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| SEO Art |
What makes SEO different from most other professions is that
no-one really knows the exact answer and no-one ever will. SEO is mostly based
on theory and experimentation much like a lot of science, but the difference is
that the theory you once thought was concrete, can change overnight by a simple
algorithmic change. There are also many different tactics that can be adopted
and the same results will be achieved, a combination of on-page and off-page
SEO will achieve great results, but the ratio doesn’t have to be the same every
time.
The image below shows how you might be able to achieve the
same ranking using different levels of on-page and off-page SEO. This however
is not a universal strategy and I would suggest it would not be true for more
competitive terms. An example of how this works is if you take one
version of a site that has tons of content on a subject and only a few links
pointing to the site, compared to another version with less content but more
high authority links pointing to it. Each version has its own merits and it’s
up to the search engines to decide where to rank them.
Google alone has more than 200 ranking factors with many different
variations for each, meaning that it’s not a case of one size fits all for SEO
strategies. An SEO consultant could use all manners of different techniques and
still get the same results as another SEO consultant that used completely
different techniques. What it comes down to is doing what you know works and
tweaking things when they don’t. I have had experiences where a tactic would
work for one website but have no effect on another, showing that there is no
right or wrong answer it’s just a matter of finding what works and what doesn’t
on a site by site basis.
Not only are there over 200 ranking factors for Google to contend with, we
also have to contend with the fact that these ranking factors change all the
time, constantly keeping us on our toes, so we will never know every ranking
factor or how effective they are. For example the introduction of Social media
into SEO meant that there was now a more complex strategy to be used to achieve
ranking.
Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz confirmed that Google and Bing do use Twitter and
Facebook to influence SEO, which gives an extra dimension to SEO that forces us
to take a more creative look at SEO than we perhaps would have a couple of
years ago. I now find myself thinking of strategies that would persuade
Twitter followers to retweet my message and my links in order to achieve
rankings and also create a viral element to the overall marketing strategy.
The
influence of social media on SEO is probably not all that well known but what
we do know is that by having many people retweet your link you have a strong
chance of ranking and ranking fast too! Danny Dover also of SEOMoz created an
experiment to see how twitter would compare to conventional linking in gaining
raking for “ending hunger in sierra leone”. The results showed that Twitter has
a massive impact and as a result the website that was linked to via tweets was
ranking very quickly.
This factor alone shows how SEO is going to have to become more and more
creative, not to mention the fact that ASA will start investigating paid links
which will mean more creative approaches will have to be adopted to avoid any
investigations. Rand Fishkin has made the prediction that “We’ll start to move
away from the title “SEO” to something more all-inclusive” in his 7 predictions
for SEO in 2011 something that I believe has been happening for a while now and
so I don’t see the title changing just starting to encompass more broader
marketing strategies.
