So my best definition of “SEO” is the art of getting a site to rank where those most interested in what you have to sell or offer are already searching. We are not looking for the path less taken here – we want to be jumping out into measurable traffic with our message.Now in Google’s cumulative mind working to influence your site’s rankings or working on “SEO” is an evil way of manipulating what they work so hard to provide to their users which is pertinent, focused search results. If you search Google for Yellow Nike Running shoes – you sure as heck don’t want Red Adidas basketball shoes popping up – right??
It has been said many times but bears repeating: “If it were up to Google – there would be no such thing as SEO consultants.” The search team at Google is in a constant balancing act of getting rid of (“penallizing”) sites who have potentially overstepped the standards of “optimization” while at the same time providing Google users with the results they want.
So in a perfect world dentists, doctors, vets etc. would all be producing magical content for their websites that was easily shared amongst multiple blogs, social media outlets and even major media outlets.
Sadly, this is NOT what really happens. Most professionals are too busy actually doing their daily jobs to mess with creating amazing content that is worthy of sharing through out the web and carrying their message to the masses.
But . . . this is what Google wants . . . Google wants “natural” sharing – “natural” link building that – in their mind clearly demonstrates that this particular dentist is WAY “better” than this other dentist – that then makes it easier for Google to rank one higher in their search results.
So where does that leave most business owners?
Let’s first review what most everyone wants – page one rankings in Google for keywords their potential customers/patients/users would be searching.
Ok – now how do we do that? Well the easy and somewhat over simplistic answer is that your site has to be “better optimized” than the other sites that are already ranking for that keyword.
The operative word in that last sentence is obviously “better” . . . . what does “better” mean – and where do go to learn all about how to be “better”.
This is where the reality of what works versus what most business owners are actually doing literally takes off in two totally different directions.
This is what I usually see most business website owners actually focusing on. They worry about writing interesting blog posts – they worry with adding funny little stories to Facebook or Pinterest – they fuss with the color of a header on a webpage – thinking it is not blue enough or a picture isn’t centered correctly. Now many if not all of these things MAY be important for users that are already on the site or are reading the content – which obviously infers they have already found the page within the wonderful world wide web. And, I should add if the business owner is paying me to do these things – then they are ALL important. 🙂 However they are a drop in the bucket and in some case have zero – zip – nada to do with actually effecting where website rankings for a chosen keyword.
So in the next few posts we will look at what does matter to Google. Not necessarily what everyone tells us matters, but we will actual test some things to really see what matters.
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