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New Content
Now we come to
meat of today’s search engine optimization. So far, we have not discussed anything new or original. It is same strategies that have been used since I first got into business of SEO in 1998. Today, with smarter engines, a site needs to be something that is cared about. A site has to grow, develop, and expand as if it were someone’s baby. Gone are days when you could build a site, get good listings, and then forget about it as it brought in traffic and dough. Take care of your site by adding useful content to it on a regular basis, and then site will gradually grow from a few pages to dozens of pages. Not only will this make site seem more alive - radiating with healthy glow of a developing child - but it has added benefit of increasing amount of content site contains, and thus increasing amount of keywords found within it. For example with www.canada-health-insurance.com we add pages with more details about dental coverage or pages with details about government coverage for each province. Every month there are new pages, so that every time spider comes back to visit, it spends more time at site reading new content. This is one half of key to getting good listings in search engine results pages (SERP).
Link Campaigns
The second half of key is getting good sites to link to your site. Going after web sites with related content, sites with good authority in your web site’s field, and sites that are “popular” are priority. Getting only reciprocal links is not goal, getting aforementioned sites to link to you because you have good, valuable content is goal. Sites that do reciprocal linking usually have hundreds of links on their link pages and these will add very little value to your site. Don’t waste your time with reciprocal linking. Only link to a site if doing so will increase value of your site in eyes of your clients.
A link campaign is a lot of work, and it involves a lot of frustration and rejection. You have to approach bigger sites and sell value that linking to your site will bring them. For every 20 sites you approach, you will be lucky to get one to link to you. You have to be persistent, consistent, and determined.
Conclusions
Optimizing a site is no longer something you can do and then forget about. For a site to succeed in search engines today, it has to constantly be changing and growing either in content or in links, and ideally in both. It has to appear that site is life and soul of its creator, and that somebody cares enough about it to pay attention to it. Because after all, if creator doesn’t care, why should search engines?
Shawn Campbell is an enthusiastic player in the ecommerce marketplace, and co-founded Red Carpet Web Promotion, Inc. He has been researching and developing marketing strategies to achieve more prominent listings in search engine results since 1998. Shawn is one of the earliest pioneers in the search engine optimization field.
