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10.26.06
SEO Success
 By
Steven Bradley
Are you looking for long term success when it comes to search engine visibility? Do you want to make sure all the hard work you do today will still be paying off a few months or years from now? If you do then you want to look forward in the your thinking with regards to search engines and their algorithms.
Yes it's true that if you're new to the game you'll likely need to play catch up with the other sites you're competing with, but catching up will only get you so far. Those other sites are ahead of you and as you're working to get to where they are today, they're working to get ahead of where they are today.
We all know that links are important to where you rank. But it takes time to build links and in that time your competition will also be building links back to their site. If it's going to take you time to build enough links to compete why try doing so with today's tactics. If it's going to be a year before you see the results of your link building efforts doesn't it make sense to be working toward where the search engines will be in a year's time instead of where they were a year ago? In the recent past reciprocal linking was all the rage. Then Google decided it was an artifical means of building links. Overnight websites that had heavily traded links disappeared from the SERPs. Those that saw it coming were still ranking where they had been, or even better given all the other sites that had fallen.
It's natural for those new to seo to see optimization in terms of formulas. It's where things once were and it's easy to find articles online about how to write meta tags and about ideal keyword density. Unfortunately the world of search moves very fast and these articles, even just a few years old, are long out of date. It's possible that articles written today will often be less than effective by the time the tactic would be expected to pay off. By the time you're reading about it, it's probably already been in place for several months and may already be something the search engines are working to keep from being effective.
If you want your pages and site to rank well next year you need to think where the search engines are headed and not where they've been. It's true that no one really knows where search engines are going. No one can even say with 100% certainty why a certain page ranks today. But we can, by looking at a collection of pages that rank well and by observing what happens when we make changes to our own pages, what likely works. The more we see what works today and what from yesterday has stopped working, the more patterns begin to emerge where things may be headed in the future.
Reading through patent applications is another method for determining what a search engine algorithm may look like tomorrow. I'll admit patent applications aren't always fun to read, but they can be understood. And for those of us who don't want to read them at all Bill Slawski makes it a point to help the rest of us by covering patents often on his SEO by the Sea blog. Not everything you see in a patent application is going to be in the algorithm now or even ever, but they do give some idea of what search engineers are thinking and where algorithms might be heading.
By keeping track of news stories about the world of search you can see what Google, Yahoo, or MSN may be thinking in the months ahead. Recently when reading PC World magazine I came across a very short article indicating both Google and MSN were looking to better understand the intent of search queries. The article corroborated for me what I had already been thinking; that search engines will be placing more emphasis on personal search, user traffic patterns, and social communities. Do I know for certain? Not at all, but I will be looking to each of these more than I will to worrying about the keyword density of any page on my site.
What Can You Learn From The Past?
Just because you shouldn't blindly follow what's gone before doesn't mean you shouldn't understand where the world of search has been. The foundations of search engine optimization have been known for some time. You can find out the basics of seo in older articles. Be careful though when reading an article on the latest seo tactic dated 2004. There's a good chance that it won't work any more. But the guiding principles are as true today as the were then.
Click here to continue reading this article.
About
the Author:
Steven Bradley is a web designer and search engine optimization specialist. Known to many in the webmaster/seo community by the username vangogh, he is the author of TheVanBlog, which focuses on how to build and optimize websites and market them online.
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