“You’ve probably read emails that say a company will guarantee you’ll rank on the first page of Google search results for a small monthly fee. Sounds too good to be true, right? But that’s exactly what’s happening,” says Chris Kilbourn, CEO of marketing platform TOFU Marketing.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a lot less complicated than marketers make it out to be. Marketing for Beginners The field has existed since the early days of the Internet, and the goal has always been the same: to rank as high as possible on a search engine results page (SERP).
You can imagine how cutthroat the buy business fax broadcast number list competition is in this space as more and more companies realize the importance of ranking their unique selling propositions highly in search results for specific keywords.
This competitive pressure has forced market participants to resort to real underground marketing – buying links, abusing keywords (keyword stuffing), using link farms, etc.
In February 2011, Google reaches a tipping point and releases Panda, the first in a series of user-experience-driven updates to its search algorithm. This results in a near-immediate collapse of questionable sites. In the ensuing chaos, multi-million dollar online businesses lose much of their traffic.
And which sites took the top positions?
These were multilingual versions of Wikipedia, Marketing for Beginners focused on providing useful information and a good user experience. Tricks and tactics failed, and relevance and quality won.
This brings us to the most important lesson in SEO: user experience is king .
If you are not focuse on developing a truly great product, your SEO will suffer because all of us — sellers, marketers, consumers — live in a time when search engines (Google, Bing, Yandex, etc.) have put all the power in the hands of consumers. User experience dominates the search engine market. SEO and marketing go hand in hand today.
Search engines constantly monitor landing pages and websites, checking them for key signs of good UX. Since web resources, marketing, products, and services all need to support a strong user experience, make sure that all your strengths are described in language that search engines can fully understand.
Read also: User experience: power shifts to customers
What is SEO?
“SEO is the practice of improving and promoting a website to increase agent email list the number of visitors from search engines. Marketing for Beginners There are many aspects to SEO, from the words contained on your page to the ways other sites link to you on the web. Sometimes SEO is as simple as making your site structure search engines can understand.” — MOZ Search Engine Optimization Platform, “A Beginner’s Guide to SEO.”
It may seem counterintuitive, but focusing your efforts on SEO means more than just analyzing search engine technologies.
Just think about it: Search engines are designed to connect users with valuable information — immediately, if needed.
Quality and relevance are critical here, and Google’s goal is to ensure that the best possible sites are at the top of search results. That’s why we keep coming back to platforms like Google and Bing — because we can trust them.
Search engines don’t allow themselves to show “dirty” results, which is why they are constantly looking for algorithmic signals that indicate a quality user experience. And you can’t fake that – search engines are getting smarter and smarter. Spending money on tricking a search engine today (buying links, stuffing keywords, etc.) is just a waste of time. Focus on building a quality user experience instead.
Refuse to use black hat SEO techniques
The first step in implementing any SEO strategy is to understand what not to do.
Black hat is a term used by marketers for many years to describe shady SEO practices. These practices were develope for one purpose: to manipulate search turkey data to rank a business by spamming the web. You may be asked to use black hat techniques in your SEO strategy.
Google strongly discourages such practices Marketing for Beginners and will penalize you for using them. You will be penalize for an unlimited period of time and in most cases, you will not be able to recover from such a blow.
Once you are given a penalty, the following will happen:
Traffic will drop sharply
Sales will decline quickly
There will be a need to rebuild your SEO program from scratch.
“I know of one particular company that was penalize after the Panda/Penguin algorithm update due to a large number of low-quality inbound links. The eCommerce business went from $1 million in monthly revenue to $10,000 in a good month. The owner was face with laying off many long-time employees while trying to get the penalties lift and developing a new (no longer “black hat”) SEO strategy.” – Chris Kilborn
Whatever you do, avoid the following at all costs:
Promises of a guaranteed number of links
Solutions that involve the use of social bookmarks, “article spinning” (automatic or manual modification of original texts to place the Marketing for Beginners resulting versions on different resources), and publishing guest posts through content farms
Promises that you will rank in a certain position within a certain period of time.
Guaranteed traffic
Creating fake social media accounts
Prices under $1000 per month (all prices in this post are for the North American market)
Explaining that your links will be remove if you end the partnership
Mentions of a certain number of keywords that can be targete
You can reverse any damage