The Changing Face of Search Engine Optimization
Written by Bobby Heard
With ever evolving internet market for just about anything you can imagine and Google’s index growing to almost 9 billion pages, and counting, there is little dispute amongst search engine optimizers that our job is getting much harder. From linking to articles, and density to ontology, our industry changes as fast as any other. The search engines, especially Google, seem to be on a daily diet of change and their algorithm seems to be growing at rate of their index.The word ‘related’ plays a much bigger part in SEO today than it ever has in past. Instead of targeting an exact keyword phrase, it now makes a lot more sense to keep your site within context and to have related words to your keywords, compared to having density of one keyword phrase. Linking has also turned into a frenzy for relevancy. Unrelated links seem to no longer carry much weight at all. The theme through all of Google’s recent changes seems to come down to one cliché: quality over quantity. Just like with any other update at Google, optimizers must search and research their profession, however it seems to be happening more often than ever. You can’t walk through our office without hearing Google’s name a thousand times. We have unofficial RND (research and development) meetings almost every hour as there seems to constantly be new ideas and theories popping into all of our heads. In past there were always changes to way we’ve done our work, but pace of this change is accelerating rapidly as well as competition for online searchers.
| | Keep Your Web Site Content RelevantWritten by John Metzler
Visitors and search engines love content-rich web sites, but just having a lot of content on your web site is not enough. It all has to be relevant to a main topic with each page or section of web site having a specific theme (And yes, this includes any resource or links pages site may have). Each page should have its own topic and content should not stray to a different topic.If you are promoting your graphic design business and have a page on business card design, stay on topic and refrain from using a page title such as "Graphic Design company in Vancouver, Canada - business cards, logos, letterheads". Your want business card design to be most important key phrase. There are two main reasons for content relevancy. The first is so that visitors have an easy time understanding flow of your web site. Visitors who have to search through multiple pages to find information they're looking for won't be visitors much longer. The average web site user takes about three seconds to decide whether or not stay on a site. A clear idea of what your site is about should be apparent immediately, followed by easy navigation to other pages that display further topics in more detail. The second reason for keeping content relevant throughout your web site is for search engine algorithms. Keyword relevancy is an important part of search engine optimization. The more relevant your web site's content is for a specific term, more likely site is to show up near top of search results for term.
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