SEO - The new reality of being found on the web

Getting people to find your website and to take action on it are the core objectives of search engine optimisation. The quality of the visitors is, perhaps, more important than the quantity of visitors to your site. If you have copious amounts of visitors to your site who end up not buying from it, not reading it or not taking the actions you want them to take to be successful then who cares if they visit?

Successful websites provide what their visitors are looking for - simple.

But, so often the quantity of visitors a website becomes the focus if website owners lose sight of what they want the site to do for them. When this happens, website owners fall prey to companies that offer to deliver them quantity and being top of the search engine results page.

You have probably seen companies offering their 'search engine optimisation' services to you to get your website to the top of Google for a certain phrase or word. They do this by using dubious methods which manipulate the search engines to think that your website is more popular than it really is. Some of their old methods used to include 'stuffing' keywords into the text on your website or creating hundreds of links to your website from low quality, irrelevant (to the topic of your website) sites.

Search engines aren't stupid

Fortunately, the search engines have become wise to these tricks and, through a number of updates to their search algorithms, they have begun filtering out the websites which offer little value to people searching for information on the internet. Consequently, quite a few websites have been suffering with hugely reduced visitor numbers. Sometimes, the website suffering from being punished by the search might not deserve to be so. The site might have decent content on it, but have plethora of poor quality links to it.

Companies that offered the low quality services, however, are still out there offering to get you to the top of Bing or Google. Be cautious. Think about what you want to achieve with your website and who you want to visit it before you hire an SEO company.

Here are some tips for making sure you understand how your website will be found on the internet:

Your best weapon for getting the attention of search engines and searchers is to write decent, well thought out, helpful, interesting or entertaining content on the subject in which you specialise.
Think about your website like a daily, weekly or monthly publication - people keep buying publications like this (even though it might be a digital version of a newspaper these days) because the publishers keep on publishing interesting content. Your website needs to keep people coming back for more interesting things to read which are not self-obsessed.
Find other websites in your field which you respect and which are relevant to what you. Contact the site owners, get to know them and ask if they would be happy to link to relevant pages on your website. It's even better if the website from which you are asking for a link is respected by Google or Bing, for example. This will help your website be found more quickly. The more good, relevant links you have to your site, the more your website will benefit.
If people ask to write a 'guest post' on your website's blog, ask them to where the link they will inevitably ask to place in the text they send you links. If the site is not relevant to your website, then forget it. Also, ask them for whom they are writing the post.
Share links to your website through your social media accounts. But, don't send out links to your website on these accounts solely to your content (It's that 'self-obsessed' thing again. People switch when people talk about themselves all of the time). The search engines are taking links from social media accounts more seriously as indicators of a site's popularity. And, in conjunction with your good content, if people like what they see on your website, they will share links to it on their social media accounts.

There are a number of activities you can do to promote your website. The tips above are some of the core actions to take. The main point to remember is to always think 'high quality' and provide it on your website. It sounds obvious, but it is not often the case on the websites of some well known organisations.

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