazon.com, Borders.com, and Barnesandnoble.com. In the majority of the cases, Amazon.com came up first in the search engine results, and the lowest ranking for any of the books listed was 8. In most cases, Borders.com has a hard time cracking the top 40 search results, and Barnesandnoble.com didn’t do much better.
Of course, there are other factors in Amazon.com’s success than good SEO practices, but clearly good SEO does play a significant role. The good news is you don’t have to have millions of dollars to play with in order to build your SEO campaign. You just need to have a good SEO strategy, quality content for your site, and to back up your promises. When your customers can find you, there’s no telling how far you can go.
