Why You Need To Take A Holistic View Of Your SEO Strategy

Ever since the launch of the first search engines, businesses have unsurprisingly tried hard to get to the top of the listings. During the infancy of the search engines, there were many easy techniques you could do on your website which would help boost your ratings. However, as search engines got more advanced, these techniques no longer worked, and often then had a negative effect on search engine positions, or meant that sites were excluded completely. With search engines now more complex than ever, what is this likely to mean for the strategies businesses use to maintain their search engine ratings?



With Google dominating the search industry, numerous companies offer various techniques claiming to get you top rated for particular keywords. A few years ago, this could be achieved via mainly on-page methods. In recent times, the Google algorithm became very heavily dependent on your site's popularity, so many Search Engine Optimisation companies focused their resources almost entirely on link building. This meant that lots of websites with very little quality content could get very high ratings just by having purchased lots of backlinks to their site.

The recent update from Google (nicknamed 'Panda') has put the focus squarely back on the website quality, meaning backlinking alone is very unlikely to provide long-term results. The quote that "if visitors like your site, Google likes your site too" now seems more valid that it ever was.



Building links is undoubtedly still important, but should no longer be viewed with a 'set it up and forget about it' approach. The links should be relevant to the content on your site and should come from sites that are of good quality. Ideally links should be generated by genuine visitors to your site who are telling everyone how good you are! Obtaining backlinks with mass-submission software is not likely to provide rewards in the long-term.



Now, more than ever, companies should take a holistic view of their search engine positions. No single tactic is likely to be successful in the long term. Instead, you need a structured plan to provide more, quality content on your site as well as continue to encourage visitors to link back to it.



In a recent high profile case, Google penalised several companies who purchased links solely with the intention of getting good ratings. While backlinks are still important, never more has it been more essential that these are good quality links and relevant to your own site.



The exact Google algorithm is a closely guarded secret, but certainly Google themself are more keen than ever before to furnish users with the information they need as quickly as possible, and low-quality sites that provide very little in the way of content are being targeted heavily at the present time.



Carl Fraser is Managing Director of Totally Commerce Ltd, owners of http://www.TotallyShoes.co.uk - Retailers of leading brand footwear in the UK.



Totally Commerce Ltd also operate several other websites in different business areas.