Is SEO No Longer Effective?
Search engine optimization has become more challenging over the years and there are many critics out there who have declared that it no longer works. There are thousands of small sites populating those top search indexes! So, don’t buy into the idea that SEO is no longer effective; if you do your site will never realize the potential of being highly indexed by any search engine.
Bulk Submitting Will Get You Thousands of Visitors We all dream of having the perfect site or product that will make us millionaires. Thus all we have to do is acquire a domain name and then submit our site to thousands of sites and you’re an overnight success! I’m sure you’ve seen the advertisements, such as “Submit to 4000 websites for only $99.” The reality of this is these sites are set up just to collect email addresses from people like you! You’ll then experience all kinds of junk email flooding your mail box and all from one simple submission.
In reality there are only a dozen or so real search engines and Google, AOL & Yahoo account for about 90% of that traffic. Those bulk submission services will generally do very little to nothing in optimizing your rankings. Your site will just be buried at the bottom of their results with millions of other web sites. Optimizing your site properly and submitting to the top search engines will generate all the riches and glory your looking for.
Focusing on Meta Tags only You may read tutorials on how to create the perfect Meta tags so the search engines can find your web site. What their not telling you are that most search engine algorithms give very little weight to meta tags if they even rank them at all.
Some consultants will tell you to include your keywords in your title and meta tags and follow up with a website that has quality content for your readers. Then the search engines will just automatically find your site and rank it in the top spots. Title tags and content are very important, but don’t make the mistake of believing that this is all that needs to be completed to be found on the web today.
Please see my article on The Basics of Meta Tags (http://www.kosmoscentral.com/seo-articles/html-Basics.html) for more information on this subject.
Doorway Pages Will Get Me Banned Search Engines have flooded the internet with negative publicity regarding Doorway pages. You may even hear them called spotlight pages, gateways, informational pages, portals, entry’s, gate’s etc. The simple fact is that every page on your site acts as a doorway page to your site. Many people are under the wrong impression that doorway pages will allow visitors to the home page of their site every time. This is not true, visit any search engine and do a search of any topic and you’ll see that you’re arriving at various levels of these websites, which could be 10 to 20 pages deep from their home page.
Some search engines that condemn the term “doorway page” will even include FAQ’s and tutorials on how to create highly ranking pages. These tutorials are often too broad to be of any assistance, but points out that optimizing each of your pages is not something a search engine will object to. Regardless of what the term you use to call your optimized pages, do not be duped into thinking that optimizing or fine tuning your pages will not achieve a high ranking.
Submitting Pages before Establishing any External Links Google has stated that it will not index a site that does not have at least one external link pointing to it. Other search engines are known to drop pages entirely after a couple of weeks if it finds that no other domains are linking to it.
Sometimes a link from a major directory will suffice, such as Yahoo, Open Directory or LookSmart. However you should definitely try to trade links with other web sites that are complementary to yours and submit the url’s of those pages that are linking to yours. See Reciprocal Link Popularity (http://www.kosmoscentral.com/seo-articles/reciprocal-Link-Popularity.html) for more information. If you can submit one of these pages and let the search engine spiders find your site on its own then you’ll stand to rank higher than if you submitted your home page directly. This obviously will take longer to index since you have to wait for the engines to get around to indexing your page.
If you’re in a big hurry buy a second domain, put some unique content on it and cross link the two sites. To give the impression of independence it would be best if you host these two sites at different hosting companies. This way the each hosting company will provide a separate ip address and be part of a separate subnet. You might also vary the spelling information on your registrant you used to purchase the domains. This will also further provide the illusion of separate ownership to the search engine spiders.
Can’t Wait Need Results Now If you want results/traffic to your site fast, consider the pay engines like FindWhat or Sponsored Links from Google. With many of the major search engines now using the top results from the pay engines, if you’re having a difficult time achieving top rankings using standard optimization efforts, paying for keywords will get you where you want to be much faster.
I am a developer, designer, dmoz volunteer editor and consultant. I have been working in the computer networking industry since 1991, providing training, technical support, project management and consulting services. After working for 4 years for a major online company providing web development technical support services, I was offered a directors position in a large real estate corporation utilizing my web development and management skills. A few years later I decided to start a side business for myself and created Kosmos Central LLC a web promotion consulting company. Currently I provide my consulting services for the same company and a few more.
I’ve lived in the Portland Oregon Area the majority of my existence on this planet and occasionally Ill take time off to enjoy life
