If you look at sites offering search engine optimization, or SEO, you’ll notice that the prices can get pretty high. If all that is involved is making sure all the elements on your page have your keywords correctly woven into them, then how can SEO services be so expensive? Well, it turns out that the words on your pages are just a small part of the picture.
Google and other search engines have very complicated ways of figuring out how to order sites in their searches. If only the keywords on the pages themselves mattered, then a useless page that lists only the keyword thousands of times would always be first. So that doesn’t work. What search engines decided is that they would look at who links to a page, and also the outgoing links from a page. It gets complicated since it’s not just the number of pages that link to your page that is important but also their quality in the eyes of the search engine. Links to your page from other pages are called back links. The more of these you have more top ranking sites the better you will do in the eyes of search engines.
In addition to number of links, there are other differences among sites. For example you’ll notice that .edu, .gov, and .org sites often achieve very high rankings. So, if you can get links from any of these type of sites, your page will do very well.
That’s presenting things with the broad brush stroke. Not only are the number and quality of your links important, but as usual, the devil is in the details. Your back links must be from pages that have the same keywords as yours. Additional if you really want good search engine optimization the words in the back links themselves should be your keywords. For example, if you make neon signs, then you want other pages dealing with neon signs to link to you, and you want these links to specifically say “neon signs”….. not your name, or you companies name. No one’s going to search for your name or your companies name when they’re considering the options. If they already know about you and want you to do their neon signs, they’ll just pick up the phone and call. You want people who search for neon signs to see you in the search engines, since they don’t know about you and can give you business.
All of this takes work a lot of effort. You have to know how to get others to point to your page. You have to know who should point to your page. There are many ways of doing this. You can buy, trade, or create links. All of this will take time, money, or both.
Just to illustrate a complication that a good search engine optimization specialist would take into account, consider trading links. This sounds easy, right? You email another site that has you keywords, and you get them to link to you, while you link to them. Not if you’re really good. Since unreciprocated links work better than reciprocated links. After all, the search engines know that anyone can trade links, but not anyone get a link without giving one. So it is ideal to use multiple sites when trading links. They link to yours and you use a different domain name to link to theirs. As you can see, there are many different choices in how to do things. This means that the quality of SEO you get is highly dependent and based on who you deal with.
In addition to these specific individual strategies, you have to have an overall strategy for moving up in the rankings. This is important in order to create a realistic goals.
A common SEO strategy is to move up in the rankings for a very long series of keywords and then gradually increase your rankings for shorter and shorter phrases. For example there may not be much competition for “tennis pros from Rhode Island who are left handed,” so if you happen to be a left handed tennis pro from Rhode Island, you are in luck. You’ll move up in rankings quick. Then you can concentrate on “tennis pros from Rhode Island” Then “tennis pros.” And finally you can show up on the first page of search for the key word “tennis.” A long way down the road. “tennis pros from Rhode Island who are left handed,” shows 7,280 results in Google. “Tennis” has 190,000,000 results. SEO is an ongoing process.
So you see, search engine optimization only begins with your page. Your url, title, alt image tags, h1 headings, etc. are only a small part of the picture. The content of other websites and a cohesive overall strategy will also determine the success of your SEO. This is why the process is more complicated than just paying attention to the content of your pages, but not everyone knows this, and not everyone uses the same strategies and techniques. Make sure you understand what you are purchasing. Do this by asking questions and looking at the details.
Tags: backlinks, keywords, search engine optimization
