Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a key factor for so many modern businesses that it could be said to be a necessary part of operating in the modern economy. Consumers have so many options available to them that bringing your business to their attention as quickly as possible when they are looking for relevant goods or services is vital if you want to take and hold a reasonable market share in your sector.
Shifting Sands
However, the changing requirements, weightings and heuristics of the many search engines that customers can use place large demands on most businesses’ content generation. Many sites had been using keyword stuffing, irrelevant and circular anchor links, and other non-customer-focused techniques to generate pages that were weighted more towards search engine rankings than customer needs. Because of this, several large-scale search engine providers, in particular Google, with its Penguin update, have implemented new systems to remove the emphasis on keywords and try to encourage more new and original content. This means that even more legitimate techniques such as linking highly focused anchor text in blogs, reviews and other related areas to your main website are now less useful and receive a lower weighting in searches.
New Approaches
This had lead to many businesses becoming concerned about their search engine rankings. Without the easy fix of keyword anchor links from a set of subsidiary sites, it can be hard for newer or small businesses to build up the necessary number of links and associations to rank highly on search engines without paying for promoted advertising. This has lead to some creative solutions being sought by SEO experts.
Co-Citation – Win/Win Approaches
Because companies’ efforts to promote their own sites are now being downgraded in terms of search engine rankings, the corollary is that links from non-affiliated sites are suddenly more valuable. In particular, if a site is frequently cited in conjunction with another site, modern search engine algorithms will recognise a relationship between the sites, giving them peer legitimacy.
Co-citations are harder for businesses to directly affect, and rely on third parties appreciating content enough to share it in a formal way. This, for most search engines, is a more legitimate way to judge a site’s impact and/or importance on both a global and local level, and, taken in conjunction with the simultaneous push towards locally weighted results, it is designed to help target searchers’ needs more accurately. This means that more relevant original content needs to be generated, and this in turn means that the customers are more likely to get useful results from initial searches.
Working with the New Paradigm
Rather than trying to focus on keywords and the associated anchor text links within their own sites or subsidiaries, it is more important for businesses that wish to perform well in search engine rankings to concentrate on creating relevant, original – perhaps even controversial – material that individuals and other businesses will take an interest in and that may affect online debate. By doing this, the sort of anchor text links that still count may well be created by third-parties, and these are of direct relevance in your quest for a higher search engine ranking.
Maintaining clear keywords for your industry is still vital in order for your site to be correctly classified in searches. The relative ranking of your site, however, is more likely to come down to how much of an effect your business has on its customers, shown by the number of linked independent reviews and commentaries, and your business sector, often indicated by links from industry and academic articles.